MÀ BRAÇ ANSA TRUC
HAND ARM HANDLE TRICK / The materials and materializations — in the broadest sense — have been found, appropriated, or duplicated in some of their gestation phases and have become something that doesn’t entirely belong to them; they are and are not . [i]
Language is, in and of itself, multilingual. It contains worlds . [ii]
The world as you experience it is right here in front of you, or behind you, to the right or to the left, on your television, on your screen, or whatever . [iii]
Reminder: your clothes will be costumes for someone else . [iv]
You follow, on the ceiling, the winding line of a thin crack, the futile path of a fly, the almost traceable movement of the shadows. This is your life. This is what you have. You can take stock of your meager fortune, the precise tally of your first quarter-century. You are twenty-five years old and have twenty-nine teeth, three shirts and eight socks, a few books you no longer read, a few records you no longer listen to . [v]
L The maids took my measurements while I lay on the floor, one standing on my neck, the other in the middle of my leg, with a strong rope stretched taut, each holding one end, while a third measured its length with a one-inch ruler. Then they measured my right thumb, and that was enough, because by means of a mathematical calculation (twice the circumference of the thumb is once the circumference of the fist, and likewise for the neck and waist), and with the help of my old shirt, which I had spread out on the floor in front of them to serve as a pattern, they found my exact size . [vi]
There’s a shirt on the chair / Now I don’t know if it’s yours or mine / It’s watching us. Mixed up on the other side of the room . [vii]
An imaginary chamber is built around our body, which we believe to be well hidden when we take refuge in a corner. Shadows become walls, a piece of furniture becomes a barrier, a curtain becomes a ceiling. But all these images imagine too much. We must now define the space of stillness, transforming it into the space of being. Noël Arnaud writes this verse:
Je suis l’espace où je suis
[I am the space where I am] [i]
In a book of interviews, Pierre Cabanne asks him at one point whether he engaged in any artistic activity during the twenty years he spent in Cadaqués. Duchamp replies that he did, since every year he would rebuild an awning that provided shade on his terrace. Duchamp always liked to be in the shade . [ii]
in 1949, Robert Moog, who was fourteen at the time, discovered the theremin thanks to a magazine for electronics enthusiasts that featured a sort of “build your own theremin at home” tutorial. Following the magazine’s instructions, Moog built his first model at the kitchen table, soldering with care and precision . [iii]
The accident is a compensation for unbridled enthusiasm, an abrupt tangent in the dissident’s credibility that in the traumatic vertical finds the space of pain . [iv]
A precipitous paradise, in short, where the artist and the amateur have almost no place except for themselves and their slow gestures . [v]
The amateur is a contradictory figure who, unconcerned with authority or recognition, freely appropriates languages — corrupts them — and gives voice to a multitude of discourses within himself . [vi]
Irony is singularly useless when it comes to building anything that replaces this hypocrisy that it itself exposes . [vii]
And not without ironic desolation, Flaubert, in his Dictionary of Topics, defines poetry as “completely useless” because it is “out of fashion,” and the poet as “a synonym for fool” and “dreamer.” [viii]
Several dozen visitors showed up with all kinds of magnifying glasses and thread counters, starting a trend that, for several months, made a fortune for all the opticians in the city. The favorite pastime of these obsessive observers — who came several times a day to systematically examine every square inch of the painting, and who displayed treasures of ingenuity — or daring acrobatics — to get a better view of the upper parts of the canvas — was to spot the differences between the successive versions … [ix]
Words on the page are incomplete. The poem, the novel, or the pamphlet are completed when they reach people, when people engage with them. Connection is a collaboration. For words to make sense, they must be read . [x]
We don’t always give words the full attention they deserve, and we often forget or underestimate their power, as demonstrated in the civilizations of all eras. One of the areas where the word exerts its power is in suggestion or, more precisely, in a particular kind of suggestion: the one that directly transforms words into physical, sensory, or emotional realities . [xi]
We should speak only of sensations and visions: never of ideas — for they do not spring from our very being, nor are they ever truly our own . [xii]
Using ChatGPT, anyone can feel like a powerful prince — something that’s hard to experience these days, unless you’re a crown prince who can afford to buy a “Da Vinci” painting of dubious provenance or order people to be killed. The most Renaissance-like aspect is the chatbot’s subservience — none of OpenAI or Meta’s other self-indulgent, publicity-driven nonsense. It is the kind of renaissance that can occur when both a sense of community and aesthetic judgment are automated, and public debate is drowned under a tsunami of fake news and bots entranced by the sublime avalanches caused by climate change . [xiii]
[i] Jordi Mitjà 2026
[ii] George Steiner. Los libros que nunca he escrito, Siruela, 2008
[iii] David Foster Wallace. L’aigua és això, Edicions del periscopi, 2023
[iv] Alicia Kopf. Memòria d’Eco, L’altra editorial, 2026
[v] Georges Perec. Un hombre que duerme, Impedimenta, 2009
[vi] Jonathan Swift. Viatges de Gulliver, Edicions 62, 1981
[vii] Júlia Francino. Els Excedents, Edicions de 1984, 2020
[i] Gaston Bachelard. La poética del espacio, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974
[ii] Enrique Vila-Matas. Bartleby y compañía, Anagrama, 2003
[iii] Maitane Beaumont Arizaleta. Una idea de felicidad. Momentos fulgurantes de la música del siglo XX, Temporal Casa Editora, 2023.
[iv] Jordi Valls. Tractatus de la mort de la poesia catalana, La Breu, 2023
[v] Marcel Broodthaers. L’artiste et l’amateur, Ronny Van de Velde, 1992
[vi] Xavier Nueno. El arte del saber ligero. Una breve historia del exceso de información, Siruela, 2024
[vii] David Foster Wallace. L’aigua és això, Edicions del periscopi, 2023. Citat per Vicenç Pagés Jordà a l’epíleg de L’aigua és això
[viii] Nuccio Ordine. La utilitat de l’inútil, Quaderns crema / Acantilado, 2013
[ix] Georges Perec. El gabinete de un aficionado, Anagrama, 2020
[x] Kae Tempest. Connectar, Més llibres, 2021
[xi] Vicenç Pagès Jordà. El món d’Horaci, Editorial Empúries, 1996
[xii] E. M. Cioran. Ese maldito yo, Tusquets, 1995
[xiii] Hito Steyerl. Medios calientes. Las imagenes en la era del calor, Caja Negra, 2025