Vox Populi 2013 - 2014

Vox Populi

Vox Populi 2013-14

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2013-14

Cutouts

Samantha Spoon, Marie-Amelie Prieur and Hugo Rourke Paper Cut-Outs —2—

Vox Populi 2013-14

‘For me, a love of literature, the arts, and the performing arts is the heart and soul of education.’

–M. Crist Fleming

The American School In Switzerland —3—

Table of Contents

Boy with Toy Horse Cover Photograph

Francesca Pellas

2 Cutouts Samantha Spoon, Marie-Amelie Prieur

Paper Cut-Outs and Hugo Rourke

6 Still In My Mind Emma Lo Re Poem

7

Thai Soldier Tatiana Kochan

8

Sweet Childhood Aziza Kilic

Photograph Poem

8-9

Peace Of Mind Nadine Schellekens

Digital Painting

10-12 Tango Gavin Muenzberg

Poem

13 Identity Arisa Kozuki

Matte Transfer

14-17 Artist Spotlight Aidan Brooks

The Young Artist

Cardstock + Mixed Woods Self Portrait

Acrylics on Paper

Bloody Self Portrait

Acrylics on Paper Old Woman

Acrylics on Paper 18 Fontana Orianna Sibada Photograph

19 Swimming Iines James Poem

20

A Carnage of Fallen Leaves Gabriella Piconi

Poem

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21

Voyage The World Before It’s Too Late Zachary Kronsnoble

Bronze Figure

22

Self Portrait Sophia Buzzonetti

Pastels on Paper

23

Constant Flicker Nadine Schellekens

24

The Streets of Tears Andrew Bone

25

Girl from the Dowa District of Malawi Milo Zanecchia

Poem

Poem

Photograph

26 Smear

Georgia Mantegazza Pastels on Paper

27

I Wonder How Many Lips Your Lips Have Kissed

Poem

Gabriella Piconi

28-31 Poet Spotlight Geneva Arystanova

Society vs Individual Ambience Admiration Exhiliration

Color Your Conscience 29 Fennel Molly Hercules

Acrylics on Canvas

32 Happiness Emma Gabbiani

Poem

32-33 Filippe Raina Haynes-Klaver Photograph 34 Tiger Ayse Cevikel

Acrylics on Canvas

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Still In My Mind Emma Lo Re

Goodbye as usual.

“See you soon,” it read.

But I was tired, I went to bed.

Then I started a new day.

“I’ll call her now,” I should’ve said.

The thought of you inside my head.

Sunday filled with joy at work.

“Come play with us,” the three tots cried.

Your last words stuck in my mind.

The lit up phone began to sing.

“Hello?” I sighed, In fear and sadness both combined.

“Last night, an accident,” They chimed.

And just like that, you left us behind.

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Thai Soldier —7—

Tatiana Kochan Photograph

Sweet Childhood Aziza Kilic

Oh, how I miss those days The dawn of my life, Of my sweet childhood That the years bring no more.

Instead of hurts now, I had these delights, My mother’s caresses And kisses from my sister.

The love, the dreams, the flowers In those smooth afternoons How beautiful the days, breath the innocence of the soul as the flower scent;

Free child of the mountains, I was well pleased, Barefoot, bare arms, Running through the fields Blue butterflies!

The ocean is a serene lake, The sky a blue mantle, The world a golden dream, Life an anthem of love!

Oh, how I miss those days The dawn of my life, Of my sweet childhood That the years bring no more.

The moon kissing the ocean Like the waves kiss the sand.

Oh sweet childhood, like the sky of spring.

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Peace of Mind —9—

Nadine Schellekens Digital Painting

Tango

Gavin Muenzberg It has always been my dream to truly dance the tango, I have been told that it is impossible to truly tango until you have felt the hot lick of lust and the cooling sweep of love.

I have been told that the tango will find you wherever it wants to find you but that when it does you will not be able to resist its pull I have been told, that tango kisses you the moment it sees you and wont let go.

The two greatest idles of my life have been Jay Gatsby, and Neal Cassidy Each of their hearts must have had enough passion to master the tango I originally became infatuated with the idea of Gatsby, A man who could have had the world, but chased his heart and his past In the hope of a light. a green light.

I began to become him, I wore yellow, green and pink I did my best to speak and act, like a gentleman, with a mystery and I waited, for my daisy to come. but lately I connect more to Cassidy because I have always preferred red Red symbolizes so much more than green red symbolizes Love, Hate and that perfectly mad place between the two.

Lust.

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Red is the three things that make life memorable at all.

Red is what causes us to fear death, because isn’t the fear of death really just the fear of forgetting everything that was, red.

Cassidy is as smooth as Gatsby but he wears loose white shirts and flannels .

Cassidy knows maybe a little to well how to let go of the past, Cassidy knows his future.

I have discovered the tango, or more of she discovered me It was aboard an 11 hour flight between one place I wanted to be and one place I didn’t want to be, It caught me half awake it grabbed my loose white t shirt and smiled searching for my Kiss. the light becomes red and bathes us in incandescent LED Lust. we are filled with emotion and heat as our hips bounce to the kiss of tango and our hearts spray out the electric dizzying beat. we are engulfed in Love.

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The red glares brighter as sweat breaks over my body.

I stand dropping my complimentary pretzels my hips move to the tango.

This foot wide aisle becomes our red light district and we dance. we move and we pant and we sweat and we swear and we scream. everyone joins us in our foot wide aisle and we all become red. because we all wish, to get a taste of Denver I have brought us back to the beat.

And we all stand interlocked with the excitement of our beat and our Love.

The light turns green. taking away my red But it beckons me to go.

I am sorry but I will not kiss you because in my heart I know I am still Gatsby, And I have not yet escaped to become Cassidy, But when I do I will find you, and we will move our bodies to our hearts’ tango. and make our own red.

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Identity

Arisa Kozuki Matte Transfer — 13 —

t h g i l t o p Artist S The Young Artist

Cardstock + Mixed Woods

Aidan Brooks

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Self Portrait

Acrylics on Paper

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Bloody Self Portrait Acrylics on Paper

Artist Spotlight: Aidan Brooks

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Old Beauty

Acrylics on Canvas

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Fontana

Orianna Sibada Photograph

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Swimming Iines James

Floating far away Middle of oblivion Never to return Watery castle Barricaded from ashore By deep fear of loss Home waiting with pain Cuts in us made by the land Water washes clean

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A Carnage of Fallen Leaves Gabriella Piconi

One summer afternoon On no particular day As the sun started sinking Behind a craggy background Painted and pasted pink I strode through a carnage of fallen leaves Slain by their trees On a slanted hillside Half exposed to sun And half in shade Leaves of several shades and sizes Littered the forest floor Cut off so gracefully From their life source Without warning And without mercy

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Voyage The World Before It’s Too Late Zachary Kronsnoble Bronze Figure

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Self Portrait

Sofia Buzzonetti Pastels on Paper

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The Constant Flicker Nadine Schellekens

you were a dream. my personal fleeting hallucination induced by the sweet, sugary summer breeze, a fantasy that breathed life in me and left me breathless. alas, time pressed on and summer passed. you said that what we had experienced had been an illusion, a sultry, prolonged confusion that seemed real only because we believed in it. deceptive, delusional, our shared illusion, its existence dependent solely on our conviction that what we had seen and felt was real. time accelerated, autumn became winter, winter turned into spring and the distorted lens of my memory slowly altered my recollection of us. despite that inevitable degradation of reminiscences, my faith in the illusion never faltered. it remains a constant flicker in my consciousness and often appears to be more vivid than the present. the sweet, sugary summer breeze returns to me, I am left breathless to think of you. an illusion flickering, constant, unfaltering.

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The Streets of Tears Andrew Bone

I dream of my love, Like they dream of theirs; The one thing that mankind shares.

But our souls were strangers, And our language marooned, When I came and saw and lived alone, In the land of the orient moon.

A bed of concrete, unshuttered from life, The corner of some shop doorway; The little they claim to be their own, Commercial hours steal away.

I slept well on my heritage cheque, And laughed at the rain that comes at four; The men caught out on the creditless deck, Huddled close to the base of the door.

Shiva may hear them, Or God, or Buddha, or Allah, But nothing on Earth gives them a thought, Only the pen of the western traveller.

I catch them and hold them in mocking blue ink, Etching their memory for years, And may they forgive me if I see them wrong, The men in the streets of tears.

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Girl from the Dowa District of Malawi Milo Zanecchia Photograph

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Smear — 26 —

Georgia Mantegazza Pastels on Paper

I Wonder How Many Lips Your Lips Have Kissed Gabriella Piconi

I wonder how many lips your lips have kissed, How many words and whispers you let slip In how many dark corners Through long dark hours Woven in secrets and sweet words Caught between kisses and “I love you” so’s I wonder how many an eye your eyes have sought And how many of them caught How many glances curiously cast How many glares hatefully thrown Across the room Unbidden, Unwanted False compassion dimming false charm False confidence Forced intimacy Forged interest Toying and Teasing Deceiving and Cheating

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t h g i l t o p S t e o P

Geneva Arystanova

Society vs Individual tell me which way you are facing before society turns your neck.

“What is immorality to the individual?

Is it perception of the mind, or simply the coalescence of shared opinion?

Is it a way of being, or a way of being within the frames of the concretion of society?

Is it easy thoughts or being eased into a particular way of thinking? tell me, do you choose to be so descended, sprawled across the ground, do you feel this way when you free the force that drives your soul, or are the lost souls forced into empty feeling, steered into an unknown direction, simply because we can no longer stand up for our own?

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Ambience Did you know Pluto isn’t a planet?

Starts with smalltalk – diminishes into a monologue.

Your voice tries it softly, It’s not you it’s me, you say, I need time And space.

I see you look down at your watch And gaze up to the stars Is it really what you want?

If it were up to me still, I would give you all the seconds and minutes and hours Seven solar rotations a week, Three hundred sixty five days a year.

I would give you Jupiter, and Mercury, Mars, The Sun and the Moon at your fingertips, this whole Earth and the rings spinning around Saturn Uranus and Pluto But it is not up to me anymore, Is it?

You give me a long look,

Fennel

Molly Hercules Acrylics on Canvas

and a deep sigh.

The watch says 11:11; And I wish Pluto was still a planet.

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Admiration Exhiliration I admire artists who can paint the whole world with a stroke of their paint brushes and the mix of the paint unraveling in such beautiful ways on the once barren canvas I admire photographers who with the right click, with one perfect angle

before you feel in love with me. because what is there left to do to a broken heart and a torn soul

can capture the exact fleeting moment

and how can you make beauty

slipping away from our fingers, and instantly, it is immortal on a photograph, that may become old and faded but eternally identical to the past

out of dark brown eyes and uncertain thoughts it is emptiness, an unquenchable void that thirsts for freedom

I admire writers who can spin stories out of the thread of language turn great things out of everyday things

Poet Spotlight: Geneva Arystanova

and paint with their words ascending into sentences and then, into pages. who can describe the faintest note of a rain drop hitting the surface of the sidewalk in September and who can describe the precise patterns of diffusion of the night stars peppered onto the celestial empyrean through chaotic inked scribbles on a paper I admired you

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empty, and that is the end of it.

I admired you before you fell in love with me. because what is there left of beauty now?

Color Your Conscience you are so many beautiful things, all at once. white when the world, your world, becomes quiet. shut out dimness of passerby noise and conversation. the snowflakes coat you in cold, mesmerizing you and you are white silence. you are the scarlet red your face flushes to in the winter or when his voice sounded like that yesterday. you are the watercolor green your eyes become when there’s no sunlight to dilate your irises from the inside out, to illuminate your soul out into the world. you are the depths of the sea, holding up your sails swept up by sea air and salt. you are sadness sometimes, wrapped in nothing but dark, soft after light, when your fingers already slipped over the switch but your eyes are yet to adjust to black. you are the tint of maroon and cotton pink left on the skyline, right before the dusk settles, like spilled milk on linoleum floors. city madness, and the stirred canopy of voices over your head you hear when you are indigo shy shadows. you are impossible to define by a color, but a shade, left out in the rain book pages, spilled ink leaving marks on the patterns on you skin. you are shades and tints drying on a canvas, a painter’s brush strokes. you are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet stacked up on the clutter of disorder, a collection, a mess, a palette of tempera paints carefully balanced on an elbow. you are beautiful and I hope you see that, before it all fades and becomes a mess of gray streaks flickering before your eyes.

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Happiness Emma Gabbiani

The breeze of a summer’s night, dragonflies shining bright.

The scent of freshly cut grass, the bell at the end of class.

Warm towels after a swim, the light tanning your skin.

Sunday mornings with a duvet on your head, the taste in your mouth after chocolate spread.

Drinking mint tea- snow falling outside, air in your face on a rollercoaster ride.

Knowing a friend will always be there, smile- happiness is everywhere.

Filippe

Raina Haynes-Klaver Photograph

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Tiger

Ayse Cevikel Acrylics on Canvas

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Editorial Board Gavin Muenzberg (editor-in-chief ) Maja Pankowska (editor-in-chief ) Nadine Schellekens (editor-in-chief ) Hailey Hibbard Emma Lo Re Oana Nafornita Ryan Osgood Fatah Soroush Todd Matthew (faculty advisor)



Vox Populi, the TASIS Art and Literary Magazine, encourages creativity and appreciation of both art and literature and seeks to publish work from its community of students, teachers, administrators, and staff. The magazine strives to balance excellence and diversity in a wide variety of media.

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