It was a sound I saw — Maria Velho da Costa and the engagement between verb and image

Abstract

“La Dame à la Licorne”, tapestries from the 15th century, are an allegory of the five senses and the motto that questioned Maria Velho da Costa, a Portuguese writer of contemporary experimentalist literature who, on this universe, traveled “For a new journey — that of the reader — begin in turn.” The text “A vista” (inserted in the collective work Poetics of the five senses) is a challenge to “stories in the mouth”, to “the hands that caressed me in childhood”, to “the breath in the first mirror”. Despite resorting to an ekphrastic rhetorical mechanism, there is an inverse process in the expansion of the non-specific, as MVC seeks the word on the painted canvas, the “uncreated”, were it not for writing to be an agent, par excellence, of metamorphosis. The intersection between verb and image results in a structure of the sensible order, which problematizes the limits imposed by classical poetics. In a postmodern condition, the new aesthetic object desecrates the law of belonging and displaces, confuses, merges the different means of expression in a polyphonic dialogue. More than a speech that describes, there is an inscription of the self, insofar as, summoning the different senses, one perceives the formulation of a body that is rehearsed “from the passage of animals and sounds”, as an “intimate paradise” that is given to contemplation, until it forms a “place of its own”, that of “pure desire”. It will be questioned whether this porous body, crossed by word and image, could be a construction of meaning, despite being a deviation and fracture, in a world where, based on the intelligibility of phenomena, it is due to a classification that delimits and announces. Following Floquet, Cluver, Agamben, Garramuño, Ducrot, Orlandi or Greimas, the convergence of artistic planes is problematized, since the verb does not translate what one sees; what is observed is fragmented in the gesture of written replacement. Therefore, in its intent, the text is always a failure.