All Possible Forests
The Politics of What Remains Open

Maria José Arjona

Artista plástica

The work gathered in these pages recounts transformations, alignments, intersections, disappearances, and collaborations… Actions undertaken or set in motion that alter and involve bodies of different kinds in terms of their duration, magnitude, and scope. The attempt to compile all these actions within the pages of this issue opens it up to the immensity of all that may—or may not—come to pass.

The spatial limits of each page are constantly overflowing with shapes, bodies, and marks that do not stay centered but move from one place to another, from one state to another, from one thought to another. Crossing over. Passing through us. Always in motion. The text, in turn, also transforms and is able to move freely. Beyond the horizontal line, it seeks other ways of making itself present: appearing as a flickering light, spilling like a liquid, crawling like a curious animal, silently fluttering in the air like a flag. Written letters become another body, an image that also moves.

Those who read, unable to help themselves, move and find their place within the expanded time of an echo that resonates and multiplies. This active reading sets the eyes in motion as they follow the trail of black marks; fingers turn the orderly pages; the heart remembers, with each beat, the unique experience of the word just read. Some of these movements find their voice in what these pages say: when read aloud, or even in a firm whisper, they transcend the paper and reach eager ears which, noticing the breath carried in that voice, listen carefully.

Space then emerges, opens, within the tangle of relationships brought into play: that of paper with the skin that touches it in an act of discovery; that of language with the idea it constructs and transforms; that of the body with the air it breathes as it deciphers what it reads; that of the image with the things that give rise to other landscapes and territories. The space did not exist before this; only the subtle gestures of moving bodies can draw it out across a deep surface.