«Escrito ante puesto a la obra» por Yolanda Pérez Herreras

Writing set before the body of the book

I transit through words and images between intangible outlines. Beyond doubt, I find trials, lines, reflections of concerns and shocks; manifestations of a passion, the passion for flying.

When one imagines flying rarely overflies dumps, traffic jams, dependent continents; we rarely imagine flying over in a cave, a burrow, a tunnel. We identify flying with looking over fertile land or organic seas; a flight with color and clarity. It is the manifested goodness that, in the face of the theoretically impossible, sublimates to evade unpleasant sensations.

We are capable of more: to be to fly, not to fly to be.

Writing, drawing, photographing, performing, are ways of being – of being present -, a way of searching personally from four cardinal points that, in her determination to evolve, approaches the desired sky. The heartbeat of these tasks is the wings that go with us always, even if only sometimes we are aware of its existence. The wings are not detachable appendages, they are thinking that goes from the shadows into the light displacing with no anger the mist that prevents progress, the mud that hinders from spreading the wings to be light and take off.

To take off, nothing like giving up after having played intensely with unlimited attention; nothing like feeling the failure clawing each door that, once having passed through, it is left behind us as an adventure; nothing like unlearning the borders that mark routes that never belonged to us; nothing like giving up control that fear pushes; nothing like looking face to face the temptation to stay because, at long last!, we have found a comfortable nest. Because flying is not an end, and we cannot expect the optimal time to take off or to get the perfect blow taking into advantage the inertia, such things are as believing that one time is forever.

We are capable of more: to heal ourselves to fly, not to fly to heal ourselves.

Breathing pure air and polluted air deeply like if it were the last sigh; embrace the good and evil as two sides of the same moon; let’s be human-animal-human and so on in an infinite loop. And so on until we are not commanded by the jailer who interprets from kneeling on the ground.

Do not let our wings the responsibility of our capabilities, do not praise highly the flying above the daily happiness that brings the possibility of discovering feathers in dumps and gardens. To deify the need of flying takes away from us the freedom to decide where, how, when. Let’s liberate the mystical idea that when flying is achieved there is no longer need of land planning… and soar. Let’s unlink the «idea» of flying and the «fact» of flying: it may be the same and the opposite, each of us must be reborn as many times as necessary.

And let’s remember that heights do not exist, the looks that still have to overcome distances exist. Coincidences of space-time exist when there is no stitching to create differences. Let’s learn that flying cannot be tamed and therefore must be practiced every day to adapt to the pace of now. If it is ice, flour, mould, quietude or movement which encourages the momentum to beat our wings, let’s welcome the cold, the raw, the rotten, because they are all transient states needed to experience the essential processes of living.

From Yolanda Pérez Herreras to Ana Matey

P.S. I have not wanted to write a text OF the text, drawings, photographs and performances of this book, but a text FOR the text, drawings, photographs and performances of this book by Ana Matey, a text inspired by the reading and abstracted contemplation of her work. Prefaces, I believe, should serve to propel readers to dive into the body of the book that each should interpret according to their own savoir vivre.