Each utterance provokes a kind of hospitality between ear and eye. Roland Barthes says of close-up speech in cinema that the recording is throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor in my ear.
In this suite of films ideas bubble like infections, leaping from act to act, casting their premonitions. They lap in language and return in images of gold leaf, the muted hum of insects, a portrait of a figure. The small grey cluster of hexagons is held delicately by a hand, just in view, rotating it, putting it on display.
I remember that wasps build their dwellings by chewing bits of wooden and papery matter, turning it to pulp in their mouths, which they cough up into shell-like, repeating structures.
I wonder how it is that when asked to sing back a particular note, we choose a U sound rather than that devotional invocation, the O. A transformation triggered by their striking of two copulating snakes with a stick. Again, I hear: is language the wrong tool for an extrusion of consciousness into the world? When taught how to prepare for singing in such a way, I was told you should tilt your head back as though taking a drink, mouth poised elliptical.
Drinking in all of the room and sending it down to the base of your lungs, letting it rest just atop the belly before willing yourself up through the mouth. A well built bridge. For Hayes and Symuleski, this affectively affirming framework of collective worldmaking that is articulated in the notion of queer counterpublics calls our attention to the way intimacy may be a political affect when performed outside of the couple form.
