Closeup  Sylvia Kristel  Manonde Boer2
Manon de Boer, ‘Sylvia Kristel, Paris’, 2003, detail

From the sanctuary of a list we can speak to chaos. We can replicate its song as if learning to understand the language of animals. Coo-coo coo-coo. The communal voices of a library enumerate endless and limitless sounds. For instance, recordings of people imitating the inhalations and exhalations of the sea, is the infinite indexed. In various registers the administrator’s paperwork calls to spirits in the walls and spreadsheets. The catalogues and their made up mythologies call back. Outside a musician plays her instrument to wildfowl.

The workplaces of women in their everyday and literal lives hide the tiny and tenebrous technologies of time travel. Such a place is a phone box where the body in the cell and the cells in the body exchange cycles of information. One lesson learnt from this process is that historic and contemporary writing offer spaces to perform in. Another is that there is a family of creatures living below the surface of the carpet/earth, called the Erratics. They are brown with bristly hairs and round bellies. They are completely blind and sing to each other.

Holly Pester is a poet, writer and researcher. This text is the second instalment of a series of ‘magical correspondences’ with MAP’s archive of past issues and content. Each instalment will be a projection that stories imagined potential from the archive data. Read Pester’s introduction here, and the first instalment, ‘The Confessional Reading Group’, here.

See also:
Turning Around
Emerging: Hanna Tuulikki
The Erratics
‘A Feminist Chorus’ Voices at 5 Blythswood
Back In To It