Distributed notes

“El ano tuyo. After much activity at the start of the fall season, things quiet down through October. The exchange picks up again about one week into November, beginning with a series of photos of Aimar emerging from el ano tuyo [your anus], a narrow passageway marking the end of a cave in the Basque municipality of Tuyo [yours]. El ano tuyo, as you could imagine, opens onto a discussion of sexual pleasure zones and control, which implicitly leads us back to the topic of queer form—as Sands suggests in his response to Aimar’s rite-of-passage photos, his work about sex is all painting, all ‘one big gestural stroke’. Here Sands disappointment with the rejection of an invitation to Adrian Piper mixes together with a discussion of control as lifelong sculpting process and the formal (or, perhaps, informe or formless) possibilities of the orgasmic encounter—sexual, textual and otherwise. The chapter closes with a 20-page essay by art historian Kathy Wentrack written on the occasion of the 2001 exhibition Double Trouble: Carolee Schneemann and Sands Murray-Wassink. In it, Wentrack traces the shared aspects of Sands’ and Carolee’s art/life practices, particularly their shared commitment to using lived experience as the basis for creative production. Wentrack’s text is an important reference point in the the development of a narrative linking second wave feminism with third wave queer (male) feminisms. Following the essay, Sands shares one last image, perhaps to make Wentrack’s point more palpable, more present: If we began with el ano tuyo, we end with a gold-plated vulva.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“Missing Strands. The year is coming to a close, and in the weeks before winter holidays six more communiqués are exchanged. There is an attempt to wrap things up, even as there is full recognition of the impossibility of that—some strands will always stay missing, in the letters as in relationships. In a letter dated 9 December (though began in the week prior), the topic of queer form returns, this time with an extended quote from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in which she articulates her understanding of queer formalism. For Sedgwick (and, in turn, for Aimar), it involves a kind of fantastic imbuing wherein ‘… objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love.’ And then New Year begins. It is marked here by a letter within a letter, sent by Sands to Aimar on the first day of 2021. The nested letter dates back much further, to 2015 when Sands wrote to Carolee Schneemann following their difficult meeting in Salzburg during the opening of Schneemann’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum der Moderne. In this moment of carefully selected over-sharing, Sands performs one final gesture of ‘spilling out’—Sedgwick’s description of the excessive, of survival and of the need for sites of messiness (where things don’t quite line up) seems to come alive on the page. For all of that ‘abundance’, though, indeed some strands will always stay missing.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“To rhyme an ending with a new beginning. The winter holidays are over, and the communiqués close here, on 6 February 2021 about a week after Aimar’s 45th birthday. After months of backs and forth, of dreaming and planning, of delicately finding each other through words and images, Aimar opens up about health, about identification and about intimacy and its blockages. His admissions are somewhat unexpected, as is the affective impact of them. In his own final gesture of ‘spilling out’, Aimar offers a closing rhyme matched in its formal clarity of thought only by the rawness of psychic grappling evident in its content. Sedgwick comes to mind once again, this time her understanding of the beauty of not fully knowing people. In Aimar’s final letter (and the final of this eight-month epistolary exchange), it’s the sort of ‘too much’ that only an air sign can give, and, with it, Aimar at last comes to meet the ‘spilling out’ of Sands—not by mimicking Sands’ modes of expression, but, rather, by making visible his own intensities of feeling.Aquarius season.I think that says it all.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“Epilogue. The songs compiled in this final of the afterthoughts and postscripts are pulled together from across the months of Sands and Aimar’s exchange, merging their seemingly distended virtual time together with the regular weekly rhythm of Sands work with Gift Science Archive collaborator Amalia Calderón in archiving sessions at the Rijksakademie van beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam. Online and on-site the playlist (and the relationships it traces) developed from June through December 2020, combining sentimental pop beats, iconic New Romantic ballads, ‘deep house’ electronic tracks and more. There are some twists and turns — as there have been in this epistolary exchange—so take your time and listen when the mood is right. I’m only a few hours in, and I anticipate staying with Aimar and Sands long into the summer.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.