Annotations on Un texto camino (sung and spoken by Caistulo, listened/transcribed by Dani Zelko)

Abstract

We are interested in raising some questions about Un texto camino, a text that is part of the series under construction Movimiento por la lengua, edited by Dani Zelko using a specific procedure that links orality, listening, transcription and editing. Unlike other texts in the series, the case of the testimony/song of Caístulo —inhabitant of a Wichi community in the Gran Chaco, located on the border between Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, crossed by extremely precarious historical conditions— arises after an extreme experience he lived at the time of the pandemic/2020: after remaining in a coma for several hours in the bush, he wakes up and begins to sing in Wichí ihämtes, certain messages —he says— “that the mothers, what we usually call trees, transmit to them”. We wonder about this “song” and the subsequent narration that gave rise to this text: how this voice bursts into the public space, what affects/thoughts it gives rise to and how the procedure implemented by Zelko would operate in this sensitive emergence. Listening as a mode of relation allows us to inquire into the voice/word of Caístulo, in the images of thought that he deploys, in the use of signs and their connections, at the same time that it would stress certain codified forms of listening, which prompts us to reflect on other ways of intervention in the aesthetic and political imagination.