With time stuck in the throat, or the last departure
Laila Algaves Nuñez
The lake is always calm, that is true. Still, there are moments when it is especially motionless, so tacit that it silences the tiniest ruffle of feathers, so perfectly level that it repeats the world upside down, clear as a stone and all the rest that stands above the waterline. I know it will be one of those when I stretch my neck, still sleepy and languid, and immediately touch a dense emptiness filled with prophecy, the waters already holding their breath, as if to guess with us which of the worlds will yield first. What follows is always an important event — a boat. A man cutting, with elegance, that excessive meekness that leaves me pensive.
There are several of them. I still find myself surprised, from time to time, when a new face appears on the edge. They are never accompanied and, therefore, I rarely hear them let out any sound. When they do, they sing — some embarrassed by us, others with indifferent confidence. I have seen them emotional, inspired, tired, and distracted. I have seen them scrape, scratch, measure, do a lot, and do little with the things they bring. Some have looked at me in the eye. This was one of them.
He was one of the least elegant, I must confess. At first, I recognized him by the crude noise his vessel made as it bumped against the lake. It seemed to ask permission, awkwardly, as though it didn’t know the space its own body occupied, as though each time were the first to experience its weight upon the water. Later, I would recognize him by the irregularity of his steps. Although he lacked grace, I liked what he composed with his tools. I followed his creations — other doubles of the world outside the water — with enthusiasm, always only until that damned object insinuated itself from his pocket. That’s when he would stop, leaving his gesture unfinished, and return to land. I saw him perform the same ritual countless times — and I also found myself longing for the moment when he, no longer wearing that air of urgency, would finish what he was making.
It was then that I realized that the key to the matter was there, so obvious beneath my beak. Although he was keeping it close at hand, perhaps that round piece sounded absolutely deafening and annoying to him, just as it did to us. Maybe it would be enough to put an end to the insistent tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock that ordered him away — and he would then stay until the end. One bite. I was sure everything would be resolved. I approached, gently, and stretched myself in a single motion. I swallowed it.
Time got stuck in a swan's throat. The story — which must have once been the most efficient route between here and there1, before and after — choked, short-circuited, turned from a line into a point (or whatever the opposite of a line might be). Wedged between inside and outside (IN and OUT), it now describes at least IN e o OUT), descreve, agora, pelo menos two directions simultaneously. These are the kind of stories that matter and inform Tiago Madaleno's work— powerful chronicles in producing and overflowing (con)texts, that is, adept at addressing certain subjects (con)textos, isto é, hábeis em abordar determinados assuntos precisely while speaking about something else altogether. In his works, one senses that each word or image contains a drift, a misalignment between form and meaning. They open fronts, gaps, cracks; they are smoke in fact and figure — a sign of the fire that burns (or that burned, or will burn) somewhere out of sight. Staying in the middle is their strength.
The swan bites the clock, which is now a foreign body. Will it digest it? Will it mix it with the internal rhythms of its guts until all the little pieces of glass are properly crushed? Will it live to see time return to the painter2? Or will it have managed to stop, once and for all, every departure and every arrival? Personally, I like to imagine time there, almost still, finally silent, at the mercy of the fermentation of saliva or an involuntary spasm in the esophagus. And what if it doesn’t go down its throat? What happens to origin if there is not an afterwards? Or to exile, if there was never the possibility of returning? What language to speak with the other, if one is no longer native to anything? Time, an intrusive organism, settles in the center of the body, leaving us only and nothing more than ingering, “demorar”in Portuguese. It is not a simple verb. We know it derives from dwelling, shelter, habitation — which somewhat hastily leads us to ideas of autonomy, sovereignty, unity and, not without reason, fixity. However (and because Madaleno also shares the gesture of breaking words), there are some subtleties to be uncovered in one of its minor meanings: the pre-Roman root mor-, which indicates a collection, or, merely, a pile of stones3. To dwell, therefore, reflects a process of gathering, a gesture that collects and keeps what has beenbut which, by creating a place of excess, equally nourishes what can be.
All these relations reside in Madaleno’s exhibition — we are received into a home, although we do not know exactly whether it is ours or someone else’s; whether as hosts or guests. In French, the word is one and the same: hôte. This will therefore remain an open question, designating positions in constant exchange or perhaps always juxtaposed. In this space, on the neck of that utterly white swan, time trembles between assimilation and expulsion; it sediments dirt, ritual, and identity. The sovereignty of the self in this house is an illusion (as Freud already told us), because neither the self nor the house can be complete and enclosed entities. They never manage to fully coincide with themselves. They exist in lingering — eternal accumulation and abundance. They remake themselves on the threshold between the interior and the exterior, between two animals and a clock. Thus, even if time survives the throat and resumes its organizing duty, we will now know that returning home, or returning to oneself, implies understanding that both are places we have never been4.
[1] Cito o autor, advogado e ativista político Dylan Saba, no seu ensaio Point of No Return (2024).
[2] Escrevo esta nota por último, depois de muito cogitar se deveria ou não oferecer alguma prova de veracidade ao texto. Without any attachment to the reality of events, I concluded, however, that the reader may rejoice in knowing that this anecdote seems to have actually happened to the German painter Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). One summer's day, in Grasmere, England, his pocket watch was eaten by a swan — which, under the guardianship of the British Crown, went unpunished and never accounted for the theft. Various moments in Schwitters' life have guided the works of Tiago Madaleno, such as in A Garden at Night (2020, RAMPA), A Leaf in the Pocket (2022, Estabelecimento Prisional do Porto, a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Serralves), or Smoke Room (2023, Guerra Junqueiro Museum).
[3] According to the historian Armando de Almeida Fernandes, in Toponímia Portuguesa – Exame a Um Dicionário (1999).
[4] I refer directly to the phrase by Ursula K. Le Guin, in her novel The Dispossessed"[y]ou can go home again, […] so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been" (1975, p. 44).
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