COUNTS WOULD NOT ACKNOWLEDGE. MILLIE WILSON+NAYARE SOLEDAD+FRANCESC RUIZ+CHE GOSSETT

Counts would not acknowledge arises from an invitation to the artists and poets that participate in the pdf to work on issues related to the archive: the way in which the particular negotiates the epistemological tools imposed in archives; the potential of fabulatory components as a means to counteract official narratives and their voids; strategies that complicate the archive’s temporality; the possibility of (in)visibility and the contestation of realist exigencies; the critical examination and reworking of the categories of facts, taxonomies or representations within it. All the contributions coincide too in questioning different spaces linked to the archive —the closet, the trailer of a truck, the hold of a ship, the city or the ocean— based on the mechanisms of containment and circulation, protection and violence, and erasure and dispute of the very category of subject that occur within them. / We wanted to reproduce part of the work of MILLIE WILSON, which is little known in Spain and an important part of Los Angeles’ nineties art scene. Thanks to the help of David Evans Frantz, the pdf includes reproductions of Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl), Wilson's 1989 retrospective exhibition of a fictional lesbian painter, Peter, which is based on the portrait Peter (A Young English Girl) by Romaine Brooks. This show is built from the few artifacts that survive Peter: photographs of the artist (played by Wilson in her studio), and various possessions that are accompanied by texts describing her personality. However, Wilson refuses to provide a "compelling" biography of a lesbian heroine in order to resist discursive mechanisms and historiographical strategies that lead to legibility and canonization. Wilson's contribution is also accompanied by the text "The Theoretical Closet" (1990), in which the author captures the context in which her work was received and the reactions it aroused at that particular moment in the history of LGBTQ+ art. / NAYARE SOLEDAD describes her text as a story-prayer. In it, she generates a personal and latent archive of places and people that appear and unfold in what could be an ordinary day —the hairdresser and encounters in the alley on the way back home, the park of the 7 tits…— but instead opens up the possibility of a transtemporal transvestite kiss with Giuseppe Campuzano, la Veneno and Choque Chinchay. Through the rhythm that is generated in the succession of everyday spaces and the affective relationships that are located in each of these, the text widens the entrance of a recurring past into a present that intertwines the sacred and the desired. / FRANCESC RUIZ's TTT project consists of an archive of collages made with images of faces taken from makeup cards and asses superimposed on images of trucks. In Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers, Anne Balay explains the seeming irony that results from transwomen, black women, gay men, and lesbians' understanding of their trucks as vulnerable. Trucks are vulnerable and exposed and not the people that drive them. The bulkiness of the truck provides strong protection and the possibility of a life away from the violence associated with socialization for queer people. But its size also makes it more insecure and the lack of contact derived from constant travel implies an extreme loneliness for drivers. This relationship between the personal and the context that surrounds the truck appears in Ruiz's work in the form of snow, fire, overtaking attempts between trucks, accidents, borders: a series of threats that are linked to the strange expressions on the faces. / CHE GOSSETT examines —through two works by Theo Eshetu and John Akomfrah— the ocean, its ontology and its sublime power, linking it with Spillers' conception of flesh, the temporality of the ship's hold and the fracturing of language when trying to register (and therefore generate an archive) of what happened on the slave ships, or Akomfrah's conceptualization of affective proximity. Opting for the plasticity of the sensitive, Gossett focuses on the intertwining of the past and a present marked by climate collapse and rising sea levels, the hyper-militarization of borders, the affective atmospheres of coloniality and anti-blackness, and racial capitalism.