"Art advances from the question"

2023-06-05 01:41:00

Interview books proliferate, but few look back at the details of that dialogic experience. Valeria Tentoni (Bahía Blanca, 1985) brings together her adventures around the genre in The favorite colora book of expansive condensation that is at the same time an initiation evocation, an essay on the art of asking questions and an unexpected profile of an admired writer.

In a subtle digressive fugue, the poet, narrator, and editor of the Eterna Cadencia blog analyzes the calculations, fears, and surprises that surround the act of interviewing, and whose zen magic (the text opens with the epigraph of Lao-Tse) is suggested in the technique of asking each interviewee for their favorite color: the answer is always significant, singular, enlightening.

Tentoni says that her Italian last name indicates “to grope”, so there seems to be something of destiny in her dedication to reporting, even though she denies professional journalism. Perhaps it is this lateral and literary approach that gives freshness to her exchanges with Bruno Gelber, Ramón Ayala or Juana Bignozzi that are recreated in the volume and that end in an exalted portrait of Alberto Laiseca.

Does the author agree that there are few texts dedicated to the interview as such? “Yes, but there are many books that compile interviews and usually include a prologue in which the interview as a genre is worked on in an essayistic way, always crossing that essay with autobiography, to a greater or lesser extent; to give examples, life of the living, by María Moreno, who has such a good prologue; those of María Esther Gilio or All these years of peopleby Christian Kupchik. I think this has to do, on the one hand, with the fact that journalism is shown in action and theory is not usually very useful. Journalism continues to be a free, wayward trade, with very little regulation and, deep down, its exercise depends a lot on who executes it. It is precisely for this reason that it is a signature trade”, responds Tentoni.

And he completes: “There are a thousand and one ways to interview, more because there are a thousand and one interviewers than because there are a thousand and one interviewees; the result depends more on the interviewer than on the interviewee. The one who controls, in the end, is the interviewer, who is the one who proposes the paths to follow and also the one who edits the crude. Who has the first and also the last word is who interviews. I did not write The favorite color to fill any vacant space, quite the opposite, I think I did it to sneak into a conversation between some people I admire a lot”.

What’s in a question?

–The question is the tool of knowledge and exploration par excellence. Science knows this well, but outside of that paradigm we are moving before being pulled by the answers, whose force is rather anesthetic. We see it in all spheres of civil life: the question can even be offensive, something to which it is sometimes hard to believe that we are entitled. We are encouraged from childhood to “know things” and to ask implies revealing one’s own ignorance, doubts, disagreements… Art, however, advances from the question. Poetry advances with questions, advances in alliance with what is not known, with mystery, and that is why in some way I think that everything is so close to me –journalism, poetry, writing–. I feel that the movement, the momentum, is the same. All the potential for disobedience is concentrated in one question, which begins with the acceptance of one’s own ignorance; and that is a humility that, far from crushing us, empowers us and also allows a profound encounter with others.

What did you learn by interviewing?

–I began to interview male and female writers, but also painters, musicians and all kinds of people to ask questions that I didn’t know and wanted to know: what to read, how to read, what to write, how to write. I did not manage to learn as much as they taught me, but I did learn something: that dedicating oneself to an artistic task implies living in a state of doubt, that no one is completely sure of what they are doing and that each one has to pursue –rather than achieve, it seems to me. – a world of their own, a personal imaginary. It is an accompanied solitude, but at the same time a radical solitude that art requires.

– What decided the cut of interviews? Was much left out?

–Yes, there were many incredible interviews that were left out. The book has a few quoted and confidential interviews that are revealed in due course, and I am very honest when I say that I did not choose them. I sat down to write and the ones that came came, I think they came down to help the plot, to pull the line of the story. I remembered those, and it must have been for a reason. It is a book that took me two decades of experience, but three or four days of writing. The first draft came out very quickly, afterwards there was a lot of proofreading and editing work, but the raw material was already there. Luckily, I did not start thinking about that list of interviewees because it would have been hellish, the book would not have come out if sympathies, friendships, commitments began to operate.

soft force

–How do you derive from the euphoric profile that you make of your “teacher” Laiseca?

–I deeply mistrust the idea of neutrality. Nor am I interested in idolatry, although I am interested in admiration: there are exaggerations in The favorite color that solidify the story and helped me to write, but the truth is that I feel the same as anyone, and I interview and live from there. I never accepted less or more. This can go wrong and I don’t care either. I also felt the same as my teacher and it was precisely he who taught me that: Laiseca spoke of Edgar Allan Poe as if she were his friend, someone he had just had a beer with, and Poe wasn’t even alive. Because I felt the same as my teacher, I was able to ask him what I wanted, I was able to read him my bad texts without fear. And because he felt the same way we did, he treated us patiently and without emasculating us, I knew that he, too, had once been a lost boy who wanted to write. Now, what I managed to write won’t even be close to what he managed to write. I’m talking about something else, which may be precisely what matters the most to me.

–The question about your favorite color is inevitable.

–Right now, it’s the cover color that the publishers of Storm Gray came up with; a watery green, aquamarine, which is the same as a stone that I brought from Teotihuacán and which stars in a poem by Pyramid, my last book of poems. These two books were closed at the same time, I feel they are related in points that may be too private and invisible to the outside, but the point is that it is a color that represents a soft force that I find very fruitful lately. Maybe tomorrow I will choose another color.

The Favorite Color, by Valeria Tentoni