name: camilla / age: 26 / profession: ANTIQUES DEALER / location: VERONA / weekday: MONDAY / reference: HOW MUCH WOMEN CAN BEAR
gesture
whether in art, politics or work, what we tend to call gesture is usually suspended somewhere between the sphere of mere functionality and that of mere aestheticism. this is the case in examples as divergent as the rhetorical gesture, the gesture of applying a paintbrush “just so” or the gesture of setting up a table more nicely than you strictly speaking should have to. according to philosopher giorgio agamben, gesture “breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends”. and one page later: “the gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such”. for him, walking is not purely a means for getting from a to b, just like dancing is not some purely artistic and thus supposedly more noble activity. thinking about our ordinary gestures, then, however routine or banal, allows us to make the everyday more like art and art more like the everyday, ultimately making the distinction obsolete.