CAER EN AMOR

CAER EN AMOR, needles in free fall by Ileana Elordi "As I felt love for Marthe, I took it away from René, my parents and my sisters." Excerpt from the novel "The Devil in the Body" by Raymond Radiguet There are images that sleepwalk through memory. Probably, it is because we cling to them by giving them a state of constant veil. They are details. The tattoo on someone else's back, for example. The way the ink matches the shape of the muscles. The tattoo of an eagle spreading from someone else's back. We can spend hours reminiscing about other people's bodies. And not only do we think them but we make them appear, in between dialogues and false laughter. Gestures, movements, miscommunications. Sensations that do not fit with what is spoken, lies. Because the world is full of lies. Whether as a way to hide our intentions, or to delay the time when we will finally let ourselves fall. To think that we all want to be loved, is as true as it is superficial. We want to be loved, but the problem lies in how to achieve it without destroying ourselves in the attempt. We do not want that achievement to annihilate us. From there then, the fascinating and exotic deployment of tactics and resistances arises. Writing down these diffuse images or displacements is a way to fix the experience in time and give them a firmer appearance. But more than an exercise of self-consciousness, these embroideries seem like a reminder or a threat. A kind of war banner.

And then the idea of love as a battlefield, which probably arose millennia ago along with the very idea of love. One seeks to make the other cross over to the threshold of one's own territory. And on that threshold, no one can interfere. Jealousy, possession. It is difficult to measure the damage that can be caused in the name of love. The essence of love is always ambivalent and its configuration contradictory: there is pain, there is pleasure, and some low feelings live there in conflict with affection. They are levels of reality that float one above the other without being able to converge.

The change from one level to the other is sudden and vertiginous, and precisely this ambivalence is the plot of these embroideries: the needle wounds the fabric and a love phrase is constructed. The experience is relived and the wounds of the battle are recalled. The fabric opens up on a grand scale, exposing the intimacy of these competing forces, along with the false sense of being ever closer to a common core without ever being able to reach each other. What is the downfall of love then? Disarmament does not seem to be a possible way. In this fall, there are sinful snakes, tattoos and competition. The needles in free fall, open to tenderness and the lowest feelings. However, in these embroideries, tactics are revealed and lies are confessed. Because the terrain of lies is as difficult as that of truth. And the truth is that it is when we are unable to invent tactics that we begin to understand that love no longer lives there. 
 There are mechanics that we cannot do without. And just like that, the detail of a gesture returns and is stamped in the memory. Other people's hands dig into our bodies, and we mentally tattoo images on others with the intention of imprinting them with a mark. Sometimes, the more you maneuver, the more you fall. And that's the irony. Or at least that's how it seems.