peeling mandarins

dear reader,

this is ana, peeling mandarins for the first time.

the peeled mandarins and i will arrive at your inbox with every new season, approximately, but never on the season’s first day as it seems to me that first days ought to be dedicated to other affairs and matters. or perhaps other newsletters.

but the peeled mandarins and i will indeed arrive at your inbox seasonally and that arrival will afford brief glances at my making, thinking, and sensing.

dear reader, as i am writing these words, i can see your eyes encountering them; as you are reading these words, i hope you can imagine my voice slowly uttering them—whether or not you have heard my voice before this moment, i hope you can imagine. and do you see how we have just built a shared moment of sorts, even if time abandoned its regular logic? i believe that this moment of past-becoming-future marked the beginning of something. don’t you?

all for now, until next time.

ana

making

these days, i am mostly focused on of flesh and terra, my graduation work.

of flesh and terra is an essay-like moving-image thing that includes performative, archival, and abstract imagery. it illustrates and narrates the process of my search for belonging through constructing memories about and imagining remembrance of an ancestor. by engaging in (fabricated) dialogues with myself, the great-great-grandmother whose existence i construct, and matter (terra) found in the different spaces this ancestor may have inhabited, i reflect on ideas and places of belonging and on the roles of memory and imagination in the state of being in.

for now, here are four, non-sequential stills from that moving entity and the dead can dance too, a letter that, among other things, ponders on the possibilities of a reincarnation through performance and thinks about the making of images from different brain and body positions.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS: my photography and society colleagues and i will be exhibiting our work between july 3rd and 8th at the royal academy of art (KABK) in the hague. come visit!

thinking

katrina miller and dennis overbye wrote something great about dark energy, the universe’s fate, and science itself.

; this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.

stills of a moving three-dimensional map of the universe, made using the dark energy spectroscopic instrument. earth is at the center in this animation.

seeing

every time we go to maat, lisbon’s museum of art, architecture, and technology, we leave with something that stays with us—douwe and i, we do.

recently, the highlight was black ancient futures, an exhibition with works from baloji, april bey, jeannette ehlers, lungiswa gqunta, evan ifekoya, kiluanji kia henda, nolan oswald dennis, gabriel massan, jota mombaça, sandra mujinga and tabita rezaire and curated by camila maissune and joão pinharanda.

when one truly is with this multidisciplinary, multi-language, insightfully curated body of work, one becomes witness to a possible future // one becomes part of an exercise in imagining otherwise, while getting reminded of the colonial truth—and don’t we, portuguese, need all the reminding we can get in order to unlearn what we were taught?

details of april bey’s "we learned to love ourselves until we were full until we did not need yours until we realized our own was enough”, 2023 (L) and of jeannette ehlers’ “we’re magic. we’re real #3”, 2021 (R).

reading

currently reading marlen haushofer’s the wall and dwelling on the delicious, outrageous possibility of waking up one morning and finding i am entirely alone in the world, confined by an invisible wall; wondering if i, too, could become forest. ah!

One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.

composite, vintage classics edition 2022, cover illustration by maría medem

listening

still listening to andré 3000’s new blue sun. and yes, i do know that, by now, i should have dropped the new, but i do find something novel every time i listen to it. that counts, does it not? the blue sun is a demanding sun. it is not the type of sun you put on to lead a life oblivious to what your ears are telling you. it is demanding and it demands that you demand too. andré is a sensorial magician and a tangible ode to make and to be art; his new blue sun plays with the in-between, with what exists between the familiar and the eh?, the soothing and the unsettling; together—andré and his blue sun—allow you to, in a recurring loop, get lost and be found. perhaps andré’s sun is a dark energy of sorts too.

andré 3000 performing at gent jazz, july 2024 + an image of andré waiting for check-in to open at schiphol—an image that exists but that i will not share here and thus an image you must imagine.