sandra zanetti
I think the visions come from absence.
From a space filled with second-hand myths of violence, religion, and history, spilling into the inseparable.
I want to know if you see it too.
Even if it hurts to look.
I don’t trust what I see.
Only later—after the image has already taken place—do I understand why it came to me.
Sometimes much later…
My mind works backward.
Then pretends to go forward.
Theory is an old flame.
A habit I still touch even if I know I shouldn’t.
I trust hunger.
I trust blood.
I trust survival.
I trust secrets.
I distrust all of them all at once.
I trust spring breaking through snow.
I also think that’s just damage with good timing.
I trust the lotus rising through mud.
I also think it is only mud learning how to do what it’s told.
I trust silence after something breaks.
Because everyone else hates it.
I trust the space between notes.
And I can hold my breath there.
Slightly wrong.
Still necessary.
Power in a place you dodn’t think to look.
Tenderness and humiliation sit next to each other.
Safety trips over danger.
Love and violence switch mouths.
I cannot tell which one is speaking through me.
I am a conduit for something.
I am constructed under pressure.
A mash-up of inherited belief, violence, and devotion to something even I don’t believe in.
Frankenstein body.
Performance feels like clearing a hard drive.
It also feels like refusing to delete anything because I want to show it to you the next time I see you, to ask if you’ve been there too.
An alphabet of iconography.
A temporary architecture for surviving the mess.
Or a way of returning to beauty.
Only certain people enter the constellation.
Not witnesses.
Not observers.
Not spectators.
Kin...
The image only exists while it is held in their hands.
I let it slip through me like a ghost.
I don’t want a resolution.
I don’t want to see another dying thing.
I want to move toward what is already waiting for me before I arrive.
I want to enter the eye of the storm and return.
Even if it disappears as I arrive.
When I found performance, something answered me.
And I still try to speak to it, even when it screams back at me.