melissa stabile

COMFORTABLES

By Paula Parisot

Melissa Stabile and her “Comfortables” came into my life together. It was the year 2013. The year before the year when nothing could return to being what it was before – for him, for me, but mainly for my children who were then two years old. And when something hits my children the one who hurts is me. So, I swear, I am a bit upset for having accepted this task of writing about the Comfortables. But how could I tell Melissa, now, that it was actually better not to write about them because if I talk about them I will somehow have to talk about myself?

We had no hint about what was coming, we never do – or maybe we do know something and that’s why, now and then, I would get scared and tell my psychoanalyst that I felt that something terrible was about to happen.

We forget that life is short, that sooner or later death arrives.

“Mom, why are you crying if everything that is born dies someday?”

Many of my afternoons in 2013 I spent at Melissa’s house.

I would lie down, sit or throw myself on a jumble of pillows of every color, size, shape and texture. Pillows that often became the center of our conversation because Melissa was still seeking to understand, to feel, to know – I think it was all of these together, as is so often the case in the creative process – what they were and why she was making those pillows that are called Comfortables.

Comfortables. That name pleased me, for being an adjective of both genders. In Portuguese, the unstated noun that this adjective modifies can be either masculine or feminine. Come to think of it, it is interesting to consider why we use the masculine definite article (“os”) with their name in Portuguese, saying “Os Confortáveis”, when they are actually almofadas [pillows], a feminine noun. But that would be the subject for another text.

Melissa would sew the Comfortables while we talked. I liked the sound the sewing machine made, I liked the colorful fabrics scattered around, some pinned, others already basted, I liked the foam pieces inside the large plastic bags, I liked being there, I liked listening to and talking with Melissa, I liked being on the Comfortables and I liked even more seeing the new Comfortables that arose. Yes, Melissa would make one right after another, without a preset idea of where she was heading.

The end of the year arrived and then came the new year, as it must be. The days keep arriving like that, just like the arrival of that day that made everything different.

“Life is mortal,” said Clarice Lispector, “and we each keep this secret in silence from ourselves for convenience sake.”

Anger, outrage, fear, sadness, anxiety, despair, panic, screams, tears.

Does the future only have meaning while one lives?

I went back to visiting Melissa’s house and the Comfortables. I went back to seeing the cigarette light up in my mouth after years of not smoking.

Another day arrived. It was the first exhibition of the Comfortables. My Comfortables, that’s how I felt about them, because, after all, they had been only mine up till then, I had never shared them with anyone. Only a few times with the tomcat Peixoto, the tabby cat Lola, or the tomcat Ulisses, who was alive and is now dead. They were the same Comfortables, but different. They were happy, they were passed from hand to hand, children jumped on them and adults scattered them about, sat on them, laid on them. The Comfortables were pillows, toys, head accessories, scarves, waistbands, and teddy bears. My children got together with other children and staged a Comfortables war. Luckily the Comfortables were available and many of us had the possibility to have one. My children wanted very much to bring one to their father. And we brought him the Gum Pink Comfortable. At every coin flip my daughter always came out on top. A game. Life. Living is absurd.

Months later. Melissa and I made plans to go to the Bienal de São Paulo. Before we entered my telephone rang. There was no longer any way, it was a question of weeks. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of despair, a despondency that had been gradually building for two years. Melissa held me and we left Ibirapuera. She brought me to her house. We stayed there. I laid down on a huge Comfortable with zebra stripes, surrounded by smaller Comfortables of different colors, sizes, textures and shapes. I closed my eyes, I slept.

Before I went away Melissa gave me a navy blue velvet Comfortable and told me to take it to the father of my children as a gift. I thanked her. The Comfortable was navy blue velvet. The color! The shape! The fabric! The Comfortable looked like death to me. I felt that death was in my hands, but my children celebrated when they saw what I was carrying.

“Mom, were you with Melissa?

They wanted to give to their father that which I did not want to give.

The next day we brought the Comfortable to their father, who was happy with the gift. We spent the day together. Just the four of us. Father, mother and children. Their father was already facing difficulties to walk, think, and speak, he confused everything, I brought the navy blue velvet Comfortable in one of my hands, I hugged the father of my children, said that I loved him, that I would take care of our children.

For reasons that I don’t want to go into here, I never returned to see the father of my children. He died soon afterward.

I’m not able to dissociate the Comfortables from those years of my life, which is why after accepting Melissa’s invitation and sitting down to write I felt angry, but now I am taken over by a feeling of power and love, I am alive and I can talk with ghosts.

Looking back, looking at Melissa’s work, the path taken, the research, the discoveries, the Comfortables that now have hooks so they can link up with each other and connect to other objects, or to living beings, making the Comfortables prostheses, a body coupled to a living body, that pulsates and breathes. Comfortables that can be hung on the wall, attached to the ceiling, that can be on the floor or on a table, organic and uncertain shapes, horizontal/vertical, object/figure, inner/outer, sheltering/repelling, clothing/prosthesis/body, female/male, public/private. They are the refusal of language, the place of feeling that requires more than just vision, which often limits and imprisons. As Luce Irigaray stated, “in our culture the predominance of sight over smell, taste touch and hearing has led to an impoverishment of the bodily relations. The more that sight is dominant, the more the body loses in its materiality.” And it is precisely this that the Comfortables invite us to do: to go beyond sight. I even dare say that the Comfortables do not exist alone – to be Comfortables rather than mere pillows they need me and the cats and the people they make contact with, and leave their traces on.

Are the Comfortables more than objects? Or are they only objects? And does it make a difference? I love certain objects even if they do not love me back.

Melissa, Melissa Stabile, the Comfortables (of either gender), I and everyone, we go, together, I love you.

Pictures: Cassia Tabatini

Text: Paula Parisot

Performers: Lenora de Barros, Lau Neves, Marcelo Fagge and Paula Carvalho

Casting: Daniel Ortega