Alma Palpitante is a project that results in an installation, collaborative performance, a series of telegraphic poems and graphic scores from the self-published book by Isaac López Fuentes, Semblanza trágica del telégrafo y los telegrafistas nacionales (The telegraph and the national telegraphers: A tragic statement). Therein are contained texts, in the form of telegrams, songs, hymns, and poems, written by members of the telegraphers’ union.
Like telegraphists, artists carry out the practice of translation; while telegraphers are continuously interpreting codes, artists also dabble between different languages and mediums. And just as artists, telegraphists use their bodies as performative mediums: Through the vibrations of the wire, they were able to feel the words and their rhythm in order to transmit a certain something. This precise interest in transmission is what led the artist Samuel Morse to generate a code using the principles of art: the dot and the line. Capable of (dis)assembling meaning, the dot and the line have greatly influenced the poetic Dada movement in Zurich, Switzerland.
For this work I used the same structure and some content of Isaac López’s book, and translated it into the collaborative performance Words are silent by the emotion. One by one, our different mother tongues get together to read the hymn that celebrates the union of languages, a harmony that becomes the coming together of our differences. Through translation, the performers have put something of their own into the hymn, starting with their handwriting, which is -for me- a printing, a score to be read, to be performed by each player. These Graphic scores also conform the installation.
Additionally, one score, a drawing of a poem written by telegraphists and translated into morse, accompanies the physical telegrams displayed as an archive. Both the drawing and the telegrams displayed recite the same poem written by telegraphists who talk about their medium and how proud they are to belong to a practice that unites languages in such a way.
Between syndicalism and progress is a series of telegraphic poems, all addressed to the International Telegraph Union (I.T.U.), an organization created in 1947 in Geneva, Switzerland, the same year that Isaac López’s book was published in Mexico. This link between them feels like a way for the telegraphists’ voices to finally reach the place where they will be heard, like going back to their origin.