The abstract matter

It´s not made for the fingers, It´s not made for the eyes or the ears, however it´s made to be felt. Its challenge is to remain as something blurry and without shape while keeps breathing on our necks and overlaps our own shadow. Give a name to it it´s just another clumsy attempt to make it more manageable, to draw it a face and look into its eyes. We will call it the abstract matter and try to believe that our compass has something similar to a north. 

It cannot be perceived but insists to be noticed, a chill ruffling the emotions, a strange animal scratching in the back of our brain, so in some ways it “is”, and here´s where the damned duty of trying to give shape to it starts.

For some it is on the rainy days, for others it is on the electric lights dotting the night, it is on abandoned places or in roads that dissolve in the horizon, it´s here and there, again and again, coming from outside or coming from inside. A land without place that doesn´t allow to be mapped but calls us to trace routes back to it so we can find again what we once felt. 

It´s the fiber that the storytellers try to weave, the clay the musicians have to mold, the stain to be domesticated by the painter, that thing saying that there´s work to be done and it has to be done before something gets lost forever. Is before the emotion, before the idea, before the white canvass and before the image, is the motor which moves us to cross all that distance, at the end of which, finally, something must have been found. Something now carved and molded, a reflection of that which had no shape. It´s not a task with many successes, the end rarely looks like the beginning, the purpose of this abstract matter is not to be captured, but to be inherited, to arrive where someone else can feel it and consider it again the beginning of something new, so its journey never ends. 

And here we are now, at the beginning of something uncertain, in this place out of the maps where, with humility and clumsiness, I´ll try to share my attempts to give shape to the abstract matter, indicate where it could inhabit and even talk about the work of others who have been more successful than me in this task, or, why not, about other travelers with whom I share this search. 

The journey will make me wanderer for years or sink in the same port, but it starts now.