Poletical
While alphabets were invented after words, words have always been projections of thought. Now, when I speak with somebody, when I write
this sentence, when you read it, this act is always separated from the thought. A temporal gap between the production of this sentence, the thought, and its articulation as a sign.
Using a letter, added by a simple gesture with black spray paint, I blurred this distance, creating a series of words that exist both as pronunciation and representation.
Some years ago I was in an English-speaking place for the first time, lost in the reality of the fluently spoken, fast and locally accented language.
It was my first trip across England, from London to Glasgow, through Manchester and Sheffield. I was discovering, with difficulty, the different
accents of all these areas. The sounds of the words I heard during this trip were so different from the ones produced in my head, reading the dictionary. I was always wondering why the words I heard looked different when written.
I started to write words the way I used to hear them, phonetically. It became a mixture of languages, out of which came a poetry .
The word “poletical” doesn’t exist, except in the minds of billions of people who start learning to speak English, without writing or reading it.
It is a “mise en abîme”, of how much politics and poetry have to do with each other: politics as a way to live together despite what we sometimes
call Otherness.