Text

—

This is an antidote. This is a poison. Both the build up and the break-down. This is all the words ever spoken and all the words ever removed. When we speak it would be powerful and dangerous if objects absorbed our voices, the things that we say. The pillow you whisper into while you sleep could be stolen by enemies. Our telephones might become radioactive with language. Would Gandhi’s mouthpiece exude the inspiring equanimity of the man? Would a banker’s echo with imperious greed? The servant’s with servility (or perhaps secret revolution)?

Death might hollow out the trunk, but the tree can live on. Erasure is closer to the end than death, but even erasure leaves a lacuna, a stain, not even Rauschenberg could fully disappear a de Kooning. Disappearances leave traces. This is the end of all stories, of all lives, these traces. The word “disappearance” has absorbed the emotions of its speakers, the actions they utter.  I can’t say the word without a host of lost souls and political casualties whispering in its shadows. Their specters hiss at the end of the first syllable and leave behind a wet stain in roll of the last.

Things can be altered even by words. Even words are things. Ink and graphite has not such memory, but in the space where there is presence, there is absence. The eraser bears the sin of the erasure. They have memory of a different kind.

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaizahas saved in this small jars the corpses of used up erasers, soaked with disappearance, marked but mute, arranged like specimens or spices.