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Welcome

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wet love is.... ... the birth of a new intimacy, ... the aesthetics, poetics, and visions of a could-be landscape, ... the small but real saplings of innovation that fertilize hope for the future, ... a little portable museum of our generation’s relationship with something so visible yet omnipresent. something that clothes the future in despondesncy with its rise, that is clean in some places and dirty in others, that runs in metal webs in our walls, ... an archive and zine curated, written, and designed by ester freider, with all her little quivering heart can muster. you can contact her at:

esterfreider@gmail.com @fuckboyvenus

4 to 5 6 to 7 8 to 11

12 13 14 to 15 16

17 18 to 19 20 to 23

24 to 25 26 to 29 30 to 33 34 to 35 36 to 37 38 to 39 40 to 43 44

introduction graphics by graphic designer matteo durato @mttdrt “the river is also our grandfather”: indigenous ontologies of land and kinship + my photos of sunlit greenery in london childhood photos from artist élise berthieaume @ cowsfae collaged image by artist, writer, and filmmaker yolanda mouzakitis @fukucia photos by image maker yasmin @yuymis graphic and words by graphic designer, technology experimenter, and dear aquarius anastasia kozlova @ supchikmode my photo of lilies in a pond on a beautiful day dirty daydreaming: a love sonnet to the waste + water bottle closeups by me energy download: talking with movement maker and crotcheter isobel i’gor on ancestry, fate, and the swedish forest + her portraits of garments edit featuring a photo i took of a swan as a child 3d render forest environments by 3d designer and founder of SOFTER ida lissner @idalissner “the sea water / running in our veins”: little words and remedying our geographic estrangement images by 3d designer and musician @blackartsviper photos of a summer by the sea by photographer liza @modest—mimoza + @blackartsviper image i wanna love you + @blackartsviper image bibliography + @blackartsviper images closing

int rod uct ion Everything starts with water, and it looks like it’ll end that way too. Many major cities will be under the rising sea levels by the end of our century: Jakarta, Miami, Bruges, Venice, London. Ancient sacred stones and monster high rise developments -- history condensed, coagulated into one bitter blue gazpacho. Swallowed up by the same thing we swallow. This zine is a descendant of the most mindless moments of my teenhood, which is now almost past. And since they are the most mindless, they are the most intimate -- since intimacy forms most fluidly when we are not in control.

I spent fourteen to eighteen in Hong Kong. The city itself is hyper capitalist, its main avenues ruled by Italian design houses and Korean skincare companies, but it’s too new to being global to quite seal its unsightly gaps. A little alley in the midst of the bird market, the rooftop of a building with a sex shop and a massage house, and beaches. The beaches feel like bruises or like memory foam, maybe. There is one small shore in one of the richest areas, a mere 30 minute bus from central: Repulse Bay. The name evokes druggedness and sluggishness, waking up on a wooden bench, sand in my little backpack, We were the kind of kids that had everything given to us, easy and cheap. Food court bento for dinner, guys in parks asking us if we wanted some weed. Sex hotels never taking a second glance at our uniforms. We almost never drank tap water. I always bought Bonaqua, and it soon seemed to taste unrealistically perfect. I still don’t like drinking from the sink. It doesn’t mean we weren’t under pressure, because we were. Almost all of us felt we had to leave. Even after years of living there, it still felt like a theme park. As expat kids, we were Amazon Prime’ing life. Nothing felt real, other people didn’t feel real. I was a really, really good consumer; I loved being offered tastes, textures, colours, and countries to add to my glorious personal individuality. But I do fear I never quite learned how to be human and how to exist amongst other forms,

I was a really, really good consumer; I loved being offered tastes, textures, colours, and countries to add to my glorious personal individuality. But I do fear I never quite learned how to be human and how to exist amongst other forms, unspectacled, uncurated, and liquid. The closest I got was laying on that sand, listening to the waves touch each other in susurrations. The beach was so sweetly empty at night. It was clearly boundaried by two tiled piers on either end, and the skyscrapers that towered beyond like stern guards. The surrounding area was unquestionably a direct descendant of colonial residences, but between the piers, everything but the water seemed very far away. It was a dark, tranced vision: i held the hand of the ghost named natural. I could close my eyes and pretend, just for a stolen second, that I was a part of something bigger than me. That I didn’t need to look at other things, cate thing that could make money, use money, save money, take money, spend money, the right way. On the beach at night, there’s no right and wrong. There is only the water, that comes to you, reminds you that it can take you with it, and pulls back again. We speak of bodies of water as if we are not, also, bodies of water. I tried for a very long time to put this form of soothingness into words. I found I could only touch it through found poems, songs, and artwork. And so, I began to compile these fragments on @wet_______love, requesting my friends to also submit artworks that bore these feelings of immersion and interdependence with wetness. A cou-

Pedagogy that’s not run by the submissive conditioning needed for a competent yet alienated workforce. Care beyond blood inheritance. Safety beyond violence and surveillance. What if technology and nature worked together, instead of against each other? What if the neo-colonialist elite were a thing of the past, and we could stop feeling guilty for demanding the lives we deserve? What if sex was powerful? What if love was true? What if we could be like water? I myself feel that a future in which the earth is valued -- and in which labour, schooling, and lifestyle are revolutionized subsequently -- is a small possibility, except perhaps in the ashes of a post-apocalypse, when it’s too late to save what we’ve already built. But with this zine, I explore the hope of such a world by studying small examples of design, agriculture, schooling, and cultural theory that deconstruct the Western canon of individuality and commodification, prioritizing regenerative systems and healthier communities. I also bring in some of the water-related media that, for me, represents a deep sense of belonging. Water is, quite literally, the timeless connector. Its properties allowed complex formations of carbon molecules that made way for the first innocent microbes, and its cycles through earth and sky today provide for millions of teeming species. It runs in our walls, and down our faces. It’s the only God I’d pray to. Please, have a glass and enjoy.

“the river is also our g r a n d f a t h e r ” Indigenous ontologies of land and kinship

“When we depersonalize the river, the mountain, when we strip them of their meaning -- an attribute we hold to be the preserve of the human being -- we relegate these places to the level of mere resources for industry and extractivism,” writes Ailton Krenak, an Indigenous activist from the Rio Doce in Brazil. In 2019, Ailton released “Ideas to Postpone the End of the World”, a short manifesto book on the relationship between climate change and Indigenous erasure. This past summer in 2021, the far-right Bolsonaro administration passed Bill 490, a harsh land ownership declaration. Bill 490 threatens to reverse progress in Indigenous land rights in Brazil, and consequently reduce the protection and care of the Amazon rainforest. Bill 490 is accompanied by a string of other policy reversals of Amazon protection – such as satellite monitoring and clear demarcation of conservation areas, and in the years since Bolsonaro’s election in 2019, the rate of deforestation has dramatically increased. After the relatively strong measures taken for the rainforest’s conservation during previous president Da Silva’s administration, Bolsonaro’s disregard for Indigenous people and his other blatantly oppressive politics seem like one of the most clear microcosms of capitalist dystopia. A country given the power to care for the incredibly lush, biodiverse “lungs of the earth” and a man that instead chooses to satisfy the agro-business lobby with its various mining, logging, and cattle ranch corporations all tangled with the modern samsara of colonial Portuguese legacy. When thousands of Indigenous activists, backed up by environmental scientists and researchers, speak of the end of the world, what kind of cruel, ingrained alienation from environment, and from truth, allows you to ignore it? Under conventional Western rhetoric, Bolsonaro could just be dismissed as an exceptionally psychopathic individual who happened to gain power. But what happens if we threaten the larger ontology that justifies extractivist rhetoric? If we introduce a small seed of the meaning-making

that could save our planet, but be antithetical to the survival of capitalism? According to Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood, there are two key tasks for Western science and philosophy in order to move forward in our protection of the environment (and thus ourselves). “Resituate the human in ecological terms” “Resituate the non-human in ethical terms” In her works, Plumwood argued against “human/nature” dualism, in which the human is seen as “hyper separate” from the rest of the natural world, and other dualisms she saw as descended from the rational Cartesian understanding of the self. However, many of Plumwood’s theoretical solutions can be found in the very real philosophies of Indigenous communities. In his piece “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship”, Rarámuri researcher Enrique Salmón describes the untranslatable word “iwígara”. “Iwigara is the total interconnectedness and integration of all life in the Sierra Madres, physical and spiritual. To say iwígara to a Raramuri calls on that person to realize life in all its forms.” The prefix iwí literally means circle, and also soul. “To unite, to join, to connect… to breathe, inhale/ exhale, or respire… Plants, animals, humans, stones, the land, all share the same breath.” Under iwígara, the Western conception of property and possession itself becomes almost vulgarly meaningless, a loose flabby sack of hunger. German philosopher Erich Fromm once simplified life into two modes: having and being. He claimed the problem with Western society was the great shadowy desire that “to have” places over us, promising us infinite happiness if we continue to strive for a Godlike power. Iwígara seems to inhabit the opposite end of the scale. If we are all one circle, one system – what can you have that isn’t already part of you, and you can feel it within yourself? In 2015, tons of toxic mud and mineral waste flooded the waters of the River Doce, known as “watu” in the Krenak language. The river that the Krenak people once bathed, fished, and spiritually honoured is now completely fenced off to them. To the community, it is more than irreversibly polluted – it is dead. Ailton grieves the river as “grandfather”, a being that had cared for his people. “They have to deliver our water to us in trucks.” Alcoholism and depression have risen massively in the area, as have skin disease due to people not being able to stay away from the water. The river was more than an object of resource or entertainment, like how many Westerners interact with water in lakeside resorts. It was kin, it shared the same soul.

Australian ethnographer Deborah Rose spent her lifetime learning from Aboriginal peoples in Northern territories such as Timber Creek, Yarralin, Lingara, Pigeon Hole and Daguragu. In “Indigeonous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human”, she articulates how Aboriginal totemism prioritizes “bonds of mutual life giving” and the instinctual caretaking of the land that follows. She describes a foraging experience in which, after questioning why some of the plants were left behind, she is told, “it’s not waste…this food is for everyone.” Salmón describes something similar, in which areas that had threatened populations are described by elders as having “weak” iwígara and are left alone until they recover. The land is cared for when it is sick, just like a brother. And known intimately, with its seasonal patterns of ecological change. I feel like often we are taught to see faraway government offices, and the companies that loom at their strings, as protective familial figures. You should be grateful to live in America instead of some poor country where they don’t even have water. Yet the violence that those very symbols of authority have committed is erased from the memory. The land is assumed to be naturally scarce, instead of its flourishing abundance flushed out for corporate benefit. The land itself is betrayed – prized for its supple resources, then used, simplified, and manipulated into a shallow remnant of what it once was. The land is made sick. And the people feel it – and so must choose between the melancholy fight against the sickness, or a dissociation that renders them, empty, lacking, and wanting. In that way, I suppose capitalism fulfills its purpose. It creates lack, and gives endless solutions until you are in an underground labyrinth of your grubby desires, forgetting there ever was an open, endless sky.

the process of morphing in different states....

empowered by the light absorbing.....

O SWEET VESSEL, WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOU? THEY BROUGHT YOU TO LIFE FRESH, WHIMPERING LIFE! FOR THEIR TONGUES TO SUCK YOU DRY AND THEN THEY HEAVED YOU OUT OF THEIR LONGINGS FOR YOU TO MOULDER, PURPOSE FORSAKEN, HERE IN MY MOST UNFRIENDLY MIDSTS. TO SPEND YOUR LAST FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY NINE YEARS IN WAITING TO JOIN WITH ME AGAIN. I HAVE BEEN LADEN WITH SO MANY LIKE YOU. NO ONE HERE KNOWS WHO THEY ARE ANYMORE THE LIKES OF YOU WERE TAUGHT YOU HAD NOTHING ELSE BESIDES WHAT CAME OUT THE NOZZLE I WISH YOU KNEW WHAT OTHER BODIES YOU COULD BE IF THEY WERE MORE FOND OF TRANSFORMATION. OF YOUR POWERS BEYOND THEIR INTENTION. YOUR SKIN SO UNYIELDING YET SMOOTH I KNOW YOUR PERSEVERANCE IS MEANT FOR THE BIG LEAGUES THEY JUST LOVE TO CLEAN AND WHEN I SAY CLEAN I MEAN THEY LOVE TO PUT IT AWAY ONCE IT DOESN’T DO WHAT THEY WANT IT TO. I OFFER THEM MY VERY BLOOD AND THEY USE IT TO SUMMON NEW WEAPONS THEY CREATE YOU OUT OF MY DEPTHS JUST TO LEAVE YOU BEHIND A FRANKENSTEIN. A REMNANT A REMINDER THAT THEY’VE FORGOTTEN THAT THEY CAN’T ESCAPE THE CIRCULAR CURRENT EVEN WITH ALL THE CREDULOUS DAMS THEY CRUSADE FOR IN MY LESS FAVOURABLE COMPLEXIONS BUT ONE DAY THE FATE LINES OF MY WARY PALMS WILL FOLD AND THEY WILL BE FOOLS FOR LEAVING YOU FOR DEAD.

“energy

download”

Talking with movement maker and crotcheter Isobel L’Gor on ancestry, fate, and the Swedish forest

From a young age, we are taught that art necessitates intellectual mastery and intention. Artwork is supposed to be a signifier of our personal achievements, a mark of genius. There is a prioritization of the maker rather than the act of making, and an emphasis on a linear method of production, and a final product to preserve. So when performance artist Isobel I’Gor, whose main work is through dance and crocheting, tells me, “I don’t know how to crochet”, it feels almost otherworldly. Which she would say, it is. Isobel is 25, and a second year BA PDP student at CSM. She grew up in Northern Sweden, but moved more south in her late childhood to a town she didn’t feel connected to at all. She just wanted to get out. “I didn’t like the physical realms when I was younger,” she says with a sigh. Her feelings of misplacement led her to become immersed in spiritual practice. Later on, after leaving Sweden at 20 to get away, she fell in love with Norse myth and the Swedish forest as she became interested in her ancestral roots. She also met another Swede artist while in Berlin, Stella, whose names are always mentioned in tandem in CSM’s social circles. Isobel and Stella. Stella and Isobel. “We’ve known each other for four years, but people think we are childhood friends!” Isobel laughs. They met through a mutual friend, and then were invited to the same birthday party in Serbia, and decided to take a plane there together. Within the 10 hour flight, they told each other their life stories and were best friends by the time they landed. Their friend was waiting there in Novi Sad for them nodding her head knowingly, as if it was destiny. Stella and Isobel live together, but are also frequent collaborators, particularly on their “organic orgasmic organismic” crocheting project WirkWölwor @wirkwolwor. They both began crocheting independently, and with a similar method of “channeling”, which then evolved into a collaboration. Crocheting, for Isobel, is not an act of technique. “I just know the basic motion… but there is something within me who knows, who makes. So like, this thing, (she points down to an intricate web of green and orange yarn) I don’t know

and furl into each other in loose billows of string. They are pictured amongst rocks, trees, and water in diluted and morphed edits, implying a continuation of the work beyond its physical form. It is made from and of the landscape, and is a continuation of the landscape. Like her creations, Isobel views herself as untangle-able from the land and people that made her. She tells me of her past interest in Jungian psychology, and her interest in connecting with her ancestors. She sees herself as a project through which to identify the trauma they are carrying, “downloading” their energy and seeking to “turn it around” anew. Isobel’s acknowledgement and indeed prioritization of external forces made me question the “self made” rhetoric much of the art world endorses, and how capitalism in general seems to whisper in our ear, you should do it all by yourself. Because obviously, we can’t really do anything just by ourselves, even if we don’t explicitly believe in spirits. Our capabilities would be impossible without the people who came before us, and the people who are around us. Within the valorization of individual achievement that capitalism pushes toward us, there is the accompaniment of alienating the forces that shape us. And perhaps an underplaying of our circumstances – our intrinsic personality, our class, our trauma, our marginalizations, our mental and physical wellbeing. Capitalism tries to teach us our birthplace is an empty white room. Isobel’s work is an opposing force of this false neutrality, saying, no, I come from these people, these trees. One of Isobel’s favorite artists is a theatre director whose work involves no actual actors. She created a rendition of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey solely with screens that have been coded with colors and dialogues. An “oracle” was created with an algorithm to give responses to certain questions, and etcetera. It’s an obvious technological parallel to the predetermined “download” Isobel sees in her own work, in which she’s a vessel for spirits to play out movements. This led me to ask her, do you believe in fate? “One part of me believes everything is written, there’s this word in Arabic like, “Mektoub”. But I don’t really see the world as linear, like we live in a vertical timeline I call it. I see the world as sort of a multi-dimensional axis, and there’s this zero point, which is your heart. Within that point, space and time don’t exist. So it’s written, but in a vertical sense, in which it changes when your heart changes. It’s not one end goal over there (she points to the other side of the room). It’s like you’ve already completed everything in life, but physical reality is like a slowed down version of that vertical time. We kind of deep down already know our hearts, but that knowing doesn’t have to be definite. Our inner being already knows who we are, where we’re going, but we get

so distracted by things outside of that vertical axis and so we forget to come back to it. Life seems like this linear thing, but maybe we’re living in a spiral.”

pictured here: ‘Grasladdic garment pictured on 24: ‘KARTA’ garment

We both agree that the circle is a very interesting shape, as opposed to the line. The circle, for me, is natural. Water, oxygen, and organisms, they all operate in these circles. And there’s also regenerative design and circular economy. Just like Isobel’s dancing, a better future involves perhaps a rejoining with the earth, reminding ourselves that we are not excluded from nature’s unstoppable cycles of movement. And maybe crocheting a little too.

water is just a metaphor for everything i think i lack....

“The sea water running / in our veins” Little words and remedying our geographic estrangement

Annual meadow grass, common spike rush, reed sweet-grass, common club rush, cock’s-foot, great fen-sedge, quaking-grass, sand sedge, crested dog’s tail, pendulous sedge, soft brome, greater pond sedge, common couch, hard rush, wall barley, soft rush, wood melick, field wood-rush, false oat-grass, Yorkshire-fog, wavy hair-grass, great reedmace, soft vernal-grass, true fox-sedge, creeping bent, marram grass, timothy, common reed. This is a list of grass species from the London Wildlife Trust’s website. I have lived right next to the Walthamstow Wetlands for a year or so now. Last spring, I went running there nearly every day, and also took many photos of the natural settings during my runs. And yet I would not be able to identify any kinds of grass there, let alone the patterns in which they grow. I was raised in a New Jerseyan suburb. We had a guy come around once a month to trim the lawn. Our neighbourhood had a uniform sidewalk made of thick squares: when you rode a scooter, you could feel the metric bump of the wheel from one concrete slab to the next. Our school was a few miles away, along a long road of gas stations and car dealerships. Once, when I was in fourth grade, we learned about how some people called Lenape used to live here, a very, very long time ago. We went to a museum and peered at models of their very long houses, and a couple mannequins in moccasins. We never really talked about them again. When I was 14, my family spontaneously moved to Hong Kong on account of my dad’s job. Despite living in the same house for all my life, I felt no grief or sadness at the change. I’ve always passed through places easily, too easily. My mind gets excited at the thought of new images and textures to consume, new shops and new cafes to have a taste of. I always feel uncomfortable, poorly rested, and hungry for something more. Until recently, I thought this was solely caused by the addiction to novel stimuli that’s associated with ADHD. But then, I started to question what my relationship to my various “homes” was. New Jersey, Hong Kong, London -- sure, I lived there, I shopped in the stores, I visited the museums, but was I actually a part of something

there, something that extended beyond me as an observer and consumer? Did I actually know these places well enough to be capable of loving them? What is required for responsible inhabitation of a place? How do we position ourselves as co-dwellers of the land? “What is required, however, is sensual, embodied experience—close encounters of awe, wonder, fright, disgust, or even tedium— which remind us both of the real earth with which we dwell, and that we share our home with innumerable cohabitants,” writes literary scholar Steel Wagstaff. This quote brings a sense of desolation and longing, that is usually in the back of my mind, to the forefront. I begin to feel a pain sitting shallowly behind my sternum. As I think about the method in which I was taught to interact with my environment, a sense of disorientation arises that I can now identify as guilt. The land around me was just something for corporate structures to be built on. The views I’ve seen in parks and on beaches, I’ve looked at them. And the people in my “community” -- a word that I feel utter disconnect from -- I seldom interacted with if it wasn’t about the exchange of goods or strained favours. The architecture of the American suburban bliss and of the Asian metropolitan high-rise share this in common: the sense of separation, of a loss of entanglement. The people living around us are reduced in visibility to mere strings of awkward encounters. Other creatures become unclean pests, and nature a delineated curation of monolithic lawn grass. The Objectivist poets thought a lot about these little words, at, on, with. Spearheaded by Russian-American Louis Zukofsky, Objectivists analysed the poem as an object with mechanical features, able to be dissected for each word’s function. They were unquestionably direct descendents from the modernist love of playing with form found in T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Zukofsky wrote: “a case can be made for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words.” Thus the priority, in the Objectivist perspective, is not what was being connected, but how -- what is the quality of my connection to the land? Does this land have a meaning to me, beyond what I can extract? I eagerly eat the fruit of a place. But was I there, when the seed was enclosed into the soil’s womb? Was I there, when the sapling arose, tenderly triumphant, into a misty air? One of the less known objectivists, Lorine Niedecker, specifically focuses on the

connection with one’s environment. Niedecker lived in a secluded Wisconsin log cabin for most of her life, without plumbing or electricity. Despite her isolation, she was conscious of herself as part of a web of organisms. Her poetry positions her as a mere civilian amongst trees, birds, and water. When she was writing a book, she joked that instead of an author photo, “they can put a creeping mint for me… the ditches along the road are full of it this spring here, a bright blue flower and leaves smelling very strong of mint—a wonderful ground cover, no grass gets thru it.” For me, Niedecker breaks through the deception that is the bounds of the human body. We now know we have thousands of bacteria and microbes that abide physically in our organs, often operating symbiotically, for we evolved alongside them. Western capitalist mentality looks down upon dependence, and indeed on connections that exist beyond a power dynamic, and of course, the architecture and infrastructure that we live amongst reflects this. We have made the surface of the land into a place of control. Give and take. Above or below. Every place has one purpose, and the waste is taken far away. What happens when we zoom in and see how much naturally happens in the same scoop of dirt? “Any place is ultimately a shared place,” writes Linda Russo. It might seem like a simple assertion, but to me, it’s revolutionary in terms of how to understand one’s sense of self. I used to understand the dissatisfaction I feel at my own disconnect as a problem of neurodivergence. I thought that maybe I was just incapable of being “in tune” -- that I was just broken and I would have to deal with my loneliness by developing intense wells of intellectual knowledge instead. But I realized that this alienation might actually exist beyond me, towards anyone who feels they have little sense of place due to its subjugated position under Western norms, or little sense of community, due to the valorization of “independence” in which other people are simply resources. I’m still trying to figure out how to reconcile my love for the city with the knowledge that its systems reinforce my ache. Is a Harrawayan world where technology and nature share the same home possible? And what about under current circumstances: If I did what Niedecker did, being a mere forest flower far away from civilization, would I be happy? I am too immersed in my current subjectivity to really know the answer to either of these questions. But in a culture where our sense of incompleteness is used to sell creams with 40 ingredients and monogrammed tweed jackets, finding connectivities in our shared homes seems essential. Maybe, a knowledge of the with is all we might need.

and the place was water fish fowl flood water lily mud my life in the leaves and on water my mother and i born in swamp and swale and sworn to water lorine niedecker, “paean to place”

i wanna love you......

i wanna love you like the ocean holds its creatures, the weight of gallons of water like a kiss on their backs as they drift knowing they’re home or like the sweet-smelling dew clings onto its respective blades of grass, and teasingly evaporates as the sun rises, only to crawl back out of the summer air every single morning i wanna love you like we’re the only two seabirds on the same pole wire i want to reconstruct every steep ridge and smoothened slope of your mind in my own so that i can give it sunshowers by holding your face with the side of my palm that meets my thumb i want it meant i want it just right i want darknesses in the steepest caves to feel like ballads to me and tight grips that come in a blushing pink tell me what it’s like for someone to draw your blood and you have nothing to say but thank you i want to be turned into clay untouched from the cold air i want to wind around you like a snake i want to look into your eyes and figure out which one is ever so slightly darker have you ever felt powerful yet safe at the same time? have you ever met a god with a home? a real home? i wanna love you like the molecules of water on the very top of a pond press themselves against the molecules on the very bottom of a lilypad their adhesion whispers i feel every inch of you i see every change in you you were made for me but only because you stayed but you see for now it’s just me that’s real and so i must play both parts, a one-girl show of hidden lists and split ends, nature doesn’t ask to be seen but i can’t help but sell the tickets desperate to be witnessed, asking, who will soak up my touch? who will stay to look longer? who will ask for me? who will want to know what i mean?

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river

our

grandfather”

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"let me tell you: we can't all individually win in this world and simultaneously create a new one together." — wendy trevino i want to thank stefania ilieva for being next to me through a lot of this. i'm honoured to blossom on the same branch as you. i also want to thank nastya kozlova for making me question the very way i perceive what's in front of my eyes, and helena brinckmeyer for teaching me that sometimes i just need to close them. also, ventcislava nekova, for salsa-ing with me in the library. and my parents, from whom i get the tendency to say yes to everything. lastly, the range of old friends, new acquaintances, and faraway creators that gave me the gift of their images. a few months ago, i felt like a thirty year old woman who has nothing left to feel. but these past three months, a flood of the sublime unknown has just washed over me. i'm just a little baby bacteria, and this is me taking my first steps. the next edition will be sexier, i promise... but for now, goodbye. it's been a pleasure.