Colette
Baraldi and Luiza Samanda Turrini
© Colette
Baraldi and Luiza Samanda Turrini 2009
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PLEASED
TO MEET YOU
I am a frogman. I have thin, quivering muscles
sheathed in waterproof Indian ink which separates
me from an uncongenial environment. My frogman’s
suit is from Negatron. My perception of the world
is the same as yours: for most of our waking time
we find ourselves in front of a screen, either
a TV, or a computer, or a car windscreen. Refractory
to natural light, with eyes as weak as those of
the fish from the abyss, if there are no screens
to protect us we barricade ourselves behind glasses,
which are small screens kept close to strengthen
our gaze or hide it. But I am a frogman and I
use my mask to see clearly. The Sandman logo I
have pulled off because I hate designer’s
junk. As soon as I dive under the surface, a strange
fact happens. My joints become loose, I can bend
my elbows and knees backward, and my head turns
on its axis for 180 degrees. Under the surface
I become elusive and no one can touch me.
THAT’S
ENTERTAINMENT
Today
I have given a concert at The White Abyss Festival.
The abyss is white, empty and neutral. I used
my trident to amplify my voice and I sang on a
stroboscopic mother-of-pearl stage. Underneath
I had a multitude of little young fish with their
snorkel on their shoulder and an empty head. To
see me they paid 60 cultured pearls and they convinced
themselves it was a great event despite a pain
in their fin and a subtle tedium. The White Abyss
is organized by the Mermaids, the mediacquatic
aristocracy of the thousand tempting voices. To
tell you the whole truth a little time ago I collided
with Amphitritis with her turquoise fluorite,
marble shining tail, and Amphitritis is the Festival
Art-Director. It was great fun, I danced in a
gravity-deprived water, I drew symbols of the
infinite with my liquid-boned body. And I emitted
ultrasounds, I made them vibrate at the bottom
of my spinal cord, making their swimming bladder
burst in front of a school of fish ready for a
barbecue. It was a little like television, squalid,
unreal and exciting. It was ready cash from the
Mermaids to me, a recommended whore, because the
great rock’n’roll swindle works as
a prostitution ring. The same for the Great Swindle,
but more about this later.
OH
MY LOVERBOY
Today
I’m happy, I found Niebieski at the Vortex
Grotto. I hadn’t seen him for ages, he told
me he had been around, first in Norway following
his Greenpeace’s schooner, then he recovered
in the Carribean, following a warm stream. Niebieski
is a Bottlenose Dolphin. Bottlenose Dolphins have
an enormous brain, with a cerebral cortex which
is definitely more complex than human beings’.
Their language is very articulated, absolutely
musical, and as a talker Niebieski could rival
with Oscar Wilde himself. The Dolphins of his
species are more intelligent than men, but they
haven’t an opposable thumb, they cannot
create artifacts, therefore they do not possess
a technological culture. Their culture is cerebral
and esthetic, it is what is known among us as
art. For Bottlenose Dolphins, art can also tend
to conceive problems of abstract mathematics.
Niebieski told me about his mother who committed
suicide on a tar-blackened beach, after one of
those usual ecological disasters that entertain
our TV channels. His mother’s name was Beatrix
and she had kept saving people from shipwrecks
even after the promulgation of the Twentythird
Deep-Sea amendment, a hydro-political plan conceived
to avoid hindering in any way the design of self-destruction
of “Those who, crushed by the gravity of
the earth, like vampires suck oxygen without gills!”
We exhibited to each other our family ballast,
before a portion of arctic fermented plankton.
Niebieski also had an elder brother whose name
was Ylinx. When they were children, five bipeds
with a primitive language, disguised like fish,
had kidnapped them from the azure sea and imprisoned
them in a tiny stinking and unnatural cube of
water. Even after their separation, Ylinx and
Niebieski had gone on communicating through telepathy.
Telepathy is a parapsychological art, which isn’t
sensorial or assimilated by body portals, but
by the subtle spirit. Thus, at the beginning men
made them play and follow an obstacle course or
labyrinths to test their intelligence. Then Ylinx’s
labyrinths had become more complex, and he was
given a wider and wider radius. Black, swift frogmen
followed him, and he swam harnessed in a collar-wheel
as uncomfortable as a Victorian corset, in a pale
approximation of freedom. Niebieski instead remained
in his chlorate water cube. He had to exhibit
his physical gifts by hurling himself above the
surface, with bounds and spins, and in exchange
men threw him tender fish. At the beginning he
enjoyed it, he tried to improve himself, to challenge
his records of jumping and apnea, then little
by little he started becoming mad. Time was out
of joint, from a light, swift flow, a radiant
infinite, time had reduced itself to a skeleton,
into segments as heavy as the vault of the Mariannes’
Deep, full of a dull pain, all the same, always
the same. When he didn’t have to jump through
rings or scream incoherent sentences amplified
as in a nightmare, in moments in which throaty,
raspy shrieks of human beings stopped, Niebieski
went to the bottom of his cube-shaped cell, turned
his belly towards light, and remained still, until
the lack of oxygen became like a roar of fire
in his head. But then his body decided to come
back, always. He couldn’t answer Ylinx’s
voice calling him anymore, and he thought that
if his brother was in the azure sea and he in
that fetid chloric prison, it was fundamentally
because he was only good at jumping and clapping
his fins, and he couldn’t wear the magnetic
iron ring. At last he reached the end of the line
and he forgot his name, and his brother’s
existence. Then one day, while he was masturbating
himself to death under the water spurt, like a
good animal in an infernal captivity, something
happened. And you can be sure that it wasn’t
the sad epilogue of his desperate masturbation.
Niebieski heard a thunder collapsing over him,
he saw a slow, blinding flash of lightning which
cancelled the limits of his prison-cube, then
he fainted. When he recovered, he became aware
of the fact that he was completely cured and that
his life was beginning to change. Hence Niebieski
waited, and after two days they came to free him.
Later, while he was following a trade-wind in
the light-blue sea, he learned that some men had
transformed Ylinx into a kamikaze against submarines,
and that his brother had carried his potentially
highly-explosive collar to its final destination.
This happened two days before he was liberated.
Niebieski is a diamond-dolphin, he is so evoluted
that he doesn’t hate men.
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Colette
Baraldi and Luiza Samanda Turrini
© Colette
Baraldi and Luiza Samanda Turrini 2009
An Extract from 'NECTON'
- a hybridization between graphic
art, novel and art criticism. Colette Baraldi
did a series of drawings, about a frogman named
Lucido. Then Luiza Samanda Turrini wrote 14 short
novels inspired by these drawings, and after that
Colette made a new series of illustrations.
