1. Isiah Medina on Love Sounds (Excerpt from his essay in the forthcoming Love Sounds Catalogue, 2015)

    “There has always been a false dichotomy between silence and sound when, in fact, both appear. When listening to Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Sounds one hears an intimacy in the doubling of listening. We are not simply listening to ‘love’ but to the very possibility of using our organs to hear love. We are also listening to the pure fact that someone has already listened, which is what makes our listening possible. We listen to a movie and also to the work of someone listening to a movie. The words in Love Sounds are speculative since the same sentence can mean two different things. To be more precise: the same sentence can be saying something or it can be saying no-thing. It is the difference between saying I love you and meaning it, and saying I love you and not meaning it. Love Sounds asks us to listen to and hear this difference. To hear the difference between no-thing and something.

    Yet Love Sounds is also about listening closely enough to the history of cinema and the statements it has produced to be disappointed by them. Tupitsyn enters into this space of disappointment and re-formulates what has been said about love in cinema, producing new listenings—new sayings, new possibilities—that forge and ground new couples. In the end, Love Sounds is not only a movie or a history. It is, more importantly, a documentary of an act of love, and a generous, patient listening by its creator.”

    Reading Isiah’s always careful words makes me think about how the work of Love Sounds, the listening for the difference between something and no-thing, between people who say I love you and mean it, and people who say I love you and don’t, is the work I am doing in my own life, too, when I talk to people. When I listen to people. I want my work to be like my life and my life to be a form of work. I think my body always knows the difference between the difference. Insists on the difference. Tells me yes or no. But sometimes my ears want to believe what I know isn’t true. What I knew was never true. And my eyes are just continually disappointed by what I see. What I’m seeing–what I saw–is not even worth seeing.

     
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