Alma palpitante is a project that is the result of artistic research that takes as its starting point the book self-published by Isaac López Fuentes, Semblanza trágica del telégrafo y los telegrafistas nacionales. The book contains texts, in the form of telegrams, songs, hymns and poems, written by members of the telegraphists' union.
Parallel to the telegraphists, the artists are engaged in the practice of translation; while the telegraphists constantly interpret the codes, the artists move between different languages and media. The importance of the telegrapher lies in having been the pulse that connected and transmitted messages, which revolutionized history and cemented the construction of our present. Like artists, telegraphers used their bodies as a performative medium: through the vibrations of the wire, they were able to feel the words and their rhythm to transmit something. It is this precise interest in transmission that led the artist Samuel Morse to generate a code using the principles of art: the dot and the line, together form rhythms, impulses that form messages that are sent through cables, telegraphic channels that cross borders to make unions between different foreign voices. Capable of (dis)assembling meanings, the dot and the line strongly influenced the Dadaist poetic movement in Zurich (Switzerland).
For this work, I used the structure of the book as a score and listened to it as such, following its chapters as if they were a cartography that, in an archeological way, I translated into different media such as drawing, performance and poetry.