Do you fear control and order, or do you fear losing it and disorder? Wouldn’t disorder be an equivalent to deception? Or on the contrary, could deception be the return to order? In my case, I bet that fear of disorder is fear of losing control, but because lack of control and disorder are part of my life. So sometimes order can appear to be fear of deception, and deception can be the return to order. Order seems to be something cold, dead; something that gets you up from a dream and says: "come down… come down to earth", the earth of control, domination.

But self-control can also be something I want to get to; a goal, a point of manouver between my lack of control and tendency to total disorder; a self-control that manages to delimit the omen of catastrophe… Then I was going to contradict myself and wager on losing control and never reaching deception, because, submerged in total chaos, there is no room for deception.

Joan Morey: Tattooing the word ‘deception’ on my left forearm was a frustrated way of taking on the disorder, lack of control and dead silence that consume my chaotic wandering in the liturgy of art. An ideological catastrophe that constructs the pillars of a personal mise en scène. An eternal return briefly reduced to its minimal expression through ink on skin, arrogance and evanescence in which to carry with dignity these omens of catastrophe you talk about. And I quote, literally, the last page of Dora García's Todas las historias: "A time in which all countries speak constantly of peace, while they’re secretly arming themselves to the teeth. Ideas have stopped meaning anything except for a few innocents. You can smell the catastrophe, it’s so close."

EP: Do you want to start there? What about a vanitas? A skull, a black, destroyed, guitar and papers with lots of song lyrics no-one will ever hear… What else shall we put in the vanitas?

JM: How many worldly pleasures are useless to us when faced with the certainty of death… Personally, and reluctantly, I’d take the sombre point of view of the world with a vanitas that drops the skull, that immense dramatic beauty that condenses the human cranium into a lucid symbol of death. Death that we have inside, in our blood, death that enters in through our pupils, death that sends our brain to sleep and that many of the so-called mainstream artists have diminished to the objectual use of a domesticated, decorative, prêt-àporter cranium, seizing on its true symbolic value in order to extract, frivolously and despotically, its complex iconographic sense. A meaning that descended into materiality, the brief and fragile future of life, and that now suffers as a vacuous form (formalization), exempt of content, decorative and even, dare I say, repulsive for those of us who respect, admire and follow existential pessimism.

Turbulent tardy cannibalism…

EP: Yes, the commodified skull! Swallowed up by the system and commerce, but always with that sublime subliminal message that no-one manages to take away, that is, "a skull is a skull is a skull…" à la Duchamp… and a skull will always remind us of that, a corpse.

Also because, if we rethink it… I, for example, in my scouring of Roman, Neapolitan and Sicilian baroque galleries and churches (I say galleries and really they’re all palazzos), saw many of them… Let’s not forget that the beginning of the end and in fact the beginning of disorder in terms of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was baroque, where we’re still supposed to be… in a tremendous, abysmal rocco rocco post rocco! A baroque that since then has been literally plagued with skulls and angels, among other things.

But returning to disorder –or to fear of order–, I think of Pasolini’s "Salò", of your piece, "DOMINION", in which I had the pleasure and honor of participating as one of the perverse narrators. I remember all that mise en scène and you, including yourself, almost like a symbol. Pasolini going from Camera Director almost to Christ Pantocrator… You were talking about the theme, about order, sadic order, about the order where there is only vertical hierarchy –above/middle/below; heaven/purgatory/hell–, and about the order society submerges us in, dictates to us, and tempts us with, whether as possible slaves or possible masters… How can we find the liberty/disorder in ourself within this system that stigmatizes us according to what it perceives our intentions to be? How can we realize that order is only a vanitas, an inconsistent Appearance? The dream of reason and its monsters eating our feet…

JM: Disorder is to liberty what trickery is to self-control. Right now, and in an almost inevitable way, we are unconscious esclavemaîtres (a poetic term coined by Dominique Quessada in his essay "La era del Siervoseñor: la filosofía, la publicidad y el control de la opinión"), trained from a burlesque lucidity acquired in the figure of ‘the artist as exemplary sufferer’ (analyzed by Susan Sontag in one of the chapters of Against Interpretation), that artist that replaces the saint in modern consciousness, and from the end of the last century migrates towards the 'relational aesthetic'. A new paradigm of the arts destined to interact in the sphere of social relations, and which is no more than a recent unconditional trap, a fragile cobweb, that traps us in a new regulation/imposition that becomes a crucial tool for understanding the keys to current art.

Indomitable keys, since when “the monster (of the System) eats our feet” – as you point out so well – we’ll be left with nothing but bandaged stumps in the sadic New Order, which with equilibrium, with interrupted communication, will unite us in an obligatory iniciation course in the circus techniques of balance: first in a period of physical, psychic and technical training, and immediately afterwards, once the great procedure capable of condemning us to arduous ostracism is overcome, in a period of transition/recuperation or maintenance, even if it’s from the grandiloquence of the style exercises, of subordination and domination that frame us in the proscenium of the Arts.

EP: Once more it occurs to me to see the beginning of that social slavery of the artist in the context of society. Baroque, as Baltazar Gracián describes very well in El Criticón and other books… Gracián was, by all accounts, on the great pessimist Schopenhauer’s bedside table. How can we escape Saturn? If the System gives us the role of saint or martyr, I can only think for the moment of following in Guy Debord’s tracks, taking situationism in a way that implies an application of these such strict supposed rules with the same attitude as was predicted, that is, détournement from the sources and texts and examples of “them” and moving among their legacy, without dogmatisms or excess orthodoxy, but rather with a sense of humor.

We’re so submerged in the Roles –slavemaster, etc.– that we can only deceive ourselves constantly, but like a game, as a way of escaping: simulating and suddenly surprising with infected viruses that we can pass on and infect almost without realizing… maybe even dream of a personal epic and the possibility of guillotining Medusa!

Disorder is scary! And disorder contains everything that can beat order! You can be condemned to ostracism, even murder, if not look at Pasolini again, and so many, Lorca too. But the virus has already been let out and no-one can be free from contagion… executioners are always late!

Another thing that seems to me essential as a point of resistance is, as Cioran said (he rejected the Goncourt prize twice so as not to have to shake hands with people who repulsed him and to stay free to write whatever the hell he wanted to), precisely that, the position assumed by non-success in the system’s summits; never called failure, since if it’s not what you’re looking for, it’s irrelevant.

A guerrilla position: camouflaged, glimpsed, followed, sought after and with enough lack of necessity to be able to live and create work burden-free…

The Controlling Order, the eye that cannot take in everything it sees; that would be the Achilles’ heel. Like David,who left the giant half-blind with the throw of a stone… Smoke screens… false messages that contain secrets in code.

Writing is still a very powerful weapon. The Text, the Word, even if it’s a tattooed word on an arm: ‘deception’.

JM: Tattooed Word or Spoken Word… The 'artist ego' tends to be as severe with others as it is indulgent with itself. The audience, similarly, provokes in many cases a ruthless gaze.A strict gaze, agreed on for its flat dialogue, that levels out the unison into an impression in the flesh or the word’s mode as a reactionary weapon. Spoken words as performance, words that put emphasis on the speaker, words that, linked by their tongue, irrigate the Dramaturgy of Art. The executioner speaker, executioner and victim, or victim through failure, will represent in his fate a fatal chain of events, whether favorable or unfavorable. Without imposing resistence the poetic plan will be handed over that, as Bataille said, is born in the disorder of thought; in turn there is something profoundly poetic in all thought's disorder.

Without ordered objectives, Cioran’s ‘Negative Exercises’ take priority in my mind, the germ of his manuscript Breviary of Losers. He asked himself, what does it mean to have a thousand ideas for just one death, for death itself? We multiply words, gestures, images, for one sole reality, sacrificing them to enrich an improbable treasure, the fragile result of an effort in which audacity, stupidity and pain combine…

They are lacerating years for our diary of defeat… above all when "you don’t know what you want and you don't say what you feel… (bis) you lie to me" –paraphrasing your own words.

We don’t know, either, what led Ian Curtis to commit suicide at 23. Cioran found suicide especially suggestive as a way of life. He considered death as the only real existence, life, which he would call the ‘great unknown’, being the source of all pain because of the impossibility of ensuring existence. Some critics believe that Ian Curtis simply wished to die young (I differ from that speculation). And more words. Words written on his gravestone: Love will tear us apart.