The Creature in the Mouth was a text performed inside a dark and damp laundry room at NOVO SEF, the abandoned student centre that was part of the show BOWING BACK. It speaks of the tongue and the mouth as foreign places where the world enters, and distant geographies are transported. The singing of Leonor Arnaut, a member of the band Chão Maior, accompanied it.
We are inside the mouth - that moist area within your face. The mouth is a point of passage, a hiding place. It has areas, regions and rooms. This is an old laundry for non-native languages. It is abandoned. In the tanks, accents were scrubbed. On the other side of this wall is the machine for drying tears. On this board, imperfect emphases were smoothed over, and words were hung out on the line. Here hung the word MOTHER. The word FLOOR dried and got wet and dried and got wet and dried. Here hung the words DUST and BONE and SLOW and GRAVE. The trash was for mistranslations, and the shelves were an archive of obsolete, captive words. This room is a place in the mouth that the tongue avoids. It barely visits. There is mould and discomfort. Words still hover at the edge of the shadows. Come in. Can you find your way here through your mouth? You'll see the stairs, the corridor and the door to this laundry of non-native languages. Here are the Himalayas. They come inside the mouths - in the sounds, signs and names that keep arriving. The Himalayas move through the streets and squares in bodies that carry them, wrapped in tongues and words. From the bottom of the gorges the tip of the Everest appears and the silhouette of the plains of China. The mouth has always been a foreign place.
All names: welcome. There is space here. We carry the distance and the mirage, the crowds within one's face. Here are skies, cities, gods and abysses. Here are names waiting to be spoken. Here is an open field and celestial abode. In here are mountains, swamps, fears and borders. Sounds that frighten. Here is the other side of the world.
Names to be invented. Names that threaten. Names backlit. Here, within, there is room for deception and clash. Here, there are wars and violence, vandalism, and smuggling. Here, there is an address and residence, a traveller who passes or stays awhile, the right to an accent and silence. Here, there is risk and lapse, echo and error. Here, a whole century suddenly enters. And now that we have arrived, the process of reforesting the mouth begins. Wasteland replanted. The flora of the language is intact and mixed. Let's populate it with more names and baggage. We invite all the uncomfortable sounds to enter, sounds so distant that they have travelled from one mouth to another to yours. Turn your tongue over, twist it, dig out words that have been covered up for years, generations. Try out difficult syllables there in the dark. Other lives and futures. In these mouths, in this room, there is space. In the folds of the tongue and chance live all the sounds, outsiders, the dust and murmurs and screams and forests, the falls and laughter and distant bodies. The Himalayas are in there, waiting.
Photography by: João Mariano - 1000 Olhos