Goodbye, Mom
Turn your head towards the sun
Dear reader,
»February. Dear all. A sad month,« reads the subject line in the last email I received from my grandparents, my mom’s parents. As usual, they leave the email body empty. The only thing accompanying the subject line is a single A4 PDF containing photos with coloured borders and quirky captions. My grandparents have sent these diary-style digital zines for the past four years, documenting the shifting seasons in their garden, driftwood constructions, and special family occasions. I’m always happy to receive them. This time, though, I cried before opening the email.
On February 21st, my mom passed away.
My grandparents’ letter included a photo from my mom’s funeral with Uno, Ana, and me beside the coffin, and another of my siblings and me around my mom’s bed, taken by her caretaker on February 14th. My mom was exhausted, in pain, and could barely talk, so we moved the dinner table into her bedroom and ate by her side. Before saying goodnight, we listened to a lullaby she used to sing to us as kids. It was touching and felt like a goodbye. Still, I crumbled when my sister, a week later, called to tell me that our mom was dead.
The funeral was at Gilleleje Kirke, the church where my mom had served as a priest for a quarter of a century. The priest who led the funeral was an old friend of my mom. They had known each other since high school, where they worked together on a student magazine. She told how my mom took initiative and followed through. How she opened the church for literature, gathered funds and food for those in need, unfolded the story of the Jews hiding in the church attic, and took the confirmands on week-long walks.
In my grandparents’ letter, there were photos but no captions. That makes sense to me; I’m struggling to describe my mom’s death in words. I borrow from the priest and my grandparents, and retell facts. I’m not yet ready to open the document in my notes app titled »Memories of living while my mom is dying.« Maybe I’m not yet settled on what I feel. Or maybe I’m trying to keep my mom alive in my mind a little longer by avoiding the conclusion, like the book you don’t want to end.
It was my mom’s belief that a funeral should move from dark to bright. I’m certain that she would have loved the symbolism of the first spring flowers, the white snowdrop and the yellow winter aconite, popping up on the day of her funeral after a long and cold winter in Denmark.
February was a sad month. It was also the month when my mom found relief from the unbearable pain she had been fighting for years. She looked so relaxed when I arrived at the chapel. Like her sickness had washed away. She looked young again and at peace. I held her cold hand and felt her presence. She is inside me. I felt her again when I walked along the shore where she lived. The sand was wet and heavy, and the wind came straight in my face. I cried and stretched my arms.
With care,
Kristoffer
𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧
Kendal Beynon & Sam Mercer: Connection Established
Kendal Beynon is an artist and researcher. Sam Mercer is an artist, curator and producer. Together they are putting on Connection Established, an exhibition in London that feels like a physical extension of this newsletter.
What is Connection Established?
Connection Established is a love letter and a rabbit hole into alternative spaces online, be that forums and wikis or personal homepages and poetic sites. We’re trying to highlight how DIY and alternative publishing parallels a world of the digital handmade, with a real focus on autonomous infrastructures (Varia & In-Grid), web communities (MelonLand & Neocities) and the vernacular of these spaces, whether that is the visual cues that rule the communities, or the shared lore developed over time. This exhibition shows how experimentation and play can enter our contemporary digital landscape.
Why did you decide to put it on?
There is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of our web. We’re all being watched, algorithms rule our feeds, and frankly, a lot of this content sucks. Connection Established is trying to imagine what the internet could be by showing that there are other ways to approach being online. We return to the original ethos of the internet community, and how there is a shifting percentage of internet users who want to build something non-extractive, that seemed to be prevalent in earlier, unfiltered iterations of our online lives. It could be easy to quickly rule this show as a nostalgia trip, or the idea of going back to a heavily romanticised era of the internet, but in reality it engages with the ideas of autonomy and agency in a landscape that is so fiercely governed by big tech companies and the monopolising infrastructures that exist within them.
Who or what inspired you?
There are a lot of really exciting projects within this alt web space, your own Internet Phone Book being one of them. I grew up with zero restriction around my internet use (it was the early 2000s) and will forever be driven to the so-called ‘weird’ spots online. You can not expect someone who grew up deep diving into ghost sightings and MySpace glitter badges to just denounce all of that. Mix that with a love of zines and tinkering, and you basically have this show.
Connection Established is running until June 7 at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. If you go, please send photos to me.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.
Field notes
1.
time—finding. I’m drawn to this personal blog mixing ambient sound recordings with intimate reflections.
2.
Stillness.digital. And this blog by Henry Desroches. Here is a taste: »computer, Show Me Less Like This. show me Parisian streets and their denizens, show me futurist art and central american architecture. show me black forests and crystal pools, steady wildlife and bad poetry and confused yellow cabs. computer, show me the agonies of Men in love!«
3.
IF’s Retrofuturist Roots. I stumbled upon this meta-reflection of Naive Yearly 2024 from someone who has engaged with the online texts. I miss putting this together. If things go well, the next edition will take place in early 2027.
4.
Call for Participation. Artlab (Due, Mar 9), Solar Futures (Due, Mar 15), Cursor Mag (Due, Mar 15), Time to Listen (Due, Mar 15), Research Revival Fund (Due, Mar 18), Permeable Barrier (Due, Mar 22), PIFcamp (Due, Apr 5), Are.na Annual (Due, Apr 20), and Antifreeze (Due, N/A).
5.
Poetic Web Calendar. Folder Poetry Party (Mar 8, NYC), Internet Infrastructure Walking Tour (Mar 8, London), Tech Support (Mar 10, LA), Neocities Coding Night (Mar 17, Rotterdam), Email Debt Forgiveness Day (Mar 31, online), The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam), Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin), Parameter (May 29-30, Ljubljana), and INC Exit Fest (June 24-26, Amsterdam).
𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊
Readers’ Corner
This one was so great: https://personalsit.es/. The idea that “nobody blogs” or has personal sites is so funny! And interviewing Manuel Moreale - he manages Blogroll, which has so many sites, too! Getting back to being curious and finding these sites is so fun! I wrote about it here: https://sethw.xyz/blog/2026/02/17/taste-vs-computers/
— Seth
i am very grateful for your newsletter, if only because i wanted to submit to needlebound and am now reminded that this must happen today, but also for other reasons. sunday mornings often start with a smile now!
— Holly
long-time reader, first-time email-er! i’m writing to share a workshop i’m hosting in brooklyn, ny in two weeks (kristoffer: today!). folder party party (the workshop) will be a play test of prompts and tools for using a computer folder as a gathering place. we’ll use a tool i built that lets you turn a folder of files on your computer into a spatial, rearrangeable website without needing to know any code. i have a few more spots open.
i’m reaching out to audiences who i think will be generous and curious collaborators/users/testers, which is certainly your readership! i’ve been plugging away at this “folder party” tool in a tiny group, and i’m very excited to see how it might grow in a larger setting. i think the whole point of building tools is to do so for/with other people; it’s inherently relational work.
— Lizz
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
Wayside flowers
Send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.