peeling mandarins

dear reader,

this is ana, peeling mandarins. it might have gone unnoticed, i am well aware, but it has been a while. life seems to happen in shorter and longer sets of whiles, some of which are simply not producing of newsletters. or life summaries. but here we are, winter and i, with two new books, an exhibition that opens in a couple of days in amsterdam, and a still fresh graduation and its outcomes.

all for now, until next time.

ana

happening

and then the wolves invite me to dance, a collaborative project (2019-2025) with six people living with schizophrenia, will be shown at bario in amsterdam between february 18 and march 1. the opening is on february 20 at 19:00 at bilderdijkstraat 186 in amsterdam with a walk-through happening at 19:30. otherwise, bario is open from wednesday to sunday from 16:00 to late.

and then the wolves invite me to dance grew out of the desire to tell stories about humanness and sameness, while recognizing that inner and outer worlds can be felt and experienced in ways many of us may never know. the book resulting from the project is now available for pre-order! the book, a self-published, hand cut, sewn and bound first edition, brings together portraits, visual interpretations of perceptions and feelings, and images made collaboratively with or entirely by the participants. it also includes excerpts from participants’ testimonies, my journals, and fragments of scientific evidence.

the book was designed by rosa francisco.

the book was launched at the bronx documentary center—where this project started in 2019—on january 21st. michelle, who is part of the project and an incredible schizophrenia activist, joined me on the stage to discuss the condition, the work, and the book. go check michelle’s brand schizophrenic.nyc!

happened

i graduated from the royal academy of art in the hague last july with a master of arts in fine art and design (specialization: photography and society). here’s the work i graduated with.

four, maybe five years ago, i learned that, genetically, i belong to a place that is not the one i grew up in. i also learned that estefânia, a great-great-grandmother of whom there are no images or other life-establishing materials, was the tie to that place my genes partially belong to. having often struggled to feel connected to the spaces i lived in, i took these discoveries as an opportunity to seek belonging. the project started, thus, as a way to think about the tensions between psychological and biological belonging. ultimately, it became a work about my very own search for belonging, during which i held conversations with myself, estefânia, and the terra (soil) i collected in the places she inhabited. these imagined dialogues resulted in and are part of three entities—of flesh and terra, the dead can dance too and anatomy of a memory.

of flesh and terra is a set of letters written from human and more-than-human perspectives that think about a process of artistic research on belonging, memory and imagination, and images and image making. the book was designed by rosa francisco. read more about it and order here.

the dead can dance too, a moving-image essay, borrows estefânia’s imagined voice to describe and think about my process of (re)search for belonging. it depicts two different phases: one in which i focused on terra as container of traces and memories, another in which i used my body as a means to connect with and look for. the impact of (the making of) images in memory creation and remembrance is also considered.

anatomy of a memory, a mixed-media installation, reconstructs some of the moments depicted in the dead can dance too. as i used my body to imagine belonging, i created a memory of having belonged. we often think back to a particular event as an integrated unit. however, our brain treats its components—what we see, feel, smell, and hear—as single elements. here, i deconstructed my memory of having belonged to rehearse and repeatedly activate that memory and thus make it solider. it was also a way to make belonging slightly more tangible, by recognizing how simple some of its ingredients can be. the visitor was invited to reflect on their own memory of belonging, or, perhaps, to start constructing it using my own contraptions, right there, at that precise moment in time.

i presented this work as artistic research at the performativity(ies) of memory(ies) interdisciplinary conference in viana do castelo, portugal. as i continue to develop some aspects of this research and its outcomes, i will work on a chapter to be included in the book spatial aesthetics of memory: place, perception, and performative experience. more soon!

seen

renee royale, fort jackson, 2023

i came across renee royale’s work in new photography 2025: lines of belonging at the moma in new york. her work is experimental, persistent, layered. time is tangible even in her stills. in landscapes of matter, for instance, as she reveals through submerging, royale tells stories of, simultaneously, slowness and urgency. she tells stories about the inevitability of the end of the world.

trenque lauquen, laura citarella, 2022

with stories nested within stories, trenque lauquen feels like watching a book, not a film. if your body is able to do so, i recommend watching the romantic-biological-ecological 12 chapters that are spread across two feature films in one go. i am tempted to assure you that you will not regret it. i saw it at lincoln film, after an insightful introduction by melissa anderson and i would sit through it again and again. it is a reminder of what cinema can do, of what narratives can do. amid all the evil, all the terribleness, these four hours were hours of tenderness and ease.

read

i just finished han kang’s the vegetarian. not a newly released book, i know, but who are we to decide when (some) things get to appear in our lives?

the vegetarian seems to be a story about a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat. the first few pages are so incredibly witty and tragically funny that i messaged a friend—listen, this book has me laughing out loud in public how weird—just to, the day after, have to amend the message and the feeling. i am not willing to ruin it for you, if you have not read it—because you must! i will say, however, that the vegetarian blurs the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the ‘atypical’, sanity and defiance, body and mind, inner and outer worlds, submission and freedom. uuf.

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.

granta books, edition 2023, translated by Deborah Smith

listening

listening with some level of obsession to fela kuti—or how to stand up against colonialist thinking and authoritarian governments and their oppressive systems and mechanisms.

fela kuti is afrobeat, the afrobeat. i fall out of time listening to him and his loops just to wake up from that deep slumber as soon as his voice is heard, as if god were a possibility. the suggestion: come as you are, dance as you never have because joy can be an act of resistance too.

fela kuti performing at orchestra hall in detroit, michigan, in 1986. leni sinclair/michael ochs archives/getty images