Crisis y pasión ornamental

Samuel Nicolle, Crisis and ornamental passion. I hope you arrived safely, my dear. On the way back, I reflect on what you told me tonight: let's imagine for a moment what the relationship would be between an ornament and the surface it decorates if it were a love story. Or how to use the ornament to talk about love, and love to talk about ornament. In this fiction, as sentimental as it is decorative, it would be a matter of loving homages, and disaffection, and all the ambiguous affections that arise between the two. A fictitious ballroom serves as a small theater or living tableau, where our joys and sorrows vanish. The lyrics of the love songs we dance to are intertwined in my memory as much as in the wallpaper that covers the walls. Their choreography persists long after the disappearance of the bodies that writhe, twist, embrace, and drift away in the blue light. On the dance floor, I thought of O., of our love story that ends and of which you know all about. My darling, in the language of love in French, is a term of endearment, a token of affection, as much as a parasitic insect. The ornamentation always describes an unequal and unfair relationship between who adorns and who is adorned. Do you think that between two lovers, one always loves too much and too passionately, while the other one lets themselves be loved, out of laziness or vanity, before disappearing? It would be fun to disguise and represent our parasitic lovers as Dressed Fleas, as the nuns did in the Mexican convents in the 19th century. To have fun with our misfortune and invent another ending, light and sweet, where disappointments are only fleeting, just small stings. You laughed a lot when you saw me strutting with R. I keep their scent mixed with the glitter of my navy-blue sweater and my sweat, the memory of our clumsy steps in a cumbia, the joy of our fleeting amorous walk during a song. Unbridled fun in their arms. I wonder if flirting is to love what ornamentation is to the object it beautifies: the harmless pleasure of seduction without the gravity of feelings, the promise of happiness that remains in a state of promise. A necessary frivolity like a caress on the heart. Sarah Ahmed writes that affections are what stick, most of the time to an object. The vestiges of our night have been covered with patterns and textures: rhinestones, feathers, silicone. What used to be residue, a necklace of flowers or a flyer thrown on the floor, becomes the celebration of ephemeral happiness, an object of affection. These objects encapsulate the sensations and affections that have run through our bodies: what hurts, what hurts, what marvels, what caresses. I can't help but think of Eve Kosofsky's reparative reading of Sedgwick, to whom we return again and again in our conversations. In a strange analogy, she relates the gestures of love of reparation and the very camp diversionary strategies of exaggeration, saturation, and disorientation, as well as attachment to fragment and waste. Ornamentation is then a gesture of love that repairs objects without quality as well as broken hearts. Tonight, like junky Cinderellas, we both dance and sing to forget the disappointments of fading loves. "One step closer, they protected, decorated and accompanied me in love, dance and our lives among the stars.". This dedicatory is engraved on the soles of our shoes as a tribute to this night. Tomorrow, we will remember together the theater of this night drinking thirty coffees and smoking a thousand cigarettes. We will smile at our ridiculous sentimental exploits and the disappointed hopes of the eve. Little by little, we will wrap tonight's memory in reasonable words. Tomorrow, we will feel our feelings fading slowly with the fumes of alcohol and daylight. Our hearts will fade in the sun like the posters of holidays past. Maybe I'll even write to R. if my affection for them still lingers, but for now, sweet dreams, sweetheart. Anaïs Lepage Acknowledgements to Enrique Cristobal, Ignacio Granados Valdez, Antoine Granier, Siobhan Guerier, Siobhan Guerdez, Antoine Granier, Siobhan Guerrero, Valentina Guerrero Marín, Karla Kaplun, Ana Mayoral, Annick Nicolle, Patrice Nicolle, Sarah Nicolle, Vita de Talleyrand Périgord, Gizeh Trejo, Manuel Valdez