This research builds a dialogue between the portraits of invention performed by the writer Gertrude Stein and the filmmaker Agnès Varda. These acts of writing are paradoxical creations, language experiments that assemble and disassemble the evoked figures. The composition strategies employed by the two authors were analyzed from the concepts of gesture, in the view of Vilém Flusser; and the notionsof deconstruction and counter-signature, as understood by Jacques Derrida. The study draws a parallel between their portraiture - considered here as performative essays (essayistic performances?) - through the insistence of gestures and performative forms of the flow of consciousness, which put in check dualistic ideas such as I-other; inside-outside; and reason-perception. They are acts of writing that make the portrayed figures a crossing of sounds, images and words. In these language experiments, the filmmakers embrace paradox, focusing not on form, buton the movement that undoes form, to reconstruct it again and again, making theirwritings wandering bodies that are (de)constructed in the transit between aesthetics and politics.