How do we gesture to the invisible, the trans or the obscure? A performative conversation between boychild and Fernando, a sharing of gestures, and a bodily back and forth between mathematician and dance artist.
The French communist and radical gay activist, philosopher and mathematician Gilles Châtelet thought that maths was best understood as gestures: articulations in motion that collapse what we want to say into how we say it. How does this relate to how boychild thinks about “the world’s moments enfolded”, or what the writer André Lepecki calls ‘choreopolitics’ — the gestures of protest that are made even within the tightest, policed spaces?
In one sense, gestures are the only medium that could possibly apprehend the multiplicity and constant motion of our times. They are essentially mobile, liable to torsion, capable of re-integrating cuts and discontinuities, and sensitive to fleeting articulations. But gestures can never be complete — incompleteness is fundamental to them. In trying to do something that goes beyond us, that evades our condition, we are always reaching out towards the infinite, the mystical, to get a small sense of something more profound. The purity and beauty of failure tears open the sky behind every gesture.
Fernando will share a gesture that sums up a mathematical concept with boychild. boychild will respond with a gesture of her own. They’ll then continue back and forth like this, maybe with some chatting.
