FEATHER THE BALANCE. RENEE GLADMAN+NISHA RAMAYYA

feather the balance creates a sort of rackety bridge between Renee Gladman’s drawings and Nisha Ramayya’s poem. This bridge is described (following Fred Moten) by Ramayya as oscillating between a safe crossing and a descent into the depths. Escaping syntax’s linear enclosure, enabling the movement of thought through space, raising a delicate equilibrium of weights and making them collapse are all processes that participate in feather the balance’s bridge / NISHA RAMAYYA’s contribution was propelled by a practice of citational listening similar to running circles around the loved one. Repeating a movement, insisting on phonetical dimensions, and marking an encircling structure that emphasises without completely trapping. There is an attractive gravitational and cosmic force in the quotes: they condensate contexts, references and times and sometimes let them drizzle. The poem starts: Page drips / to inquire /with associative / sewage. / In RENEE GLADMAN’s novel The Ravickians one character says everyone is leaking structure. Gladman responded to Ramayya’s poem with a selection of drawings that pick up on levity and the likelihood of inconstancy and leakage within systems. Some of the two-dimensional drawings produce a traversable space for the body where the architecture of buildings, corridors and interiors overlap. These topographies made of lines, circular shapes, asemic writing and arrows suggest a particular motion of arrivals or departures —paths that resonate with Ramayya´s citational circular practice. In other drawings the features of urban architectures are less identifiable but maintain the energetic accumulation of thought and the resistance to flatness. They look like spatial scapes, bright and vibrant with colour, floating marks — a synergic coexistence that Rammaya also pursues in their poetry.