A conceptual artist undertakes a writing project that is like a labyrinth from which it is difficult to get out. She calls it The Last Sentence. It arises from a drive, which becomes an obsession, to focus on the final words of literary works. First she looks at them, then she photographs them with her cell phone and when the volume threatens to collapse her device, she transfers them to a Google document where she makes various attempts at classification. The point of view and the handling of these materials by the creator produce a unique work halfway between the philosophical, literary or semiological essay and the personal diary.
The border, the limit between reality and fiction, between the individual and the collective, between light and darkness, pulsates in these pages in an overwhelming way. And it becomes both an intellectual and emotional experience to know that this work was created shortly before Camila Cañeque from Barcelona died suddenly on February 14 at the age of thirty-nine while she was sleeping. She was pregnant with her first child.
All of this leads us to read each of the words in the book – 22,000, like the final soliloquy of Ulysses, the author indicates – with greater attention and to consider interpretations about the meaning of the work. This writing talks about the final sentences of the books but also refers on several occasions to the point and end (is it such?) of one’s own life: “Our own ending, as well as that of a novel, pre-exist,” says Cañeque, which points out how thanks to endings we celebrate existence (weekend, year’s end, school year, retirement). Also, how everything alive – she writes – advances “inexorably, towards death.”
“Touched” then in each reflection, we accompany the author in the game she establishes with the final phrases of the books. It is a kind of dance, as she calls it, for freedom to expand meanings and readings. They are interspersed in the author’s reflective writing and interact with each other in the different random or non-random groupings that she establishes and in the layout on the pages – the abundant blank fragments also speak. A QR at the end of the text collects 452 windows like an infinite drop-down menu, which correspond to the included quotes. The authorship and work to which they belong are listed at the end of the book. They are by classic and contemporary authors, novelists, poets, philosophers or linguists. The proposal is attractive, sinuous, playful and intelligent.
Camila Cañeque, who had previously written texts such as Los Olvidarntes in the collective volume Olvidar/Forgetting (Brumaria) or Share the Outdoors in Jotdow – interesting analysis of a homeless New Yorker, look it up on the internet, by chance? ends with the word “final”–, had developed a recognized international career with her installations – The Sleeping Theater in New York– and performances – Dead end, censored at ARCO 2013 when she unexpectedly lay face down dressed in a Sevillian dress surrounded by verses from Lorca to denounce the death of Spain before capitalist power; A lot of shit or Error 404. Not found in the Sahara.
In all his works there is a commitment to voluntary isolation, to rest against the frenetic pace imposed by the consumer society. She agrees in positioning – different register – and in her taste for aphorisms with her contemporary Azahara Alonso, author of Gozo.
Camila Cañeque moves to Cornwall to finish the book. At the top of the cliff she looks for how to close this project that has led her to “inhabit the end of things” – observing farewells at the airport for days or attending funerals. The outcome is prolonged. She impregnates him with the rain, as she has detected in so many literary endings. Let’s take a last phrase from Maggie O’Farrell to condense the residue that remains: “She’s still here, she’s still here, she’s still here.”
Camila Cañeque – The last sentence – La uÑa RoTa – 136 pages – 15 euros
