Shredding Acts | Jumble Poetry

 

 

In my doctoral work Politics of Matter, I examine the making and unmaking of political imaginaries through a composite field site spanning two contrasting yet interconnected landscapes in southern Spain: The industrialised agricultural coast of Almería and the rural mountains of the Alpujarra. Across these terrains, divergent visions coexist, collide and leave material traces that continue to shape the present. Drawing conceptual inspiration from Walter Benjamin's notion of constellations in The Arcades Project, the thesis rejects a singular narrative in favour of a multimodal assemblage of ethnographic fragments. I propose 'shredding acts' as a means of restaging their representation. 

  

What happens when we cut up the narratives we have inherited and refuse to leave them in the order in which we found them?

Jumble Poetry is an experimental writing practice where a small paper shredder is a recurring device, breaking with histories and political narratives and reassembling them as a performative practice that asks for action and reflection on the production of the future.

I take fragments from the thesis – ethnographic encounters, historical accounts, theoretical passages, fieldnotes and descriptions of landscape – and physically cut, shuffle and recompose them into new configurations. The poems do not seek to clarify or resolve the material from which they are made. Instead, they deliberately disrupt established contexts, allowing for unexpected proximities, contradictions and historical resonances to surface. The following are examples made from those shreds:

 

I look at the tangled mess and see the words 

‘Rojos de mierda’ and ‘outer-space’ 

and I think of the words of an Air Force army commander in 2019, 

who suggested a retake of the 1936 coup, 

the pulling of seeds from the pulp of golden teeth. 

He expressed the desire “to start shooting 26 million sons of bitches". 

 The abjects from outer-space. Outer-ojos. 

Through the O’s of orange Fanta-esque landscapes. 

Of rockets, air. Contamination. 

Of not being able to breathe. 

Of fascist horizons. Desbandá. 

Of lime on bodies and yellow gorse. 

After the fire. Flipping pages. 

Airborn leaflets. Back to earth. 

To carbonated shrivels, to dark. 

And to the boards. 

To the scratching of those car keys. 

Metallic squeals. Matanza. 

To the movement of wiping one’s walls. 

 To the mop-water thrown out of the door. 

And the T-shirt, the one the activist wore in 2022: 

“Proud to be a member of that 26 million”

                                          

                                               ...

Boabdil the alchemist performs 
a DIY patch up from the periphery 
of a long forgotten plastic mine. 
Horses trot along the silk route and 
the buried touch ash from the cleanliness of their homes. 
We walk off-network among the folds. 
Water stagnant 360 degrees echoes empires 
when Odysseus decayed in a knotted world. 
Toilet tissue silk edges, lawned by goats 
in a dystopian green sea of sugar cane. 
The duende in the tarmacked sheets, 
steals water from the living. 
Polythene crumbles 
in the silence of residual silver. 
Wind farms bleach faultlines 
into seismic filaments of gold.

 

...

Sensually filthy 
shat out by a bird

Foragers feet in the mud 
Search for life entangled 
goats spring 
babble viva in launa 
contaminated with epic myths 
fisticuff fisticuff 
burning seeds 
sown in residual convivencia 
down the floods of ravers 
in the rocks of dragon lips 
Ferment with the cabbages of past years 
Sands return with the caravans 
Time as oaks alive 
inside acorns of industrial looms 
Landscapes of demise 
treasures of mushrooms