loud hand Bibi Straatman (1961, b. Valkenburg, NL) is the most prevalent subject of this installation, who I cherish as a long-time mentor and friend. She is a philosopher, arts tutor and currently works on a book about the Christian mystic and saint Teresa of Ávila, in which she gives her a central place within the European tradition of freedom, and how it remains a precarious and feeble space that we cannot take for granted. In her research, the fostering of an inner dialogue is posited as a necessary attribute in order for any citizen to start speaking, confidently, in public. We met in my hometown in Maastricht, The Netherlands, and from early on she has embraced me as an equal thinker and friend of life. Our socratic conversations, that we’ve often had in her kitchen or garden, are particularly vitalising since her thinking is, as integral to her living, always followed by concrete action. She considers a carefully prepared meal, and a well-crafted piece of writing, as entirely correspondent to each other, an attitude to which I’ve always tried to put my heart.
this book is part of an installation titled
loud hand
written in conjuction with ‘silent, minor, grave’ a text and film about georges bataille published in ASPHALTE Magazine’s May 2022 FILM issue
They’d often meet in the garden. A place of work. She repeated to him: you yourself have to become lover now, instead of merely the beloved. He replied by looking at the sky, and wondered how. They walked back up to the patio.
Located nearby, they would regularly visit Georges Bataille’s burial ground, walking up the steep hill, as they reviewed those who glorified the dark night. Wondering if Georges used to tend the hollyhocks, if he, at all, dipped his toes into domesticity’s troubles.
Her cultivation of a certain secrecy, call it interiority always remained quite vague to him it was only after years and years of friendship, that the screened maze started to subside, move an inch away and that the difficulty of documenting or relaying this relationship became a restful place.
As more time passed, the interior castle that she had spoken about started to express a desperate vitality, one that led him back to a shared garden, rather than a world of externalised cut-outs and other gruesome separations.
On the same patio, next to a mural painting of Saint Francis, he filmed her with his back to the garden, with a conviction that the evening primrose, would otherwise take revenge, as the frame’s surgical dimensions love to uproot, and provide disquieting gasps of air
The garden the slightness of harmony
can only be documented by extrapolating a word of welcome.
However,
some social ecstasies, refuse immediate distribution the sound of mumbling and chatter, may not expound our love
the first dots of images you see are crystallisations of a certain education,
let her hands proclaim their indomitable interiors
and allow their various privacies to exist only in relational precision.
This power dynamic, hangs on a small thread
as the need for integration
remains trackable
thanks to your anticipated accusation.
By your involvement in coming both my ‘’i’’ and Bibi’s ‘’she’’ are dragged out in front of the big, sovereign making it difficult to return,
to look at our muted intimacy
visible
to our inherent exactitudes.
What if access may turn out to be seclusion itself ?
Bibi, who you looked at and myself, as I filmed this intimation, try to continue our conversation, without the screen’s interference.
Not everything exists to draw you in, ask what is seen if it is for you, and what your relation is to it.
Is this exposition a gift, or a violation?
‘‘What if seclusion may turn out to be access itself ?’’ We asked each other.
There is only so much of the local flower that can move an inch away.
And since the smallest possible portion of its integrity leaves the flower most easily,
it gives us the false impression that we have earned our final accession.
The blown-glass touch screen that just fell out of my pocket refuses the tap of the most distinguished petal as it cannot bear the existence of anything opaque.
The glimpse of a garden That I have named ‘’Years and years of friendship’’ Is only caught in the shape of a hermit.
So that we give a bit of our privacy To it
As it saves up more of the unpractical particle that makes up the undefined corner held in every hand.
And it is there, in that mysticism of the home and the watering of plants that I can only listen and adapt my silence, to the need to constellate my own body back together.
After all, there are more parts of the body than the mind can count, Bibi said via Spinoza.
The film’s shyness, and my own, correlate in admitting that there is always more than the sum of one’s parts.
This shyness, hidden underneath heaps of the available,
is indispensable.
(to inner reveries, and that is where both our vocal folds — come to regain their agency)
loud hand Kaya Erdinç (1994, b. Maastricht, NL)