dear Melpignano

dear Melpignano,lately it's hard to tell who I am,
or what I do,
or what this artistic practice is.there's a need to somehow claim it all but what the actual fuckkkkk.Giacomo asked us to introduce ourselves to those joining our CPPM cohort for the residency, and late one night, exhausted after a tiring but beautiful day of our Valga residency, I sent him this:"my name is Anette, and i'm a performer, semiotician, and writer based in Tallinn. i work at the intersection of critical theory, poetic language, and socially engaged practice, and I'm endlessly fascinated by semiotics, as well as by broken objects and odd scraps of material often found on wastelands. the kind of things that have shed their original function and started meaning something new. Can't wait to meet you all and dive into the work together :)"it's very frustrating to constantly introduce yourselfto yourself to yourself to yourself to yourself,and to others,and I guess all of those words are kind of bullshit.perhaps building blocks of artificially forced identities.dear Melpignano, I have a confession to make.i'm not interested in introducing myself to you.i simply wish to be honest enough to really meet you.

shaky pixels

a few years ago i found this 20-year-old Sony HDR-SR7E video camera my dad used to capture home videos when i was a child, and later a slightly annoying teenager.all of this footage is still there on the built-in 60GB hard disk drive.there's this video of me at 12, brushing a horse called Leonhard, the one i used to ride the most, wearing a Twilight t-shirt with Bella, Edward and Jacob dramatically in each other's embrace.well, the question my besties and i used to ask each other was always: "are you team Edward or team Jacob?"only rewatching the movie as an adult did i realize: none!both of these guys are complete weirdos!!why is Edward lurking around Bella's bedroom while she's asleep, sniffing her breath?and Jacob clearly has some serious anger issues.forever team Bella. and honey, get yourself some healthy love.after getting hold of this video camera, i've occasionally recorded with it.Inge and i building a tent for new year's eve, eating from a big pot of pasta with our bare hands while listening to whale sounds and manifesting a merrier future.my ex-partner and i having our last dinner together, after deciding to go our separate ways, after a cold winter day of cold plunging ourselves back to ourselves and our honest desires.the day after graduating from university, painting my toenails red and considering entering the foot fetish industry, because what does it even mean to find a job as a semiotician, and what is this economy of bullshit jobs aajkcn scbkdjdq scjdsjdjq.a drive home from the hospital after my grandma had her second stroke. keep your head warm.packing my bags for our four-month trip of CPPM summer, beginning with a month of creative residency in Melpignano, i took the camera with me, so the present can be in a constant process of transforming itself into an archive of shaky pixels."but your iPhone camera is way better," my dad commented.no doubt it is, and that's also why.the perfectly smoothed-out visuals and instagram-worthy quick captures lack the grain that would make them worthy of forming an archive.nothing is hidden or shadowed out of plain sight with these perfect machines, and therefore, as Byung-Chul Han would most probably argue, they exist in a realm of pure "positivity" that cancels out any sense of "negativity".the iPhone produces pornographic images, and it's conveniently quick to reproduce them.but nobody cares about the HDR-SR7E and its shaky pixels.rubbish. discarded piece of junk.and that's why there could perhaps still be a liveliness in there...

kitty Ed

my coursemate Ed has lately been showing cat behaviour.this weirdo needs to be acknowledged, and he's the central star of my Melpignano archive.bless him.kitty.

stringimi come se ti fossi davvero caro

At times silence equals the chatter of strangers in a language you can’t speak. The semantics is present yet unreachable, leaving one with a sense of talkative quietness.Laughter sounds comprehensive in all languages and this is what I choose to live by.Crying sounds comprehensive in all languages and this is what I choose to live by.If angels of the almighty, the keepers of all languages beyond words would let me choose this life again and again and again, the decided body would scream HEAVEN YES. And the sorrows of the drowned would evaporate from their dampened corpses of which the sun will fry pancakes the morning after.The village of the hopeful would gather all together in a kitchen painted yellow, bringing with them jars of jams smashed from the fruits of boldness.Heaven yes. Stringimi come se ti fossi davvero caro. Si. Stringimi come se ti fossi davvero caro.Hold me as if I was dear to you.And a day will come which will hug into oblivion the “as if”.Out of all the non-oppositional possibilities, the myriad of forms of being and non-being, the decided body would dance towards the attraction of life.Heaven yes. Si.Fuck me tender.

videos coming soon...

keep your head warm

Lately, I’ve been eating for two.Pastas and pasticciottos and bread dissolving into tissues made of thin air.Stacked-up gluten, both for myself and for her, whose body is becoming more unrecognisably thin with every passing hour, refusing to work within the conditions of a living organism.A resistance, a battle without perspective fought within the meat, building a refusal of both living and dying.A limbo of non-acceptance, dragging seconds toward the upcoming silence.

videos coming soon...

n=20

The house is 95,000 euros.The paperwork, the signatures and the stamps are 5,000 more.Each founding member brings 5,000.5,000 × n = 100,000.n = 20.We are currently four.
The rest of us are already in this room.Nothing comes back to you except a share of a real place, a door that opens, and a voice in what happens behind it.A beginning that will outlast our cohort and belong to people we haven't met yet.Follow us.

videos coming soon...

confessions on presemantics

I have a confession to make.Ever since I started studying at cppm, I've somehow developed this shame around loving semiotics.I've had a sense that the precondition for being sensed as an artist in this space is that I should, at least partly, shed my semantic thinking — the tendency to always lean toward language and rational explanation — and instead inhabit a state of "not thinking."Reflecting on what Daniel said about where all these kinds of shame might come from, I don't have clear answers.But I know the shame developed over the course of cppm, and I sense it's somehow tied to the discourse I've noticed around "presemantics" — the implicit opposition between thinking and feeling, making and contemplating, the rational and the somatic.That rhetoric has often left me feeling paralyzed.
I often think back on the very first exprompt we did, where I set myself the task of reading the book The Sciences of the Artificial out loud and feeling into the text so deeply that I'd start crying, almost hysterically.And then blowing bubbles into a glass jar.And then singing a lament.Looking back, what a chaotic and silly and odd little act.
But it wasn't really an act.It was more a true representation of my daily existence.No, I'm not joking.
Recently I found myself rereading old chats with nearly all of my past lovers, from different periods of my life, trying to remember the different versions of myself I've passed through and grown into over the years.Trying to sense my way into the past through the thoughts I was expressing, and through the words I used with the people who were erotically close to me.While I was studying semiotics in Tartu, there was this guy named Andres.This chat is from 4 years ago.Andres wrote: How are you doing out there in the countryside? Miss you! When are you coming back to Tartu?I replied: listen i was just thinking today, that if someone saw from the outside how I spend my days here, it would cause so much confusion hahahahha. like. hahahhhahha. I don't know, I'm basically just trying to cope with the weirdness of the fact that I exist at all, you know, and then to ease that I meditate, and then I read something theoretical again that completely scrambles my brains, and then I go sit by the river for 2h and stare at the water, and then I come home and sleep, and then I wake up and feel like I'm actually more plant than human, and then I drink tea and read again and then I'm confused again and then I go walk barefoot in the field and pray the rosary. In between I also eat. That kind of thing. Basic.We were both part of an anarchist student organization called Veljesto, founded about 106 years ago, which has been the landing place and community for most of Estonia's public intellectuals and writers.Andres specializes in political philosophy. He's obsessed with Derrida and deconstruction. He loves arguing about Rousseau and natural law, about Hegel's dialectic, about Deleuze and Guattari and the rhizome. About A Thousand Plateaus.But most of all, he loves talking about Heidegger. Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. Language is the house of Being.The core of his argument is basically that there is no reality outside of language. That language is all we could ever potentially have.Because our existence is so completely immersed in the reality of words and concepts that our perception is not merely influenced by language — it's fundamentally shaped by it.From the bottom up and from the top down and across every diagonal.
The categories we see with are already linguistic before we ever notice we're using them.By the time a thing arrives in consciousness as a "thing," it has already been sorted, named, cut out from the undifferentiated flow and handed to us as something.We never catch the world raw. We only ever catch it already-spoken.It's a radical, fundamentalist linguistic stance on human existence — and yet one that holds its ground remarkably well as an argument.Often I tried to oppose Andres, telling him about bodily sensations and the theory of evolution, asking him whether he thought mathematics was discovered or invented.I asked whether he thought there was any possibility of God existing outside the system of language.He laughed with me and told me that God could only exist inside language.I asked if God could exist in mathematics, then.He laughed at me and said that mathematics is nothing but a language.And that once language collapses, human existence itself can no longer be proved.That each time we try to speak about a pure physical bodily reality outside of language, about entities untouched by language, it's more of a hypothesis than something we could ever really point at.Most of the time, Andres was very confused about me.He once described me like this:You're wearing something white… no, maybe not white, and probably not a dress either, but… some kind of strange robe. And at sunrise you're sighing out in a field, but the field isn't exactly… beautiful. The ground is covered in odd bits and pieces and shards of glass from 30-year-old vodka bottles. From the distance you can suddenly hear oriental gongs and the bells of a Catholic church and rave music, all at once. And you're dancing barefoot, an eclectic dance. Somewhere there's also a distant relative of the Lotmans, who arrhythmically shouts into the mix: "Biosphere!"In rebellion against Andres, I decided that God is a dancer and I'm a jingle on her skirt.That's also the main reason I ended up in CPPM.I'm trying to find the physical reality that touches something outside of language.So my reason for being here is completely existential — though now, having grown into more of an adulthood, no longer existential in that weird, desperate way.And partly it's a wish to prove Andres wrong.These days I find existentialism highly humorous.So this opposition between the linguistic and the non-linguistic, the one I've kept encountering in the shared discourse of this past year in CPPM, has grown in me a kind of resentment — toward the discourse itself, and toward my own tendencies.I think I'm ready to shake myself free of that resentment. And to challenge the discourse a little.I don’t believe that thinking suffocates art-making.I don’t believe that the best works of art are born from the state of “presemantic”.In fact, I don't think the “presemantic” is real.I don't believe I could ever go outside of language.Not only that I personally can't go outside of language — but that, in fact, nobody can.I don't think that, already having been contaminated by systems of language of whatever kind, a purely somatic reality could ever be accessed.And this hidden hierarchy between "linguistic" and "physical" reality — academia praising the former, performance praising the latter — is built on a false premise of oppositionality.Let's make these two pillars of human existence horizontal again.
So let me challenge the notion of the presemantic.Let me argue instead that language and body are completely inseparable.Let me argue that language, and the categories of the rational, can be a somatically erotic experience.Let me argue that in order to find myself an integrated person, whole, I can reject neither semantic nor physical reality.Let me argue that staying connected to rational reality does not diminish the capacity to enter a state of wildness, or to follow one's impulses and somatic states.I believe, instead, that rationality is what keeps the artistic edge grounded.Let me argue that an artistic edge which has lost all connection to the rational is constantly at risk of slipping into the territory of mental illness.Let me state that the territory of mental illness is not an artistic edge.Let me state that I will never buy into the notion of the "mad genius" or the "suffering artist."Let me state, again, that mental illness is not an artistic edge.And let me be very clear: I will go on fighting these notions for as long as I still know how to speak.Let me argue that the rational is also somatic.That the somatic is also rational.That the jingle on the skirt is 50% linguistic and 50% physical.Jingle bells,
Jingle bells.