Abandoned Architectures
03.06.2026

A while ago, I came across an Instagram reel that read something like: there was a moment in time where you logged off MSN and never returned.

That sentence made me feel sentimental, and it has stuck with me. It has made me think about the early 00’s and about all the online spaces we left behind without even noticing. Chatrooms, forums, websites and servers that, possibly, continued to exist long after we stopped visiting them. Their architecture remains intact, but the conversations and the life shaping it has disappeared and moved elsewhere. They’ve become abandoned architectures.

And there is something strange and unsettling about these spaces – frozen in time. Unlike physical ruins, they don’t weather or decay, but remain preserved in an endless present – waiting for visitors who will never return. Looking back at these, they almost feel like memories or dreams that somehow have become actual places.

I think this is partly why I’m drawn to the concept of liminal spaces – an emerging horror genre in games, films and internet culture. Empty corridors, waiting rooms, bathrooms, metro stations. All these are environments designed for movement, interaction and occupation, but when they suddenly are detached from their purpose and logical context they begin to feel like suspensions between reality and dream.

This photo series begins with a public bathroom I photographed back in 2024. Illuminated by a surreal blue light, the room already carried something of this dreamlike atmosphere. Using the image of the bathroom as a point of departure, I began reimagining this particular room through a series of different environments, all typically defined within the idea of liminal spaces. I wanted to let the initial room transform into a waiting room, an office, a metro station, a wellness centre, and let each image become a variation on the same question: what exactly creates the feeling we associate with liminal space?

What fascinates me is that the answer actually seems to lie less in the architecture itself than in what is missing from it. These spaces and environments offer enough reality to orient us, but not enough to settle us. They remain incomplete which leaves space for questions and for the imagination to spiral.

As such, I think these abandoned architectures stretches further in the mind than it does in the photograph as the images sort of exceed their own visual boundaries.

They become psychologically larger than they actually are.

Figures Figured 03.05.2026

A character, before anything else, must have a shape.

I have been trying to figure out three of them lately: the Maker, the Artist, and the Thinker – three figures who appear in a little fable I am currently writing on called Mino and the Stars. I know what they stand for and represent. I roughly know their roles in the story too, but as the writing slowly takes shape I’m getting more curious about how these figures move, how they hold their weight, how they react to their environment and shape it. So I’ve stopped writing a bit, and started drawing instead.

And I had an experiment in mind which was deliberately simple. I gave myself three criteria to work around in this initial stage of figuring out these figures which were: form, energy, and quality. I gave myself a stack of cardboard, a crayon, and as little time as possible, because the whole point for me was not to overthink and rationalize. Shaping these characters should be an open process, and the constraint would be an attempt to get out of my own way. I wanted to draw fast, draw minimally, commit to whatever appeared, and resist the urge to correct it. Whatever comes out of the hand is the thing I would have to work with.

And these rough and simple sketches turned out to hold real information that sat surprisingly right with me afterwards. I think they might’ve already been living in my mind, but this process seemed to push it all out in a very playful and effortless way. The Maker arrived round and grounded. The Artist restless and scattered, and the Thinker quietly balanced the big perspectives on their little body. Once they were on paper I could assign each one their attributes: this is their form, this is their energy, this is the quality they carry. My abstract markings became a starting point for the figures to reveal themselves, more or less, through the act of making them.
From drawing I moved to cardboard, and cutting the shapes out changed something. It gave the figures edges, shadow, and the materiality of things that occupy actual space. Held in the hand, turned in the light, placed beside each other in different ways, they started to feel less like sketches and more like presences. Their extra dimension added character, and they pushed back a little.

What I practiced moving through this process was creating from a place that feels honest and playful. Character doesn't always arrive through thinking. Sometimes it arrives through making, through the fast and sloppy markings, through the material, the deliberately unfinished form that leaves enough room for something to emerge. Simplicity here has not felt like a shortcut, but like a method to start figuring out these figures. Very roughly of course, but enough to write toward a new stage.

Woodwinds
03.04.2026

I’m cooking bolognese. Small dots of tomato sauce splash onto my white shirt, and a light and curious rhythm pops up in the back of my head. It is a bassoon, its sound vaporish in form, constantly shifting in shape and color. It feels like some sort of play. Like an invitation for me to move with it. I look down at my shirt, and I wiggle along to the sound of the tomato dots before I give the sauce another deep stir.

I begin to imagine smokey shapes puffed into the air from the tip of a clarinet now joining in. The shapes feel airy, improvised, and impossible to catch. And yet, there’s a lot of body to them. A thickness that almost allows me to touch them in my mind. I look towards the doorway to my living room where the light from the evening sun has thrown itself lazily across the wooden floor like a tired cat. It takes form between the shadows of plants, furniture, and waving trees outside the window–warm and golden. The light shifts constantly like the sound shapes in the back of my head. The sauce simmers.

Everything circulates in sonic patterns, playful and colorful. The thin line of a flute appears. Timidly, at first, but then it stretches and swirls dizzily around in endless loops. I stand in the kitchen, inside these loops of sound—stirring, listening, watching the light. It all repeats itself in different ways. Nothing really ends. It just lingers on.

I taste the sauce–pffft! It’s too hot.

Yearning for Spring
03.03.2026
Click to puzzle

Anders told me he had been wanting to create a puzzle for a long time.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you want to create a puzzle?”

He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he began circling something—modern life, constant notifications, attention stretched thin. When everything asks for attention, attention is pulled in too many directions at once. He mentioned Aristotle—a friend to everyone is a friend to no one—and he spoke about how difficult it is to belong fully, to give oneself to a single thing without dispersing.

His thoughts arrived in loose fragments. I was trying to understand how they worked as a whole. It’s not that I was distracted; I was listening closely, testing one idea against another, placing this thought beside that one, searching for a line that might hold them together. I was listening—and drifting—at the same time. And then I realized: this was exactly what he was talking about. It wasn’t abstract; it was happening in me. In that moment, attention itself felt like something I could reach into, handle, shape, direct, and then I understood what a puzzle could do.

Not the kind you finish for the picture, but a puzzle as practice—a space where fragments keep their edges, and yet something new emerges when they connect: a line continues, a color deepens, a form insists. A puzzle as a field where attention becomes material.

Each piece can be picked up, moved around, tested against another. You can linger with it, wait for that subtle click.

Have you ever read The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino? He describes those cities in fragments—streets glimpsed, conversations overheard—and the whole emerges not by forcing an image, but by patiently weaving these pieces together.

In a puzzle, something similar happens. Each piece remains separate, each hints at its place, yet together they open a field where patterns and relations emerge without imposing a final picture.

audiophilia_m4a03.02.2026

audiophilia_m4a grew out of an ongoing collaboration between Anders and me. The project developed through constant exchange, feedback, and changing perspectives. Often, when an idea became clear for one of us, it would feel uncertain for the other. This back-and-forth became central to the project and reflected what the piece wanted to explore: attention, responsiveness, and encounter.

We use the structure of a guided meditation not to relax the listener, but to shift attention and perception. Through spoken instructions, the listener is invited to notice changes in focus, closeness, and density. Listening becomes more physical, more precise, and more connected. We explore how sound moves between foreground and background, how perception changes with attention, and how meaning can arise through listening rather than interpretation.

The title reflects this approach. Audiophilia does not refer to audiophile culture or technical perfection, but to philia — care, attentiveness, and relation. We approach sound quality not as purity or faithful reproduction, but as sensitivity to difference. The suffix _m4a points to the everyday audio file formats through which listening now takes place: compressed files, devices, and mediated environments. Instead of searching for an ideal listening situation beyond technology, we ask how careful listening can exist within these realities.

Somatic attention inspired by the Feldenkrais Method plays an important role in the project. By bringing awareness to how the body rests, how weight is distributed, and how we are oriented in space, listening is explored as active and grounded in the body rather than something neutral or detached.

As the project unfolds, the listener moves from a more solitary inward focus into a shared space. Breath becomes the main way of sensing closeness and the presence of others. This marks a shift from listening alone toward listening as exposure and encounter.

And it is within this shift that the notion of the face appears, drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the face is not primarily a visual form, but a presence that interrupts self-contained experience and calls the subject into relation. The face represents an irreducible otherness that cannot be absorbed, understood, or merged with the self. It is an encounter that exposes the subject and destabilizes comfort, opening an ethical dimension grounded in proximity and responsibility (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961; Otherwise Than Being, 1974).
In audiophilia_m4a, the face is not shown as a character or image, but felt through sound, breath, and closeness. The familiar structure of guided meditation offers an entry point, but slowly changes as intimacy and exposure grow. As multiple breaths gather in the sound space, the listener becomes surrounded by presences that cannot be reduced to background noise. Listening begins to feel less like consuming sound and more like being addressed by it.

Today, the project continues as an open exploration of listening as an embodied and ethical practice. Through constant exchange, it reflects the very qualities it seeks to cultivate and understand, changing how Anders and I listen to sound, to each other, and to the process of making. Are we done working on this project? For now, yes or maybe not.

Mute Little Goose03.01.2026
“This life, which is such a fine thing, is not the life we are acquainted with, but that of which we know nothing; it is not the past life, but the future. With the New Year, Fate will commence treating you, and me, and everyone well, and the happy life will begin. Am I not right?”

Giacomo Leopardi

Every New Year arrives with the same question, cloaked in a new sparkle: what are you going to become now? Resolutions line up like polite demands. Improve this. Fix that. They promise transformation, clarity, progress — but they are rarely neutral wishes. They assume that life, like an object, should be optimized; that the time ahead of us must already know what it is for. A resolution is never just a desire; it is a promise of function.

Leopardi, writing with the kind of melancholy that never fully trusted happy endings, suggested something else — something more seductive: suspension. The good life, he proposed, isn’t the one we already know, or the one we’ve already lived, but the one that remains just out of reach — unknown, unfinished, and therefore still possible. So what if the most radical New Year’s wish is not to resolve anything at all? What if it is to remain unfinished?

In 2020, many of my plans fell through because of the pandemic, and I returned to being a student. I went to study illustration at Falmouth University. Instead of feeling delayed, I felt protected. I found myself in a space where not knowing wasn’t a problem to solve, but the point. During that time, I worked on a project called Mute Little Goose.

It began with artefacts and with making something that didn’t immediately explain itself. André Leroi-Gourhan once wrote that “the human hand is human because of what it makes, not what it is.” I took this to mean that we don’t always discover who we are by thinking harder; sometimes we have to make something and see ourselves reflected back in it.

I wasn’t interested in the hand as a servant to the brain, obediently executing instructions. I was curious to see what happens when the brain follows instead of leads — when thinking leaks into objects, and meaning shows up late. The longer I worked on the project, the more I noticed how obsessed we are with utility. We want things — and people — to declare their purpose immediately.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an artefact is simply a thing made by art. And art, inconveniently, implies skill, practice, and time — not efficiency. I began to observe that there is no clear line between ornament and tool. Sometimes the tool is only for show. Sometimes the decorative thing does the real work. And sometimes the most interesting objects are the ones that don’t yet know what they’re good for. As Charles Eames once said: “My dream is to have people working on useless projects. These have the gems of new concepts.”

Mute Little Goose became one of those projects — an open-ended prototype. A thought made physical. Not a solution, but a question you could hold in your hands. At one point, I imagined it becoming an ocarina — an ancient musical instrument shaped by breath and touch, whose Italian name derives from ucareina, meaning “little goose.” The idea felt intimate and slightly absurd. But the object resisted completion. It remained mute. Non-finito. And I understood that its silence was enough.

Michelangelo left many of his sculptures unfinished — not because he couldn’t finish them, but because some divine guidance hadn’t arrived yet. Non-finito as a form of faith. Which made me realize that creativity doesn’t come from mastery alone, but from incapacity — from not being able, or not being willing, to fully arrive.

When people encounter Mute Little Goose, they usually ask the same question: What is it? Or what is it for? What fascinates me isn’t the question itself, but the urgency behind it. Why do we need to know right away?

This year, my wish is not to be more productive, more disciplined, or more resolved. If Leopardi is right — if the good life is the one we are not yet acquainted with — then perhaps the most honest New Year’s wish is to remain available, to stay open.

Here I am to wish you a very happy 2026 — whatever it turns out to be. Let’s meet it slowly and stay a little longer with what we don’t yet know.

Sand 03.12.2025

I remember when I was not sand.

Before I learned the softness of crumbling, I carried form, purpose, and certainty.
I stood upright against wind and water, and I believed solidity was a kind of immortality.
But everything mankind touched eventually became sand.

And so did I.

The moment of breaking was not violent; it was almost tender, like lips brushing skin before the kiss deepens.
I felt myself loosen — fragments.
I became texture instead of structure, a sensation rather than an object.

I cling to skin, to warmth, to breath, to the inside of a mouth tasting salt after the sea.
I am what remains on the body after closeness, what refuses to be brushed away.
I have learned how to travel without direction.
I am shaped by every wind, reshaped by every touch.
I gather, disappear, then return in the next gust.

Sometimes I remember the edges that protected me from vanishing and the gravity that kept me from drifting.
I used to believe that to be whole was to matter.
Now I live in the space between the fingers that hold me, the whisper slipping through the hands that try to keep me.
There is a strangeness in being endlessly felt.
To be touched by many hands and held by none.

Is that freedom?
If I dissolve to be held, will there be anything left of me to remember?

I am sand.
I am still learning how to exist in little grains, but I remember everything.

Berghain03.11.2025
Whatsapp message, Gaetano Anders.

Coucou!

I just had a full nerd moment listening to Rosalía’s Berghain, and you are literally the only person I can share this with. There’s a moment in the song where she sings, in German, “in meinem Herzen”, and I instantly had my Mozart moment — straight into the Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute. Not because she sings in an operatic way (though she clearly does).

Mozart opens his most famous aria with:

“Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen!” (Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart!)

Emotion begins in the heart — the body produces the sound. In Berghain, Rosalía flips that order. She starts with the flame in the brain:

“Die Flamme dringt in mein Gehirn ein…” (The flame penetrates my brain…)

and only later:

“Ich bewahre viele Dinge in meinem Herzen auf.” (I keep many things stored in my heart.)

Emotion exists first as memory — and then sound pushes it into the body. The phrase carries its own cultural memory: that aria is so famous that even without knowing German or opera, people have heard it somewhere — in movies, memes, childhood cartoons, TikTok. So when the phrase appears, the body reacts before the brain identifies the reference. That’s exactly why “in meinem Herzen” works as a sonic artifact: a pre-charged sound unit that sparks recognition and sensation before interpretation.

Roland Barthes — the French theorist — gives us a name for this effect: the grain of the voice,

“the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.”

Grain is not what language means, but what language does — the physical effect of sound.

In “in meinem Herzen”: how mein opens, how Herz cuts, the drama is inside the texture of the word itself. Barthes writes that grain appears

“when melody works on language — the voluptuous pleasure of its signifier-sounds.”

Rosalía isn’t referencing Mozart’s plot; she is activating language as texture — in this case, German — to trigger recognition in the body. For Barthes, this is the difference between:

• pheno-song → message, narrative, genre
• geno-song → the voice as body

If we listen only through meaning, nothing moves. But when grain takes over, the body becomes the listener. We feel sound before we understand it. Which is exactly the point of a place like Berghain: music is made to hit the flesh. Barthes even calls it

“an erotic relation to the body of someone who is singing.”

Opera voltage inside club bass — and the body reacts. Barthes also says grain “will baffle the law of culture” — meaning strict hierarchies fall apart. Opera is supposed to belong to the theater. Techno to the underground. Rosalía merges them. That’s why this move feels radical and pop at the same time.

It also reminds me of Franco Battiato, the Italian songwriter who sang in multiple languages and treated them as channels of light, reaching for metaphysical transcendence through sound. And Rosalía’s upcoming album is titled LUX — Latin for light.

She has said she will sing in 13 different languages. I’m very curious to hear whether she continues treating language not as a fixed identity, but as sound technology, a place where cultural memory and physical experience collide inside pop.

And the craziest part? I came to write all of this because of one single phrase: in meinem Herzen.

I hope you will enjoy, my dear Anders.

Creative Madness03.10.2025

From the walls of prehistoric caves to the flicker of a contemporary video installation, human beings have always left their marks, sounds, and gestures in the world. It's an instinctive urge to materialize and share ourselves. Could it be that this thing we call art is not so much about beauty, or even meaning, but rather about a need to process our inner life and make it tangible? To touch and be touched? To move and be moved? To know and be known?

I've been thinking about art as a coping mechanism—a way to work through what cannot otherwise be easily understood or carried. This thought took shape in my mind as a pentagon: a five-sided model that maps the emotional patterns I see repeating in creative practice. It's not a formula, but a rhythm. A cycle that unfolds differently throughout life, always beginning with something unresolved and gradually becoming something transformed.

The pentagon represents five emotional states in a creative process: trauma, madness, creativity, relief, and love. Each corner flows into the next, forming a cycle rather than a linear path.

Trauma is a state of silence—a stillness that prevents something from being said or done. This is where the unsolved rests, where a problem, concern, or wondering stays buried, not yet ready to emerge. At some point, this stillness begins to shift. It moves toward madness—an unpredictable cracking of silence that activates restless energy. Madness here isn't clinical, but describes the eruption of something that refuses to stay contained. It's movement, often instinctive and urgent. This movement opens up a creative space. The need to give form to what we feel becomes a way to channel the eruption. It manifests as material practice—words, colors, sounds, gestures. A doing that translates inner chaos into something concrete and external. This creative act can lead to relief. The feelings that were once trapped inside now exist outside of us in some material form. They're no longer only ours to hold internally, but become something we can look at, analyze, and reflect upon. There's a sense of breathing out.

Eventually, we might arrive at love—a state where we can look back at both our wound and our work without terror. Love here means a kind of peace, a new perspective that allows for growth and movement forward. The cycle doesn't end there. It starts over with new concerns, different motives, manifesting in new forms. Questions keep arising, and we keep making things in response.

When I look at art history through this framework, I see less of a grand narrative of styles and movements, and more a collection of attempts—sometimes urgent, sometimes playful, always deeply human—to make the invisible visible and give shape to what's difficult to grasp. Francisco Goya, in his Black Paintings (1819–23), covered the walls of his own house with grotesque, haunting images. Saturn devouring his son. Witches, demons, faces emerging from darkness. He painted not for exhibition but for himself, directly onto plaster, as if working through an inner chaos—perhaps an attempt to externalize the fear and isolation he experienced in his later years. Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) seems to vibrate with a kind of panic that feels both personal and strangely universal. Frida Kahlo paints her own body split open, pierced, broken—yet her gaze remains steady, as if the act of painting itself offers a way to reclaim something. Van Gogh's turbulent skies might not be symptoms of instability, but rather attempts to make turbulence tangible through deliberate, repeated brushstrokes.

In more recent work, Felix Gonzalez-Torres poured grief into piles of candy, inviting strangers to participate in mourning his lover lost to AIDS. The work becomes a way to translate something deeply personal and overwhelming into a shared, material form.

Art tends to move outward. It doesn't stay contained. Björk's Vulnicura (2015) is heartbreak given sonic form—an album she described as an open wound. By making it external, she makes it something others can encounter and recognize. Later, with Utopia (2017), she shifts toward flutes and birdsong, creating textures that feel more spacious and tender. Together, the two albums seem to trace the pentagon's arc from rupture toward something softer and more open.

The pentagon isn't prescriptive, and it doesn't belong only to people who call themselves artists. It might apply to anyone who has felt the need to scribble something down, hum a melody, or make something with their hands. It suggests that making things isn't necessarily a hobby or a luxury, but perhaps a fundamental way humans process what's otherwise hard to hold or understand.

For me, making music has been a way to work with melancholy—to give it structure and turn it into something external that I can engage with differently. I've hesitated to share this work, worried about being reduced to that melancholy. But the pentagon reminds me that the important part is the movement—the shift from one state to another. Creating isn't about fixing the self in place, but about staying flexible, translating experience, and finding new angles of understanding.

In this sense, art functions as a tool and creativity as a method—a material way to move through fog toward something clearer. It becomes a way of knowing, of engaging with the world on terms that feel more accessible. A human capacity that we all seem to carry in different forms.

Palm To Eye03.09.2025

Your heart will change
In shape
With love in mind

But you won’t be there
To see
With palm to eye

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