BLOOD

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

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.

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.

An image of birch trees in a forest. On the closest tree, a squarish red area is visible. In the middle of the area is a small oval black and white portrait.

Forest that Cares – on Belarus, Partisans, and Thicket We Can Learn A Lot From

Human culture, people’s beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the natural environment we live in. Climate defines our diets and clothing habits, but certainly the most intricate interactions occur at deeper levels – deserts or jungles, the closeness to big waters or high mountains determine the way we perceive ourselves and others and feel about this strange thing called “life”.

The End is Not an Option: Carrier Bags and the Rhythm of the Bog

I’ve spent a lot of the last years in bogland – literal and metaphysical. For six years I obsessively returned to a river in Lancashire, (U.K.). I spent most of my time on top of the peat fells (big swathes of high altitude, boggy moorland with flat tops), looking for the source of small rivers that swell out of the wetland and spill down the cracks they make in the hillsides.

A glitchy image, with black ,peach, grey, red, and blue shattered pixels, which seems to have originally been a selfie-style photo of someone's lower body and feet in the bathtub

It Glitches at the Sight of Our Nipples

Day to day, I write and organize projects about the digital commons — where groups of people with aligned goals build systems of digital communication and information that they rely on and steward together. Like a community garden, but we dig our hands into signals, scatter bits and pixels so they grow into something meaningful. Platform co-operatives, community networks, digital research and cultural archives, Free and Open Source projects, are just some examples.

Collage of various chumbox advertisement thumbnails: images of people, skin, and runny eggs.

Feelings at the Edge: A Chumbox Tour

The scene is all too familiar, the gestures rehearsed. It begins with the innocence of casual browsing, the wide-eyed wonder as you click and scroll, traipsing around some mildly interesting news article. Then it leers at you, inevitable and horrible.

Two people sit at a desk outdoors in front of a gallery, in warm evening summer light. On the left is Anisha, a brownskinned person with long dark hair wearing a pink shirt and skirt and smiling. The other person is Schwarzrund, a Black person with curly black hair, wearing a long black floral dress and talking into a microphone.

A Conversation on Care

‘A Conversation on Care’ was the official name of the talk SchwarzRund and I gave in Summer 2021, as part of COVEN BERLIN’s event “an invitation to sink in to the bog.” Watching it back though, I realise that another title could have been ‘A long overdue catch up between friends who are always keen to work together, could forever talk to each other, but don’t always have the energy to do so.’

A colorful illustration of a bug-like troll figure, with cars and bugs and a cityscape in the background. The city is black, and the sky is turquoise, with a large green vine and pastel-colored bugs.

The Troll: Between the Mythological and the Digital

Not so long ago I met a troll for the first time. Or I think I did. I’ve probably met others, but since they usually work in the shadows, their identity is anonymous. Trolls never show they are trolls. But this time we were living together.

A person in silhouette, bathed in orange light. The image is quite dark, and the person is holding a guitar and gold bead shoulder pads catch the light as they turn toward the camera.

Suddenly You’re Pointing Everywhere and Everywhere Points Right Back

DOOM leaves space for not just the work, but also specifically the footwork of mourning to pop up, which at times might look like a teetering dance and heavy breath from under a lace mask.