evi nakou: endless distances inside me, highways of quiet

You asked me about the language.

A set of possible meanings, probable sentences. A list of deviations.

Our writing is radial, like the branches of trees, like roots and crystals.

Any translation of our speech is considered dubious.

We begin by speaking the sounds we remember.

We rehearse conversations.

Are you following?

“endless distances inside me, highways of quiet”* is a process of tending to each other via practicing gossip as an ephemeral and intuitive social practice. Rehearsed as a territory in-between-bodies, a shared site and time where we practice friendship, solidarity, and togetherness, gossip is understood as the social glue that stitches internal and external realities.

Gossip, often dismissed as idle chatter or a trivial social activity, intersects with broader issues of power, labor, and community. Underserved communities use performance and subversion to navigate dominant cultures. Gossip, in this framework, can be seen as a form of performative resistance. Gossip is not merely idle talk but a strategic practice through which individuals and communities weave collective and subversive narratives that resist dominant discourses through the disruption of linear and normative narratives. “endless distances inside me, highways of quiet” was grounded on analysis and theory that foreground gossip’s role in maintaining and challenging gendered labor structures. As a form of social labor predominantly undertaken by femininities, it involves the emotional and communicative labor necessary to sustain social bonds and community cohesion, which are essential for social reproduction. Simultaneously, gossip can be a means of social control, reinforcing norms and behaviors within a society. However, when one places the focus on resistance, gossip can serve as a tool for subversive bodies to resist patriarchal control by practicing affective labor collectively and beyond gender, as a way to reflect and shape the emotional landscape of a community. Gossip can be seen as a feminist killjoy practice, a strategy for survival, that disrupts the façade of social harmony by highlighting complex, unheard or silenced realities.

Noisy and quiet, muddled and non-linear, witty and emotional, complex and simple, the observations of gossip were captured, within the context of this tailor-made fellowship, in their original modality to provide a multimodal archive of textual, sonic, and visual fragments of correspondence. This DIY archive resembles a sum of texts, voice messages, sound experiments, performance improvisations, cut & paste and transmedia poetry writing, notation sketches, and recordings; an assemblage of fragmented materials that often become unnoticed or unheard. Non-verbal and paralingual correspondence is understood as equal to the verbal elements of gossip in the process of practicing and apprehending gossip as a social practice of our shared everyday lives and struggles. Snippets of sound, text, and movement and the ways by which they complement and contradict each other, relate to one another, make sense with each other, make up this unusual archive that contains strategies of surviving through the complexities, struggles, and uncertainties of shared realities as non-masculinities.

Found and rehearsed materials serve as crevices through which voices are heard, stories are listened to, and bodies are felt.

“endless distances inside me, highways of quiet,” both as a process and a piece, has taken the shape of an asynchronous, playful and intuitive gossip—a weave of lived and fictional correspondences, conversations, experiences, and narratives, between real and imaginary friends. Gossip comes around in silence and in hustle, at late night calls and endless chatting, at the backseat of a car and airport terminals, at doorsteps and shaded benches, in between rehearsals and meetings, at early hours when sleep never comes. It goes by the names, by our names; Chara, Franny, Sarah, Sofia, Ursula, Saeed, Marina, Kae, Anastasia, and Sylvia.