By Javier Chemes

Posadas Misiones, febrero 2014

The exuvia is us. We –on this side- are watching. Exoskeletons of what was, that is a full and knockdown past of what was barely (re)known as something owned in the being-alive path of others. There, here, whatever you prefer, there is you, me, us or them, who in some or all ways will see us as the past, ephemeral of today.  And what will warn us is not definite death, but the past wrapped in the transparent and sometimes dark layers of memory that inhabits us and speaks to tell us who we are. Because what is inside is the memory body in remains. We are merely their outside; the outside of memories (Andrés, Marissa, Leo’s) in a green digestive assimilation attempt.  Inside, seeing each other in the eyes of childhood, the microscopic clinical view of two times  –past and present– would persist, together with awareness made works of art and the siesta engaged in a pair of Litoral butterfly wings. Or even better, in thousands of wings. An in thousands of screeches that anticipate a path impossible to cover in the Summer, due to the heat that warns you not to go out, because the sun might annihilate you in a few hours. Or drive you mad…. Of course, like a prodigious butterfly. Unless you are able to escape to the river (the river, or the freshness of oblivion). How to make a part of their lives present and turn it into work: a careful and loving doing.  A vision that attracts us to the fragments of the past that drove us here and that, due to obstinacy, drags us to the edge of the almost sinister chord with which insects would assaults us; nothing matters any more, and we keep on erratically watching and listening, while we wait –why not- for something unexpected to happen. (Of course, he also considered “Kafka and his predecessors”.)* Since the strange inhabits the world. There is nothing stranger and more typical at the same time that them, who come from the past to show us their doing in the world. In the meantime, attracted by the light of the single lamps turned on in the yard, you, I, we smoke and drink in a lethal toast. We look at each other and laugh, convinced that it might as well be like that. While the music lasts, while the siesta lasts or while we try to escape in the night and turn around watching and listening, it will only be possible to become exuvia, or that infinite space from where we see, through holes that welcome and reject the look of the recently abandoned body of the welcomed guest.