This Movement Takes Three Hours | Blanca Ulloa and Bianca Felix Biberaj
This movement takes three hours.
Paper, confetti, a large wooden structure covered in fabric, plastic, nylon, wood, sperm, rubber bands, string, prologues, potatoes, pasta. Deliver it three times daily.1. We decide to meet one
afternoon to assemble a list.
It is May 17th, a Thursday, and
two hours pass and suddenly
I’m very tired.
Number 44 on the list says
Make F food. Obsessively.
Deliver it to him three
times daily.
2. Karla’s mother, also named
Karla, dislocated her knee and
could no longer bear the weight
of the pregnancy.
Kathi tells me Karla didn’t make
many noises in pain, but the
buckling of her legs and the
constant shifting of her weight
made the hurt obvious.
The veterinarian performed
a terminal caesarian on Karla
one week ago, and Karla was
born. I don’t ask where Karla’s
body is brought after the
procedure, how it’s held, or who
carries her weight away from
Karla and the farm.
3. Blanca and Bianca are sitting
talking about the simultaneously
absorptive and reflective
qualities of the color white.
4. Sunday and there is no printer
ink in the apartment.
What we want is recapitulation
and reconciliation.
And yet we are here,
reading and rehearsing lists.
5. R was a close friend of K and
identified with K’s fiction.
R highlights how they wrote
in correspondence destined
to each other—in need of the
complementarity that their
writing invited and indicated.
6. On May 22nd 1969
L wrote to Mario:
“From one to two to three or
to more but something always
comes out of the other,
and it is an extremely intimate
communication from pore
to pore, from hair to hair,
from sweat to sweat.”
7. A collection of materials and
objects against the backstage
wall: doors, ladders, pallets,
boards, shelves, chairs, sticks, a
tire, and a toilet seat, assembled
in a vertical pile.
This movement takes three hours.
8. On the first floor
I find a stack of scans from an
Anni Albers monograph.
I go home and tape them on
my bedroom wall. I text a picture
of the whole wall to B and she
replies saying that in her bed-
room she has the same pink
poster that hangs on my wall
to the left of the Albers scans.
9. Cutting a precarious, indeter-
minate space or, perhaps,
folding this space.
Several weeks prior to the
premiere, A wanted to divide
the theater into a series of
functional spaces where
they could cook, sleep, have
sex, shower, play, and so forth.
The theater denied this request.
10. The definition of “together”
suggests 3 meanings:
at the same time;
with or in proximity
to another person or people;without intermission
or interruption;
continuously;
uninterruptedly.
Layering, change of place,
change of pace, and alteration of
bright colour.
11. We meet another Blanca in the
city. We are at the bar, thinking
of weeks ago when number 55
on the list read
Locate other Biancas and
Blancas in the city. Switch
apartments, switch electronic
devices, switch IDs.
How long does the repetition
and the reiteration of the lie
take before absorption?
12. Fred remarks on the degree
of our separation contained
in the letter L and the letter I.
13. An anticipation, a prelude,
a proem, a promenade,
a proem to a promenade,
a promenade to the proem.
14. For the longest time we debate
whether it’s domestication
or domestification. Days pass
and we continue to build
together but can’t decide
or can’t remember what
the word is.
15. Our house is filled with many
materials
paper, confetti, food, a large
wooden structure covered in
fabric, plastic, nylon, wood,
sperm, rubber bands, string,
prologues, potatoes, pasta.
16. I guess her favorite instruction
line from the pink poster:
“Concentrate on tension in the
muscles, pain where bones meet,
fleshly deformations that occur
under pressure; consider body
hair, perspiration, odors.”
17. On the same night, she dreams
that her body produces an
insect stuck in clear gelatin.
I dream I am at the grocery
store buying cheese. I look
inside the vitrine and see a
herd of elephants slowly filing
amongst the food.
18. Three months later I move out
and Blanca inhabits the room.
Everything stays the same,
I leave it all to her
mattress, books, bamboo, lamp
shade, pink poster, window fan,
clothing.
Saturday, she picks me up
and we move me into her
apartment. She then packs
some of her clothes and
leaves.
I keep her setting, roommates,
furniture, posters, plants, food,
bedding.
19. I stand in the right corner
where the radiator produces
a magnet effect and I think:
I want them all to look like this:
solid, silver, hot.
At the moment I have made
groups, four masses, but they
do not give the sensation of
being wrapped in one another.
20. On a Tuesday the pile of
miscellaneous wood pieces
starts by the shelf with the
empty picture frames and
ends by the tool cart near
the window.
On a Friday the pile is thrown
on the dolly with all the other
trash, and when I return
each of its pieces are nailed
together on my table.
21. We sit in my living room and
Mariah Carey, the fish, swims
between us.
Notes on contributors
Blanca Ulloa attends New York University.
Bianca Felix Biberaj is an alum of New York University and Johns Hopkins University.