Reflexions while skipping stones across an infinite lake,
I heard a serene rumble inside

This collection of essays for ISSUE 6 transpired during a life before and during Corona times, which mingled with and alongside these seven designers’ practices. The spirit and grit of these texts at once capture and stretch what it means to undo and then carefully reconfigure why, how, and what one has come to unknow. Likewise, the collection demonstrates how in earnest and resolve they have grappled with their urgencies and curiosities despite, and in spite of, current and past animal, earthly, human, and celestial conditions.

In the last year and a half, I have witnessed their deep commitment to understanding, articulating, and untangling the varying mechanisms at work that called upon them to design or, rather, nimbly contour the worlds they inhabit and imagine with a keen sense of response-ability. (1)

As you leaf through these pages, you may notice the interplay(s) of text and citation, where they merge, summon, and are uttered alongside stories, scripts, odes, and vignettes. Where prose and banter meet theory, meets poetry. Their voices recover the personal brazenly, whilst carefully nurturing and naming the alliances and affinities that helped shape their texts. As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has noted, “The citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.” (2)

Below are just a few drops of their essay’s essences that I can share with you.

Between abiding and aborting, Zgjim Elshani’s essay Unreal Engine conjures up an uncanny vortex of enduring dystopias that speak to the now through the lens of an unwilling conspirator, incredulous double agent-narrator, and sometimes reluctant, yet clairvoyant, fly on the wall.

Meandering from insect forms to mammalian and reptilian species and curious hybrids, Stelios Markou Ilchuk’s PERPETUAL CONNECTIONS OF UNCERTAIN FORCES and sentimental ways of viewing them collides whimsical observation and the wonder and wander of genetics, species mutation, and adaption. Together with tender and cautionary reflections, Stelios’ text also imbues the darker side of how human intervention and ruthless non-coexistence has come to shape the afterlives of the multispecies cycle.

Toni Brell’s a script for three female-born and/or identifying performers is voiced in a theatrical setting that coalesces witty and provocative dialogue with auto-theory, and an embedded sonic scape that shimmers through and above the pages. Setting the stage with an assemblage of interlocutors, their protagonists challenge gender and societal norms at work—in work, at play, and in daily conversation—that unravel power imbalances behind, in front of, and offstage.

Slowly segueing into the essay Seepage, Pernilla Manjula Philip deftly crafts autonomous yet discreetly symbiotic encounters and enduring memories that stretch across continents and time-frames. Pernilla’s storyworlds collide an amalgamation of reality and fabulation that intently seeds and harvests her sources of inspiration and support to nurture kinships of care beyond the binary.

Another afterlife is explored in Marisa Torres’s essay, Chapa de Oro – Gold Plated, or rather the residue of colonial legacies and the plunder and contamination of indigenous lands as a result of gold extraction. Marisa mines unsettling histories and ambivalent inheritances, knits poetic interludes and family oral histories with current and past accounts of how cyanide toxicity plagues the soil, water, and air; at once the source of the disappearing Sonoran vaquitas (porpoises), and the revenge of the cacomixtle (ring-tailed cats).

ghenwa abou fayad’s allah project | مشروع الله | mashrouʿ allah scrupulously dissects how the varying modalities of arabic vernacular (specifically religious expressions), are altered depending on the context, psychological state, and environment in which they occur. She dismantles these rhetorical mechanisms through modes of repetition to reveal how original meanings can change and drift, a method also known as semantic satiation. Through a refrain of bodily, aural, and visual performative gestures, ghenwa shows, in unabashed defiance, just how sinister and stealthy language can be.

Meanwhile, in CLOUDY CLOUDY IS THE STUFF OF STONES Construction Sites, Anna Bierler infuses an ecology of delicate entanglements through and with her carrier bag of words and stones. We are led through crevices of building sites and sea beds of poetry among shifting grounds that dislodge forest, ocean, and extra-terrestrial stones. Anna carefully unpacks the alchemical makeup of this solid substance as fluid agents, transmitting and caressing stories and prose of matter—that matter. We are guided to tread lightly, gently taking our next steps.

Let these words sink in and send you adrift—together with the serene rumble of Zgjim, Stelios, Toni, Pernilla, Marisa, ghenwa, and Anna’s singular and collective worlds—and perhaps you may find yourself disembarking on another shore.

Tina Bastajian
Tutor

(1) In the spirit of eco-feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s notion of response-ability as “cultivating collective knowing and doing.” Donna Jeanne Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 34.
(2) Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15–16.