This collection of poetry and images, with links in the text to short films, has emerged from a decade-long project; a collaborative, multidisciplinary, poetic journey of performance writing, audio-visual manifestations, online projects, exhibitions and public workshops. The group – working in many languages and across many borders, informed by shared feminist perspectives – have often worked in ruined city spaces, and this is sometimes evident in writing that is both reclaiming and declamatory.
By taking the shape of spirals an extra giddy turn is given to the sincerity of PartSuspended’s collective endeavour. For in putting together disparate voices and disciplines, there are moments when the twenty five writers seem to be steadying themselves, only to let something go and they speed around the “tense curve” that bends their enterprise. There are passages in the poems when something close to a brash formulae of emotions steps in – “I do not want to be saved./Destruction as construction”; only for subtle and strikingly oblique images to be thrown out like surprising solar flares: “prošli pored slike ušuškani u belim kolima/we passed by the image tucked in a white car” and “exiliados/y naciéramos en un camino/que no hace más que perderse/exiles/perhaps born on a road/that just keeps vanishing”.
The image of “a circular mask” in one prose piece continues to haunt me, discomfortingly.
Writing along the spiral – “a curve that is the locus of a point that rotates about a fixed point while continuously increasing its distance from that point” – there is a sense of both the geometry and anarchy of their galactic reach. In poems like ‘She Said’ there is a Beckett-like reserve and circularity, almost like a Zen kōan, but then something pushes against the curve – “because I don’t trust in measures at all” – and the smell of “cut oranges” rises from “the rings of Saturn”. At these moments the writers’ and artists’ attentions to both spiral form and irrepressible drives condense around elegant lines: “your Hourglass will be your undoing only if you believe in sand” and “we share the responsibility of keeping standing/trust: you won’t break and I won’t lean too much”.
In the central co-written essay on collaborative writing there is both a generous attending to the difficult and “dangerous path” of dreaming, with multiple jaw-dropping examples, but there is coherence too. Shape emerges not just from the arms of the spiral. There is also the form of collaboration itself; illustrated by a description of the monologue for ‘The True Aerialist’ performed by Dani d’Emilia, interrupted throughout by an awareness of the limitations of dreams, and how when she and the piece do fly, they do so not just by “return[ing] to the more spectacular conventions of performance” but by collaboration itself and “a flying hoist (thank you Hiske Buddingh Uta Baldauf)”.
Much of the work here was created during the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic – “we were faces on a screen…. plain images…. became our bread and blood. The question was: how to keep spiralling without bodies?” and there is, understandably, a sense of both frustrated creativity – “What happens when pathways cannot connect us physically anymore?” – but also, and perhaps most appealing to a reader who does not know the project our of which this book grew, a renewed treasuring of the small and precise things of feeling: “els peus vençuts em fan d’hostatge/disappointed feet make me their hostage”.
