Invited artist: Robin Fox | "Aftermath" from the record Double Blind
Bandcamp: https://therobinfox.bandcamp.com/
Video: Margarida Azevedo and Ricardo Leiria
Words: Margarida Azevedo
The machine kept the heartbeat active and paced. Between small noises of bad connection, in a short and timeless dialogue between body and mind, she kept her arms fallen and hanging from the bed.
Her hands, not always warm, had slight spasms when the light failed. When the lasers crossed through her mind her heart tried to maintain the compass and made the machine whistle.
No one visited her in that tight, suffocating space.
Alone.
She was absolutely alone.
Wet, cold and distressing. There laid her body.
Once a dancer. Slender feet and pointing to the sky. Now an inert body with electric inputs and outputs.
Once a dancer. Now dancing between four-stroke life and the silent death of a fall.
A mute scream in a rush to get somewhere.
The fall. A simple fall.
And the once energetic hands in a contemporary mimetic dance of the hurried, irascible surrounding environment are now aligned with the still, completely still, and inert arms.
If her mouth could spit words. If her mouth could follow her feet and hands, then she would dance again.
The confusion that drifted from an erratic perception of sound had once invaded her whole body.
Once a dancer.
Small memories of someone.
Small.
Very small.
So small that they are stored in a small space of the brain.
Electric shocks. One after another.
Small and intense.
The movements become sounds and the mute words follow the transition.
While she struggled with the strength of her mind, one toe persisted in not moving. From the right, to the left. All inert.
One more electric shock.
And another.
And another..
And another...
There was the long silence of a caress. She was not alone. The memories of the body remained. Once a throb muscle.
The machine was shut down.
The sound slowly fade out.
The words are now over.