https://www.instagram.com/apocketstuff/
2021
Iphotographs and videos accidentally recorded by a cell phone in the pocket
[8.3.2021]
dm sent to Instagram users:
Hi,
I had a fake profile before this one. Yves Klein was the name, and I didn’t add anyone as a friend. I kept it without adding people, only posting: blue posts, solid squares of varying shades, different colors of blue that I found doing a single and straightforward search for images with the terms ‘International Klein Blue’; the name of the tone patented by the real Yves Klein, Frenchman who lived between twenty-eight and sixty-two of the century that is gone. The profile still exists on the same blue Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008397828971.
Shortly after, I stopped using this and so many other social networks, and the idea of having a fake profile lost interest. But last year my will come back again and, strangely, my cell phone started to photograph and film alone when inside of my pocket. I saw my gallery being automatically occupied by dark images. These videos were totally opaque, noisy, or with purples, blues, or intense reds – when I put on some red shorts on a hot day. Even my hairy skin appeared under the veil of a finer woven pocket and incident light. Curious that was occurring during the pandemic; in a moment of even more intense use of the interfaces that provide us some distance sociability, one of my devices offered its own manifestation, reminding me that it is not only a bridge between me and any other person, but it is also a being, a being beyond human.
The fortune of these images and videos, the meeting result between my pocket and my cell phone, is what I offer through this @apocketstuff, another Instagram profile. I think of the usual way this network is used; on cell phones and, nowadays, to patch up the holes left in our pre-Sars-Cov-2 sociability. Returning these dark and noisy images to these patches, images which a cell phone camera produces when against the inner fabric of a pair of pants, returns specific isolation to the feed produced here. @apocketstuff has his username inspired by the pocket stuff that the artist Rubens Gerchman created when he was in exile in the United States during the Brazilian dictatorship. Little pocket things, small geometric and acrylic sculptures with words on some of their sides. Some of it contained herbs inside; others, salt; with words and elements combined like an open poem.
One says that, back in Brazil, Gerchman carried a letter of resignation in his pocket for years, in the context of a job, inspired by these tiny things he created. Something that, who knows, demonstrated him that was possible to carry a small word; as in exile, with the words’ color’, ‘herb,’ ‘sun’ on the sculptures in his pocket; as in Brazil, in a resignation letter that can be taken as a simulacrum of the word ‘no’.
I also believe that @apocketstuff can be read as a ‘no.’
Jandir Jr.
Brazil
Ph.D. student at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Contemporâneos das Artes at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. Has experience in artistic practices related to text, informatics, and archiving. Often sends messages to people who don’t know him.