Shared silence: writing gestures and presence gestures

Abstract

The article aims to reflect on the participation in a collective artistic event as a gesture of presence, reached in the interchange of experience and writing and allowing the emergence of subjectivities. From the text "CyTwombly: works on paper" by Roland Barthes, it is presented a panorama that understands the gesture as the surplus of an action. This overview will be expanded in the union with a silent gesture of observing the contingent: The “That’s it!” advocated by the author through the haiku studies in the book "The Preparation of the Novel". Such investigation will open the field of "short form", as put by Barthes, and the notion of "subtlety" as put by Claire Bishop in the article "Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art". Both short form as the subtlety are seen as ways of producing subjectivity. Finally, the article will use the anti-interpretive character of "That’s it!" which, according to Barthes, the haikus exercise in their relationship between experience and form, using it to analyze works of the Russian Collective Actions Group, active mainly during the socialist period, thinking thus not only the shift between writing and presence, but also the very idea of collectiveness and sharing of experiences.