PART 1 :
In a note preceding the prologue of El discurso vacío (1996), the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero warns that the novel is divided into two parts: on one hand the Exercises— “a set of brief calligraphic exercises”—and on the other, the Discourse—which he describes as “a unitary text of a more literary intent.” In the first entry of the Exercises, he explains that his purpose is very concrete: “Today I begin my graphological self-therapy. This method (which some time ago was suggested by a crazy friend) is based—on the same foundations as graphology—on a profound relationship between handwriting and traits of character.”
What follows is a series of diary entries with the sole aim of writing legibly, in the hope that this act will make him a better person. Levrero then focuses on the shape of the letters: “Today, however, the handwriting—although larger and more legible—shows a certain nervousness; in fact, I am writing more quickly than yesterday. But I also notice that the letters are more detached, more spaced out between each word, less stuck together than before. As if each letter had recovered its individuality.” The task, simple in appearance, soon becomes unstable, and a strange force expels him: he veers off and falls into neurotic digressions about his everyday life. Then he realizes he has gotten distracted and returns to the shape of the letters. Over and over again. In this back-and-forth, the reader ends up entering a rhythm, the rhythm of a machine that never quite manages to function.
For more than ten years, the practice of Alberto Miani (Bogotá, 1991) centered (among other things) on being shut inside his Bogotá studio, tirelessly filling gridded paper with drawings of chairs. It was a sort of self-imposed planas—line-writing drills—in an exercise of strict discipline. Through repetition, the tiny chairs, stuck to each other, began to resemble something else: flies (when there was a blot), ants, letters, an illegible text in which the sign floats without anchoring. If we look closely, these drawings seem to confront us with a presence as unsettling as it is familiar: language.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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