Para enteder palavras

One of the discipline during my time in college proposed a four months exercise where the students could research, experiment and draw a personal trajectory on graphic language. The goal was to produce several graphic pieces reflecting the discourse construction during that period. At first our professor by then, Billy Bacon, used to cut aleatory sentences from a chosen text (usually from a poet or writer), and distribute among the students also by chance. With that bit of information the students should carry on their work in any direction they would prefer, taking in account their own experiences and intuition. Only the deadline and number of pieces remained inflexible.

I received the following sentence: “Não me lembro de ter nascido. Meu registro de nascimento um blefe. Sou tão velho quanto a África.” I don’t remenber who is the author, and I won’t translate: I decided at the beginning of the work not to be guided by the word’s meaning, but by the sentence’s structure or the relationship between their parts (words, group of words, letters...) despite what they meant. It was, let’s say, a structuralist approach.

That led me to some (shy) language philosophy and logic readings, specially Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This was already a huge and sudden step into a complex area of study, and I felt completely lost during the whole process – this was a good sign, for at the end something actually new could come on. Those readings made me thought a lot about my position as a newcomer at the language study; my inexperience and ignorance then matched those at my alphabetizing. So, that was the next place a searched for material.

I scrambled my old school papers, and those from some of my friends, noticing specially their graphic aspect: the stamps, bad printed exercises, little games, passtimes etc. There were among the tests puzzles and other things this sort, as this was made for children. Funny!, that caught my attetion, and I realized playing could be a way into that language matter, at least in this work.

So I had a lot of visual references, and a slight idea of how to articule them in some of the predeterminated pieces. Another thing I remenber being impressed by was the low quality of those printings from the school, and talking about it with Thiago Monteiro, who was at the same time doing the same exercise, he reminded me about the mimeograph printing, very common on schools in Brazil before the appearance of xerox and inkjet printers. From that 'clue' I started to look for one of those almost extinct machines to see what I could do with them in terms of graphic experiment. Obviously I found one in a public school; what I couldn’t predict was that entering after many years in a school, and even spending some time with the kids (who showed me their drawings freely!, as they asked me to draw for them) was going to be so important for my work.

By then I had concentrated only in Wittgenstein’s logic problems, which by surprise were so much alike the puzzles and test, mostly because they deal more with elementary aspects of the language, instead of literature or gramatology. I decided then that some of the graphic pieces should be “tests” of language according to some of the Wittgenstein’s ideas, but in a playful way, almost as the tests were jokes, basically because of the absurdity of testing people about language as “meaning system”, as if some of the most complex notions in language philosophy (that naturally I also couldn’t understand) were obvious to any native speaker. I prepared about twenty eight originals questions and topics to be answered – you can have the original file (in portuguese), and try to answer them by yourself.

It was clear to me that the tests should be printed in the mimeograf machine, but as the exercise had established, I should predict that all components could be printed in conventional modes, like offset for example. Also I should attempt to different formats. This could be easily solved by scanning and redesigning all layouts; much more complicated was the way to create the mimeograf matrices from the computer’s layout: I would need a dot matrix machine that could transform the digital information in “punch” dots on the heliografic paper sheets.

Fortunately Thiago had one of those machines, and after printing all the exercises on the dot matrix machine, I reprinted them on the mimeograf. One more time my inexperience was crucial to the work considering its influence on the printings’ results: many overflows due to overpressure, paper jams, overlayer prints, mirrored matrices etc. It was fun.

Then it was a question of carefull design of each piece, now that I had all the raw material ready. The good thing about exploring many different printing process was that I couldn’t say how the print would be like; the images transformations and distortions were all due to the machine’s nature. I didn’t simulated any noise or error in this case, they just accumulated from one printing process to another. In the few moments I used just one machine (usually the xerox), I did many (black) overprints, making aleatory compositions right on the spot, using machine’s enlarging and reducing resources unpredictably.

Some pieces I could propose; besides posters and envelopes, I printed among other things some protection papers for covering and some paper airplanes to be occasionally used in class. The whole set fitted inside a school suitcase.