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Daniela can be seen holding a microphone and paper. She is knee deep in water, reading. Her outfit is dark blue, light blue, and brown gauzy material floating on the water.

COVEN BERLIN reads the YEAR OF THE BOG on the Beach – THE PHOTOS

COVEN hosted this beautiful reading in the summer of 2022 on the beach with authors Zinzi Buchanan, Inky Lee, Daniela Medina Poch, and Meghna Singh. We selected their articles as…

Digital collage created with a still of Andy Samberg looking like a hunk from the 2007 movie Hot Rod. Image by Flip Zang.

Commit to the Bit!

In the first episode of The Lonely Island (2001), Ardy, played by twenty-three year old Andy Samberg, all lips and shaggy curls, stars in a goofy early-90’s-hip-hop-MTV-style interlude. From the twin-sized bottom bunk on my ten-centimeter iPod screen, I studied this scene with adolescent gravitas.

A landscape photo of the whole room where our installation is. The view here is from someone at the end of the room, opposite from the entrance. Here we see a lilac-colored room with like-colored fur trim on the walls. In the room is a large changing room bench that is painted green and covered with like-colored fur. We see an old 90s era thick television, scattered papers and clothing on and around the bench.

AXE PULSE – THE PHOTOS

As part of the large group exhibition titled How (Not) to Fit In – Metaphern der Adoleszenz at Villa Merkel, Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, in Esslingen, Germany, which ran from May 8 – July 17, 2022, COVEN BERLIN created the installation and environment we called AXE PULSE, eponymously named after our current magazine and curatorial theme (which can be read here).

A collage of two photos of the moon against a blue background.

Looking at the moon, twice

Gabriela Gordillo is an artist, born in Mexico City and living and working since 2015 in Linz, Austria. In this piece, she reflects on the work that her father has undertaken for many years, since her adolescence — taking photographs of the moon — and juxtaposes it with her thoughts about Minute/Year, a durational sound-based installation artwork by Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty.

Lesen am See #2: COVEN BERLIN reads the YEAR OF THE BOG

with: Zinzi Buchanan, COVEN BERLIN, Inky Lee, Daniela Medina Poch, and Meghna Singh
NEW DATE: Sunday 4th of September at 6:00 pm (we will be there swimming at the beach from 4pm on! If you want to join, bring 3 euros and a towel 🙂

Address: Strandbad Tegelsee /Zentrum für Kultur und Erholung Schwarzer Weg 95, 13505 Berlin
Hosted by: Neue Nachbarschaft Moabit and Moabit Mountain College

A closeup of a massive circle of black ink, cratered and three-dimensional, with metallic silver highlights and dust on thick grained white paper. Written in pencil above it is: The clock is always wrong.

Wart Paintings

Begun in 2021, Wart Paintings is an ongoing series that is part of an ever-growing body of warts Johanna Hedva has been cultivating for years. Mysterious, recalcitrant, and oddly sentient, warts testify to an animist reality, antagonizing our belief in individual agency by forcing us to negotiate with and relate emotionally to an inanimate foreign body embedded in our own. An old wives’ tale states that warts will leave the body if you simply ask them to, as if they are listening. There is a relationship there—what is it?

Google Street View, Image collage, Sonnenallee, Berlin. Excerpts from: Artist unknown, Freya and her Cat Chariot, 1886; Fresco of Edigna in the Linden, c. 1800, St. Sebastian in Puch Kirche.

Unter den Linden

I turned the laundry hamper upside down, shaking the quivering body into the planter. A rat, fugitive found in the bathroom of my shared flat, tumbled into the mess of cigarette butts and weeds growing near the trunk of the tree that separated the sidewalk from the parked cars. I’m sorry, I thought, following the rat’s ecstasy as she fled to the faintly fissured gray bark. I couldn’t find a wild place to bring you. A siren howled, blue and white light lit up the underside of the branches that graced the first floor of the apartment building where I took shelter.

AXE PULSE

Adolescence is nothing if not an endless series of paradoxes. As a teenager you spend your days with packs of people, and yet often feel utterly isolated. You’re carving your own identity, yet are indelibly shaped by the influences around you. It’s excruciating, and magical, and formative, with highs and lows that are as devastating as they are delirious.

It is a small swamp in Grunewald on a sunny day. The picture was taken from slightly above. There is an area covered with the thick high grass in the middle of the image. One can distinguish separate plants on the first plan. Behind this area, more to the upper right and left corners of the image are green deciduous trees.

Unmeasurable Falling

The first time I stepped into marsh water was when I was about 7. One of the first sunny days in early May. My friend’s family took me along with them to the reservoir. We were all neighbors living in the same street on the outskirts, and in the summer all the kids were biking there quite often. But at that time we probably were yet too young to go there by ourselves.

This is a photo that is out of focus. It captures a small section of a wall where there are what appears to be family photos hanging.

The Art of (Not) Forgetting – photographing memories as a way to resist censorship

In my project “The Art of (Not) Forgetting”, which began in February 2021, around 4 months after the start of the protests in Belarus, I tried to use storytelling and photography as a means of opposing the regime of the last European dictator: Alexander Lukashenko. The idea that brought me to address these issues was prompted by the situation I was observing in my country since August 2020. During massive rallies against the rigged presidential election, one of the symbols used by the opposition was the white-red-white flag that refers to the period of an independent Belarus and dates back to 1918. Very soon the regime declared this combination was “extremist” and eventually banned. People wearing clothes, scarves, bracelets, and even socks with the “wrong” colors were detained, fined, and given prison sentences.