As I look through the mountains that stand above me, I see nothing but the
shadow of ambitious and solitary human. It is “después de las montañas” they say.
The new life. The new freedom. It is coming anytime soon. But we must keep going
and find the renovation, step out of this void of frozen human time, only the machines
are living and finding purposes. What is the goal here if not to be a mass where there
is no mass anymore. I await for the call that reconnects me with the land. Que ganas
de ser parido novamente. The work is inspired by the local landscapes and scenarios under the influence of Álvaro de Campos Ode to the new world, industries, ways of living and creations.
Research/Process
“I write grinding my teeth, a beast for the beauty of this,
For the beauty of this thing wholly unknown to the ancients.
(…)
In fever, looking at motors as if at tropical Nature —
Vast human tropics of iron and fire and force —
I sing, and I sing the present, and also the past and the future,
Because the present is all the past and all the future
And Plato and Virgil are in machines and electric lights
Because the human Virgil and Plato had existed in other times,
And pieces of Alexander The Great from say the fiftieth century,
Molecules making the mind of Aeschylus feverish in the 100th century,
Moving through these transmission-belts and pistons and fliers,
Howling, grinding, whispering, clattering, clanking,
Becoming an excess of bodily caresses in a single caress in my soul.
(…)
Marvelous beauty of political corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Political aggression in the streets,
And now and then regicide’s comet
Illuminating with Prodigy and Fanfare
The ordinarily clear skies of quotidian Civilization!
(…)
Yellow journalism in its white wrapper!
How I love you all, all, all,
How I love you in every way,
With my eyes and with my ears and with my smell
And with my touch (what palpating you represents to me!)
And with my intelligence like an antenna you make vibrate!
Ah, how all my senses are in heat for you!
Fertilizers, steam-threshers, agricultural advances!
Agronomochemistry! Commerce nearly a science!
O cases of traveling salesmen,
Traveling salesmen, Industry’s knights-errant,
Human extensions of factories and calm offices!
(…)
I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly twisting my vision
In you, O great, banal, useful, useless things,
O utterly modern things,O my contemporaries, actual and proximate form
Triumphal Ode – Álvaro de Campos
Of the immediate system of the Universe!
New Revelation, metallic and dynamic, of God!
(…)
Hé-la great rail disasters!
Hé-la collapsing mine-shafts!
Hé-la delicious shipwrecks of the great transatlantics!
Hé-la-ho revolutions here, there, all over everywhere,
Alterations to constitutions, wars, treaties, invasions,
Noise, injustice, violence, and maybe soon to come,
A great invasion of yellow barbarians into Europe,
And another Sun on a new Horizon!
(…)
Eia! eia! eia!
Eia electricity, the aching nerves of Matter!
Eia wireless telegraph, metallic affinity with the Unconscious!
Eia tunnels, canals, Panama, Kiel, Suez!
Eia all the past in the present!
Eia the whole future already in us! eia!
Eia! eia! eia!
Useful ferric fruits of the cosmopolitan factory-tree!
Eia! eia! eia, eia-ho-o-o!
I don’t even know if I exist inside. I whirl, I wheel, I engineer myself.
Couple me with every train.
Hoist me on every quay.
I whirl in every ship’s propellor.
Eia! eia-ho eia!
Eia! I am mechanical heat and electricity!
Eia! the rails, the machine-housings — Europe!
Eia and hurrah for me-all and everything, machines working, eia!”
Rural Apocalypse 