Vai e Vem e Vem e Vai

Dear Leila and Mafalda,

The end of 2014, was for me marked by several events more or less curious, like the end of the writing
of my PhD thesis, the return of a loved one to Lisbon, an individual that decided to be my stalker for a
week and finally, with “a” unidentified someone that decided to start leaving notes in my vespa’s seat
parked in the square down from my home. As strange as it might seem, this last event helped me with
ideas about what I wanted for this exhibition we are going to make together.
The notes, at first with no interests whatsoever, full of trivia and thoughts that made no sense, became
more encrypted: without words, the notes that I found in the morning were blank sheets of paper signed
with ** or ∆ or ✓ or ¬¬ or even ~ ¢ § ® ø Ø ∞ ≈
This one-sided exchange of messages – which I stopped by changing parking spaces – even though it
caused me some concern, it aroused my curiosity because I was sure I was before a decryption of a
code. I found myself thinking that these symbols would allow the transmission of micro messages,
micro information, of more or less dense material, of a group of symbols diversely spaced providing
linguistic mechanisms and visual composition.
In this coming and going of imagination and to clear my thoughts, following the advice of a friend, I
started reading concrete poetry to, as she repeated with some persistence, “stop reading and only look
at words as images”. And, a coincidence I longed for, after reading and reading, empathizing with the
words of Apollinaire, “You will find here a new representation of the universe. The most poetic and the
most modern”1, I came across a poem by José Lino Grünewald as follows:

(Going and Coming and Coming and Going))

How about this as a starting point?
Antonia

1 Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, 1918