I transcribe some of my dialogues with mystery. I do so in the form of fragments from a personal diary.
It is my way of writing. It is not a dialogue of words responding to words, but of words responding to a presence. Presence always comes first.
Every now and then I am seized by the wonder of existing. I find myself astonished to be, to be alive, as if existence did not belong at all to the order of the natural, but rather to that of the supernatural. When that awareness appears, even what yesterday seemed banal becomes a miracle.
Light enters my kitchen, pointing to a branch and a flower: “that branch” and “that flower,” which, for more than a week now, have been surviving in a vase. The infinite has just camped there. Camping is its humble way of inhabiting. The infinite fits inside a flower, and in much less as well: it fits into almost nothing.
A crack in the wall of my yellow house. A crack in what was once my new house. When did the recent cease to be recent? In which fold of time did the unfolding take place? When does one instant end and another take the stage? And my children—when did they grow?
I am coming into being now as I write. Letter by letter, I am; I exist. I move through time and letters. I spell myself out as I live. Who holds me in this coming into being? I am Paula, changing and, at the same time, always Paula. Paula endures.
The day begins; it is already unfolding. I feel a little joyful and a little sad. Everything is about to happen and stop happening. I see a murmur of shadows and a stage at the cupboard door. They are the same shadows as always, though today they believe themselves to be dancers.
Does beauty not always hold something back? Am I not happy when I find you, Beauty? But how could I find you if you did not first go missing from me? In my world, beauty lives in the gerund: it is always becoming without ever fully being.
There are doors that open in my house. All of them minimal, almost imperceptible. Today I found one in the shadow of the napkin holder, and then another in the fold of a dress. Hidden along the edge of a beveled mirror, I found another shining absentmindedly. Doors and more doors change places with me. They are thresholds calling me to peer into what I do not understand.
The infinite is filtering into my own house, drop by drop. Someone forgets to close the doors.
About Paula Aranoa
Paula Aranoa (Argentina, 1966) lives and works in Buenos Aires. She is a photographer and visual artist with training in Philosophy (UCA) and Fashion Design in Barcelona. Her work, mostly in black and white, spans photography, installation, textile art, and writing.
Her practice is nurtured by the mystery of the veiled, the unnoticed, and the sensitive, far from the purely rational. Her starting point is an openness to the event: the unexpected within the expected constitutes, for her, the greatest novelty.
She collects tiny fragments of everyday life that seem to escape the line. She sews, interweaves, embroiders, and writes on them, adding layers with the intention of making them endure.
In her world, mystery changes place every day; it is the character she seeks to reveal. [Official Website]
