After living in Berlin for 2 years, we wanted to leave the city with a physical craft of ours. This zine and mostly making this zine is a way for us to say goodbye to who we were at this precise moment. We wanted to document how we were feeling, hopeless student artists in a megalopolis. This zine is very much a vomit of thoughts but all the thoughts are related to one component : capitalism.
Contributors:
Anna Lopez Ratouis @couleurclub / @annalpzrts Caroline
Georgina : @georginamortimer_
Anna Phillips Nora Holand @noraholand on instagram
Vasile
Mariana Porras : @marianaporraso / @vinegartee
Tilda by Alexa
Alexa by Tilda
Alexa is so many things. She can be and do almost anything ( if you were to ask me ). She is hard to capture, which is why I found it so hard to introduce her in this text.
Alexa is a water bottle, she’s full water (70%), which is pretty full when you think about it. Water is movement, and so is Alexa. She can be rapid, like a tide crashing into a rocky beach. She can be bubbly, like water bubbling in a pot. Just as clearly, I see Alexa in the gentle stream running down the mountain, and then the rock hard ice, strong enough to stand on in the winter. She is all this, and just like water, she is vital to survival. You can’t go three days without water. Isn’t it strange then that I went 21 years without knowing her?
Tilda is the kind of person when you first meet her, it feels like she knew you since you were a baby. She holds you tight to her heart and will never let you go. She means it. Born with a talent for manual crafts, it’s a pity she has wrists problems. God was literally telling her that she can’t handle all of that power. I have never met someone that didn’t have an ounce of bad thoughts, she might be the kindest human on the planet. No matter where you are in the world, no matter the time, she is the person that will always pick up the phone if you need her.
We decided to join forces and call our super friends for some super contributions with only one request : the piece has to come from a place of anger. Wherever that anger may spawn from : rejection, rite of passage, womanhood, beauty and sobriety. This zine for us is our metamorphosis, our way to process, into a new evolution of our own selves.
Enjoy the zine !
@gammalstrom
Holding on
I passed by the bridge where you told me about your crush and I thought of you. It made me wonder where you are right now and if this person was still your crush. You were just passing into my life and I didn’t know it then.
I’m aware that some people come in and out of our lives but it’s always difficult to know which one is going to be the next to walk through the door.
But as I’m walking by these places they used to inhabit; I’m wondering if this feeling of longing will ever fade away. Will I forget them
? Will I forget these places we used to meet?
I know now that they were passing through and I am wondering if I am too.
was always holding onto things in case it could serve me. This screwdriver has been sitting in a drawer for the past year and it made me wonder why I held onto it. Was I holding on at this life in hope it could serve me?
I got up, ready to leave this city when a flock of birds flew by, singing. It felt like the city was telling me goodbye. And I cried because it let me go.
Not only was I mourning the life that this city gave me, but also my early twenties with it. My recklessness, my impulsivity, my youth. It was all done.
It was already a memory. And the time passed.
Now I am back home, wondering if I made the right choice. Catching up with friends and telling the same tales for the hundredth time.
Coming home is bittersweet but here my life doesn’t belong to me. Here, I am my mother’s daughter and my brother’s sister. The life I have is not my own, so every night I look up to the sky and wait for the birds to tell me where my next destination will be. But the only birds I see are seagulls trapped in the city, screaming for a way out. In unison, I join them.
What do I think of when I think of art?
by nora holand
Emotion. Senses. Beauty, in the beautiful and the ugly.
Art to me is something that is created from the pure need, impulse, urge to create (and the art is also, to me, in the joy of the creation). If I believe in a God I believe in the world being created like this. As art, because this God was playing like a child and wanted to make something (“Look mom what I can do”).
This means that art to me is also love. Friendship. Sex.
Art is a couple kissing because of the need, impulse, urge to kiss. Art is a fifteen-year-old boy cutting wildflowers in the park with a scissor to give to his girlfriend, because he is young and doesn’t have the money or the guts to go into the flower shop on the corner, but he sees that they are beautiful like her. Art is a group of friends dancing together at 3 am to the last song the club is playing before the bouncer kicks them out, ignoring the lights turning on and the dance floor emptying except for them. Art is the first night with my girlfriend, heart against beating heart; careful, nervous, scared hands slowly caressing the skin under the t-shirts.
Art has no sense, no purpose, except for the desire to create and experience.
What do you think of when you think of art?
Do you think of dollar signs?
Do you create to sell, profit, earn something out of it all?
When you experience, do you consume?
You have money, so you can have whatever you want, right?
You buy a girl some drinks to try to make her feel guilty enough to resist turning her head when you kiss her. You are rejected, you are angry; you pay the bouncer to get him to not kick you out. You go home, you are lonely; you buy a hooker. The next day you send her roses, pretending that it is romantic, that you are spoiling her. You are happy with yourself, are you?
You think you can buy all of your desires. You buy expensive paintings and put them on your walls. You don’t need to know anything about art.
The thing is, as soon as you put a price tag on something, the art in it dies.
I wonder if God made any money creating you.
If we don’t know who we are, someone else can tell us who we could be.
how
capitalism destroys art and our own self-perception
One of the often-forgotten characteristics of capitalism is its ability to be self-sufficient – its own nature allows it to be so dire to the civilizations it controls that attempting to undo it would cause irreparable damage. Capitalism needs to commodify every interest, hobby, and thought. Art, I would describe as a way someone expresses themselves. I believe it is merely an example of something that was intended to combat the system itself then adopted to prioritize financial gain, suffering, and expectations. The commodification of art does many things, but two I think matter the most to this prompt.
One. It can stifle creativity. The objective becomes financial gain over self-expression. Is that necessarily bad? Good or bad becomes irrelevant when it is all about survival. Do all artists fall into the system? Given the sheer amount of people, I would confidently say no. But capitalist thinking is so deeply embedded in us because it is the only structure we’ve seen and experienced. Two. It damages communities where impressionable children are predominately impacted. We’ve learned exclusively about how to be successful within capitalistic societies – it is all that was taught in school, all that we saw in the media, and all that we
experienced in our everyday lives. Capitalism captured art in order to allow those who have already been prospering to acquire more.
In regard to self-perception within my understanding of the above framework, capitalism needs to be autonomous, able to exist solely upon itself. There are people employed to study the population and trends to then produce what they believe the population wants but a majority does not have. The portrayed of what could be motivates people to contribute to the very system that is exploiting them to ultimately overwhelm themselves to achieve a goal. I specifically chose the word overwhelm because I believe it is important to push oneself within means that protect an individual’s core values – while maintaining one’s own individuality.
”Overwhelm not only physically decays the body, but also fosters mental and emotional eroding.”
by Caroline Vasile
The level of work is destroying our bodies, or else there wouldn’t be the extent of damage that there is. By producing material that is intended to pique the interest of the majority of the population, we become susceptible to a damaged relationship with ourselves, altering self-perception. As impressionable creatures trying to decipher the best way to survive, we are trying to understand something new while still being inherently emotional. While simply trying to stay alive, it becomes effortless to forget who we are. If we don’t know who we are, someone else can tell us who we could be.
Sometimes I get mad.
When a man is staring at your mouth during an intellectual conversation. That’s annoying. It bugs me. Actually quite like a bug, insect-like, climbing all over me, distracting me from what I’m saying. Making me feel like I should be in a window.
I wrote these words after crying in a room alone at my best friend’s wedding.
I closed my note and went to dance again. I don’t drink but it was at that moment I missed it the most. I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t jealous. I was full of joy, and somehow, I never I wonder if we drink in a room full of people because it distracts us from how alone we are.
Sobriety made me realize a lot of those moments. Intense dualities of love and confusion; it makes me feel like a magician. I need to reveal my brain and make my libido disappear just to be heard, and not only seen. To be someone more than sex; a woman with intellect and an opinion. It reminded me of how I date and how I am dated.
I watched as couples danced I moved with them within them
lips touched eyes met
a reminder I'm not them a different species for now
peculiar how my mind can do that
tell my face to smile my body to dance but my eyes to cry
sometimes life can feel lonely in this body that we call woman
these features that you idealize my eyes, which you compliment my lips, where you gaze
you can’t hear me like your head is under a pillow my pillow you imply sounds heard words muffled
but what does it matter when you can wake with a woman a woman like me with eyes like these
when my lips allow you what does it matter where it will go
I could smell your cologne on the train home last night.
ADDICTED TO REJECTION
Mariana Porras
Never wanting to be in anybody’s way felt normal to me until I started questioning myself. Nowadays, I can give the weird feeling I felt in my stomach when someone would tell me to move out of their way, or to hurry up at the supermarket while packing groceries a name. It is rejection.
My name is Mariana, and I am a 22-year-old girl from Guatemala. I am also an artist. Both as a woman and an artist, rejection plays an important role in my life, as it tells me to hold back from doing certain things or tells me nothing I’ve ever painted in my life is any good. I became a perfectionist in everything I do, going out of my way to make things flawless, yet it never feels enough. I thought I was the only person who struggled with this issue until I started talking about it with my friends. People I look up to and think so highly of have said to me they don’t think their work is good enough.
So when will it ever be? Is it worth even trying if the outcome will satisfy my expectations? Now, who is putting these expectations on me? On us? We live in a world that has become extremely fast-paced, and it is easy to face the pressure of comparing oneself to an endless stream of creativity and success coming from other people. Being constantly bombarded with overstimulating content from social media, we feel rejected because creating art has become a way to make business, to be recognized. In my journey, I’ve learned that self-expression is way more important than external validation. It is a process that requires a lot of effort, and it is absolutely necessary. I wanted to change my perspective on my art creation, taking away the purpose from the process.
I started a journal of “bad art” where I release any judgment that comes from within, and I learned to let my creativity flow freely.
Of course, life is happening. Nothing can stop the hours, days, weeks, months, years unfolding before us. Even turning off the clocks and ignoring the calendar won’t stop the sun from rising and setting each day.
Maybe I should rephrase myself. I want to let life happen spontaneously again.
The rise of technology means that there is no longer a mystery to anything anymore. Everything I want to know and don’t already know; I CAN know in a matter of minutes. I can google ‘when was cordial invented’ and ‘how old is Bradley Cooper’ and ‘how is paper made’ and know the answers and more in a matter of minutes. I can look up the person I am going on a date with and find their Instagram, and in turn find out where they went on holiday last summer and which bars they like to go to and who their friends are.
I am aware that the concept of instant knowledge at our fingertips has been debated many times. It is incredible that we can know everything all at once, and in theory can educate ourselves on anything that we please.
However, it reaches a point where I cannot remember the last time I did not simply walk down the street and stumble into a coffee shop/bar/pub/restaurant without first googling the reviews/the menu/the location/looking at pictures of it from inside. This ability to know everything takes away the best bit of being a human… the act of not knowing.
Not knowing how the bar looks inside.
Not knowing what is going to be on the menu.
The fast-paced nature of things today and the shortening attention span of the population means that we want to do things in the most streamlined way possible.
We want the best, and we want it now. We don’t want to have to waste precious time and money on mediocre bars and pubs and food places and of course, I understand this logic. But I want the mystery of life back.
I want to live in a less streamlined way. I want to experience the joy of happy accidents again.
My new year’s resolution this year is to stop feeling the need figure out the unknown and to find beauty in the act of not knowing. I want to describe to someone a restaurant/pub/bar/beach that I visited instead of reflexively showing them a photo and when I am in those moments myself, I want to soak them in, instead of feeling the need to document them. I know my words will do more justice than pixels on a screen ever could.
Letting my mind wander and letting myself be bored.
Letting life unfold before me in its perfectly unplanned way
Anna Phillips
When I was 8, my grandmother passed away.
On her last conscious morning, she came to my bedroom to say hi.
I brought her breakfast and she thanked me.
She closed her eyes shortly after.
Her breakfast left untouched.
The bread went stale
The firemen came and yelled her name.
I remember looking at the glass of orange juice on the tray. It was so yellow.
She spent a week in a coma at a hospital.
For a week, distant family members I never met in my life came to say their goodbyes.
She passed away on a Saturday afternoon.
My mother said she went to the sky
On Monday, I went to school
I didn’t understand why I was supposed to go on with my life when she didn’t get to I didn’t know what to do
With my loss that felt so gigantic to me
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do
As I hang my coat next to my friend’s
I turned to her and told her my grandma passed away
