A Flower Amid the Rubble

by Miguel-Manso

Writing before a single voice has been heard. Decanting vestiges of dreams on the verge of day, before it. Composing something amphigoric, suspended between worlds. Being broad, brief.

A Flower Amid the Rubble is a self-imposed written and visual exercise. It is also a joint collection of morning and everyday compositions in text and image that follow the same ritual. The protocol is simple and inclusive: to create a brief and immediate record at the moment of waking of dripped moments from a dream – soft instants that are still unattached to the daily plan and its narratives of hard and inevitable edges. The notes in a diary of events that occur before the diary.

What emerges may be random and unexpected or, on the contrary, may need a little preparation the day before (a notebook left open on the table, a sheet of paper in the typewriter, a tripod in the right place, a recorder ready to press play). Via a short document – a photographic shot, a fast video, a sound recording – that fleeting moment every morning between sleep and waking will be caught, as free as possible of mannerisms, convictions and any other routine traits. To see how, in these circumstances, we capture our surroundings and influence the composition – to see what kind of catch we find in the net in the first pools of wakefulness.

A Flower Amid the Rubble is the first Writing Working Unit carried out under the initiative Mode Diaries. Conceived by the poet Miguel-Manso and developed with filmmaker João Manso, they intend to put together, during the course of a year, a collection of morning and everyday compositions in text and image, regularly published on Instagram. Miguel-Manso is a poet. Published since 2008, his work is included in the portfolio of several publishers and appeared in a significant number of anthologies and literary magazines. João Manso has worked as a director, assistant director and video editor since 2007, and his work has been shown at national and international film festivals.

Based on diary-keeping as a form of writing, the Mode Diaries initiative creates a field of interpretative potentialities within the context of maat Mode 2020, a public, experimental and participatory exhibition and activity programme under the motto “Prototyping the museum”. This is the scope that justifies and enables the twisting of the meaning commonly attributed to the term “diary” by transforming what’s individualised into collective, private into public, singular into plural, etc.

Miguel Manso