Home, Again
Home, Again
Rachel Meade Smith, Chia Amisola, and heartfelt messages
Dear reader
The red line of rear lights was endless, and between the jammed cars, scooters kept “buzzing like mosquitoes,” as our taxi driver said, a joke he repeated again and again as we snailed our way to the flat in Athens; the place we had rented for six months to test another life. It was November 17, one of the two major annual riot days in Greece, and everything was delayed except the darkness.
In the days before our move, I only slept a handful of hours. The days were filled with lifting, cleaning, walking, explaining, transporting, recycling, shipping, planning, coordinating and farewelling, so I entered the space exhausted to the core and summoned the last determination when I went up and down the three floors of stairs with all of our luggage that only fit into the taxi because we stacked it like Tetris blocks in every available space, and on ourselves.
It was not love at first sight when our new landlord greeted us in the middle of a work call and a space in bold colors: the kitchen green, the wall cabinets brown, the curtains red, turquoise and pink, the bench yellow, the entrance red, the shelves blue, and the floor a collage of stones, marble, tiles, wood and epoxy. I switched off and walked around as a zombie while he explained how things worked.
I’m in Copenhagen this weekend. Sleeping in a hotel in my hometown and doubling the alone nights for the past three years. Copenhagen is where most of my family lives. Copenhagen is where I was born. Copenhagen is where I collect wildflowers and the assembly point of my work. It is the city I am the most familiar with, where most streets bring forgotten memories. But in the evening before my trip, when I stood on our flat-wide balcony with the yellow awning and watched the daylight fade away on the distant mountains, I felt home again, this time in Greece, the sixth country I live in.
With care
Kristoffer
Wayside flowers
Notes on love is a collection of heartfelt messages.
The universe is digital review entropy.
Museum of Screens is nostalgic journey through video games.
Field notes
***
Again, again
A syllabus on the creative potentials of reuse across textiles, images, and words by the brilliant Rachel Meade Smith for the equally brilliant Syllabus Project.
Open a book and flip to three different pages. Choose a random word from each.
Go to the National Archives online catalog. Search each word, filtering for image or moving image records that are available online. Browse your results. Then choose and download at least one file for each word.
Make a still or moving image collage from your found material.
— Rachel Meade Smith
The Creation Myth of Computing
A talk/reflection/essay/dedication about ways of being and seeing with technology, delivered as a Catholic mass by Chia Amisola with bursts of smiles and laughs. I listened to it like a prayer, where the individual words and sentences fade in importance to give space for an ambience and self-reflection. Thank you, Chia.
Collections
Last week this letter was sent to 1503 inboxes. I’m keeping it donation-based and it will always be free for everyone. Currently, thirty-two people support me with a paid subscription. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Photograph by Ana Šantl.