Where are you now?

Do you already know where you are going to stay?

Did you understand how it works?

Do you think you are going to change something?

How do you ask to be named?

How much do you charge?

The other day, in a dream, I could speak in the language I think in anywhere. She would enter a store, choose an outfit and it was not necessary to pay for it, she would leave what he had been wearing on the floor like a snake that sheds its skin and would continue walking, feeling like someone else. But, even there, I couldn’t understand the way people looked at my appearance. Even in that dream, in which it seemed that I could feel free, my image was part of an echo of presences that whispered of my origin. The strange thing was that those whispers were imperceptible to me.

My mother always said that our gestures tell more about each person’s story and ambitions than they can imagine. I approach that question again and again: what can I imagine?

In the first art education book I had, there was an exercise that instructed you to look in the mirror and then try to draw yourself on paper, and it warned: it doesn’t matter that your strokes do not build an image similar to the one you see reflected, based on This attempt you will know your appearance.

What no one warned me about is how the meaning of appearance changes when you change location.

I wanted to write about a lit us that brings together diverse gestures, gestures inscribed in what we call Art, poetics that coexist in the same province in the present, and bring echoes of a history more inherited than invented. But I was able to write only some questions in the singular, thinking about how art re-signifies inheritances. Art allows me to be what I was not.

Yes, none of us were always here, we have returned or we just arrived. We need distance, shelter, change of skin. Here are the shadows, the brightness, the lagoons of incomprehension, the jumps between the stones, the games with the earth with the body with the pixels, the submerged in mighty rivers, the zonda wind demanding new postures, the aridity, the stoked fires , the daily irrigation and the permanent feeling of remoteness.

 Andrei Fernandez

Hamburg, April 2022