During the pandemic lockdown, in Lisbon, Carla Badillo Coronado (Quito, 1985) discovered a book that would explode in his head with several ideas. He found ‘The Book of Black’, by the artist Faye Dowling, while his partner, Nuno Afonso, improvised with an instrument among the light given off by video games. The Gothic images in that book led to what the author has called visual translations in poetry.
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‘The Origin of the World as a Misunderstanding’ is the title of the first chapter in ‘Amabilis Insania or the book of mutations‘ (White Noise, 2023). Its rhythm is a sustained flow that begins with an epigraph that speaks of a genesis: “What if I were born eyes again?” That verse is by María Auxiliadora Balladares. It is a clue, like the phrases that Carla has left in some parts of the book. “The word is intermittent / the language is permanent.”
In a bar in the Portuguese capital, the writer Juan Pablo Castro asked the poet about the origin of this book, for the podcast ‘The Sound and the Fury’. The central idea of ’Amabilis Insania’ is the flash of lucidity that madness can have. “Scenes of obsessions, the weight of the brain, distortions, passionate love, nightmares” made the author Explore elements featured in eight chapters.
I like that image of hatching (action of being born or sprouting from a living being after breaking the envelope that contained it), since I suffered a lot and enjoyed the entire process of the book a lot.
Carla Badillo Coronado
writing
When he won Loewe Foundation Award for Young Creation, for the collection of poems ‘El Color de la Granada’ (Visor, 2017), Carla commented that the small modifications she made after writing were like those of the craft of a goldsmith or an artisan. “The question of going little by little, sculpting until what you want to translate from the world is cleaner, from an image through words.”
In “::Some neurotransmitters as an introduction::” the images with which the artist has created this new montage. “A delicious madness and the most pleasant error of understanding” (Horacio) is the phrase with which Carla starts a timeline; He continues with “it cannot be admitted that all madness is fatal” (Erasmus of Rotterdam); “something so pleasant, so delicious, that it is impossible to put it down” (Robert Burton); around Arthur Schopenhauer and her own explorations, Carla culminates her story with the “poet who devoted himself, vehemently and silently, to the study of that genius/madness relationship traced since ancient times,” Fernando Pessoa.
The person who gave corporeality to Horace’s term (amabilis insania), the author maintains, entrusting herself to it, is Clarice Lispector: “Sometimes an imbalance occurs balanced, like a swing that is now up, now down. And the imbalance of the swing is exactly its balance.”
A game of mirrors
While returning to Ecuador after five years of stay in Portugal (she will be at the Quito International Book Fair), Badillo works as a teleoperator in a video game company, transcribes her travel diaries and prepares her first analogue collage exhibition.
He defines the latter as “a form of assembly, not the film, which dialogues, makes crosses.” Cinema is also in books, music and painting. In the fourth chapter, ‘Amatory exercises in the Garden of Earthly Delights (black bile)’, Carla goes through the work of Hieronymus Bosch.
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“This book is a body, a brain with layers and folds,” Juan Pablo Castro described in his interview. “Love is like poetryI couldn’t define it,” Carla reflected, “they are like a mutation that goes through you when you live it (…) Since poetry is so close to life and death, love is an attempt to maintain a balance when you have the blood boiling in thoughts that do not stop.”
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