Amanda-Draft-1 by Studio Nikos Stephou

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AMANDA

The Building Institute

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Sepideh Karami

is an architect, writer, researcher, and lecturer in architecture at the University of Edinburgh, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). Karami completed her architecture education at Iran University of Science and Technology (MA,2002), Chalmers University in Sweden (MSc, 2010), and Architecture, Critical Studies at KTH School of Architecture (PhD, 2018). Since completing her first degree, she has focused on teaching, research, and practice in different international contexts. Her work encompasses artistic research, experimental methods, and interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture, performing arts, literature, and geology, informed by an ethos of decolonization, minor politics, and criticality from within. Karami has presented, performed, and exhibited her work at international conferences and platforms. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Samantha McCulloch

is a writer currently based in Amsterdam. Her novella Lagoon was the winner of the inaugural First Drafts series and is forthcoming with Kunstverein Publishing. Her prose has appeared in artists’ books and exhibition printed matter.

Olga Micińska

is a visual artist currently based in Amsterdam. Micińska is a graduate of the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Also trained as a woodworker, she collaborates with craft studios of various domains. Recently she initiated The Building Institute, an experimental and non-formal organization engaging with diverse questions concerning the subjects of labor and technology, and aiming to strengthen the position of women in the field of technical construction work.

Madeleine Morley

is a writer currently based in Berlin and originally from London. Her words have appeared in The New York Times, The Observer, Fast Company, Dazed & Confused, and many more. Most of her writing focuses on art, design, tech, and culture. www. madeleine-morley.com

Nikos Stephou

graduated from the Graphic Design department of Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, in 2017. As a graphic designer, he works with identities, printed matter, and visual research for social design. Stephou has worked as an art director for multiple foundations and art projects, and co-founded the community platform and record label Honest Electronics and the yearly festival The Gathering, both in Cyprus.

Maria Toumazou

is based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Toumazou recently graduated from Professor Haegue Yang’s class at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, after receiving her BA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths College, London, and her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow. In 2013, she co-founded Neoterismoi Toumazou (Neo Toum), a project space and an art collective based in Nicosia. Neo Toum’s interdisciplinary program brings together poetry, performance, music, fashion and object-art. Toumazou is also the co-founder of the publishing imprint MARIA†. editions based in Nicosia and New York.

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Table Of Contentſ Foreword

Maria Toumazou

Frances’s Threads

Samantha McCulloch

The Guild

Olga Micińska

Thus Spoke Plankton

Sepideh Karami

The Haunting of Epson

Madeleine Morley

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Amanda is brought together by The Building Institute (TBI), a non-formal organization

which intends to emancipate the vital knowledges dwelling in the craft domains, and to unpack diverse questions related to technology and the means of production. TBI combines art’s speculative competences with the grounded practice of manual labor, manifesting its objectives through educational activities, exhibitions, and publications.

Maria Toumazou

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lgas Amanda was first a piece of clothing— not for wearing, but for exhibiting a representation of a female universal necessity garment. Amanda shares its name with a fit model from a fashion house, whose body is used as a standard measure for in-house sizing. At first glance, Amanda looks like period clothing: inflexible and starched, destined for life on display. The cloth’s threads are woven in strips, arranged by color, except for those leftover and uncut, pointing downwards. If worn on a body in motion, they’d dangle softly around the thighs and crotch. Depending on the speed of walking, they’d brush lightly on the skin, tickling. Amanda rests on glass panes, like the ones lying around printmaking studios, cold and ready to receive the heat of mixing inks. Under the panes sit loose sheets of latex and prints of weaving patterns. All these together feel like a book. A book on how we may populate places of making during production, to allow space for imagination and ambivalence. *

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FOREWORD

This book is inspired by Tradeswomen, a quarterly magazine for women in blue-collar work. A grassroots effort published during the 1990s, its pages are filled with heartfelt content from and for the minority of women working in non-traditional jobs. Among the contributions count support group columns, letter exchanges, poetry, and investigative journalism. The Editor’s Letter—a standard of every issue—provides urgent legislative updates for female blue-collar workers. In 1994, Jane Gilbert’s address to the Maine Tradeswomen’s Network Conference reads: “You’ve all heard the analogy of the glass ceiling that keeps women from making it to the top in professional and paraprofessional jobs…well, in our industry, it

SCDC CCCCC CY CY FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE FWE is not a glass ceiling that kept us out, it is a cement floor. But, there’s good news—the cement is cracking!” Within these pages we read Samantha’s “Frances’s Threads,” about the inner life of a weaver, unfolding on a sinking island, its grey cement pillars giving way, “happening slowly, so slowly it’s almost soothing.” There is Sepideh’s “Thus Spoke Plankton,” where the focus is on molecules traveling in water, polluting grand narratives. In Madeleine’s “The Haunting of Epson,” forgotten union stories are delivered through technologies whose predecessors had once made human bodies obsolete. Olga’s photo series, “The Guild,” features portraits of her apprentices and other builders associated with her wood workshop, an organization that funds artistic practice in exchange for labor. Set in spaces of production, the body and mind interchange in ghostly presence through different periods in time. The architectures of crammed, disintegrating contexts do not exhaust the possibilities of their use, leaving ways for subjects to lead as bodies of productive ambivalence. It was after reading these stories, months after I settled in my new studio, that I realized the selection of works I had installed on the entry walls—a cross sculpture, up high, above the kitchen table, and a depiction of a female torso across it— surfaced as mimesis. The cross is made of leftover cut aluminum window frames and melted water bottles. The drawing across it takes after a fashion editorial, focusing only on the face of the model and the screen-like glasses that hide them behind a reflective mask. The local workshops I frequent have both of these elements as canon: the cross

advertised upon entry and/or the sensual photographs of female models. In both cases, bodies are sacrificed under the weight of cultural ideals, receiving their multiplied tragic exposure within unchallenged, normative spaces of work.

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Samantha McCulloch

FRANCES’S THREADS

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have thought of writing to Frances. I lie on the paving by the water’s edge sunning myself and I think of her threading the heddles. In my letters, I will tell her that I live in a small apartment on an artificial island overlooking the water. I will tell her that the island is sinking and that it’s all happening slowly, so slowly it’s almost soothing. The water is gaining in increments not perceptible to the naked eye. I do not mean to be obtuse, I only mean to pique her interest, which has historically been difficult to do. I go to work and come home on the ferry and then the train. I work at an old paper mill that was—years ago when the city started to change—converted to artists’ studios. Here, the passageways are lit by scant florescent lights and the walls are bare, save the scuffs and marks from the scraping parts of objects. At the studios, I assist a relatively well-known artist who has a retrospective exhibition coming up. The artist comes into the studio infrequently. When she does come in, I worry for her clothes, which look decadent and expensive. Cashmere, fog linen, crushed and wild silk. Yet the artist manages to leave without so much as a faint trace of chalk dust on her garments. I source materials and objects like plush toys and used crocodile leather mules and then I make the works, standing at the tall desk overlooking the mill’s parking lot. The artist takes the mules into her soft hands and holds them up for inspection. “They are,” she says, “sufficiently worn.”

As I ride the train back and forth, I look out the window. The verdant fields are wet and green and long. There, cows roam like bruises on the land. The animals suffer perennial wet hooves as the warp of the ground and the weft of the water soaks outwards and rises up. In my small apartment, I have a desk by the window with a view to the water. The desk is simple, uncluttered. There is just my laptop and a plastic cup with pens and pencils. It has been unthinkably hot for the past month and the close atmosphere has precipitated my dysphoria, my conviction that I am not whole but shot through with crosshatched lines. I have worked hard to keep my dysphoria at bay, but, since leaving the school, it has reared its head, especially during the twilight hours and in the heat. These days, I feel especially formless and without clear demarcation. When I was at the school, I was threading the warp through the heddles and beating the weft down with momentum gained in repetition. These actions made me feel like I was forming something, if not myself. Frances no longer weaves; she paints fabric. I know this because I check her social media, especially at night when I toss and turn in the hot room, the sheets damp and cloying. She renders the folds and patterns with delicate and then bold brushstrokes. In one image she wears her hair in a loose bun and in another, the tattoo on the back of her knee is partially visible below the ripped hem of her shorts. As for the paintings, I can only speculate as to her process for producing the

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works. Perhaps she lays the fabric on a flat surface and translates the structure of its weave onto prepared linen. Perhaps she works from images that shine blue on her phone. Frances’s painted pictures are not hyperreal but they carry the sensible quality of fabric, especially fabric that has faded in the wash, which might be fit for use as a rag. I did consider the possibility that she weaves the fabric she paints, but if I look carefully at images of the paintings—if I zoom in with my thumb and index finger—the texture suggests the fabric is industrially produced. It is summer there now, as it is here— where Frances lives and where we went to school not a year ago—and I imagine the air in her studio is humid. There, she brings the back of her hand to her damp brow. She lies on the cool cement floor of the studio, rocking her knees. She paces. I wonder how the heat effects the drying cycles of her paintings. I wonder if the heat makes the medium more or less forgiving. * Sharp needles of winter sun streamed through the windows of the workshop and spilt onto the wooden shelves that housed the completed cloth. Snow settled over the sleeping world, extending out over salted paths like a pale winding sheet. The ash wood looms stood in rows. Some were old, some were new. I wanted an old loom. I coveted old things. I found a loom that was sufficiently worn and Frances sat beside me.

I often watched Frances work at the loom. I perfected the art of looking at her distantly, without making it obvious that I had fixed my attention on her, though in retrospect, I am sure she felt herself examined. This would not have been a novel sensation for her. She had an imposing beauty. Curly dark hair fell just below her shoulders. Sometimes, she wore her hair up in a tortoiseshell claw, especially when she was working at the loom. Her clothes were simple, though not without flourish. She wore a leather belt with an ornate buckle around her high-waisted jeans. Her clothes were second-hand—she emphasized this when I asked after certain items. Her outfits gave the impression that she had decided upon them hurriedly but despite this, or maybe because of this, they were conspicuous. I was far more effortful and planned my outfits methodically, trying on various options before settling on one. But her beauty was not so much in her appearance as in her gestures, which were smooth and then uneven. Frances worked as a docent a few times a week at the museum in the city. Sometimes, I would go to meet her after her shifts. While waiting for her to finish, I would look out through the floor-toceiling glass windows at the museum’s courtyard, at its dark forest greens, its shades of silver and little darts of red. Frances and I would walk after her shifts. We did not speak much as we strode out, up past the museum and toward the river where rowers sliced channels in the water.

1 Gerhart Hauptmann, “The Weavers,” in Plays: Before Day-

break, The Weavers, The Beaver Coat, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Carolina Molina y Veidia (New York: Continuum, 1994).

2 Hauptmann, “Weavers.”

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Frances kept patterns for cloth in her head like a secret. I was precise about following the draft notation and my hands worked deliberately over the warp. I was deliberate in all aspects of my life. Frances was accidental; she welcomed snags and errors and made them appear purposeful. We were encouraged to articulate our process and approach before the class to Ms. O, the weaving instructor. Frances resented this demand and sat sullen and silent. She tended toward figurative compositions that seemed to defy the geometry of woven construction. She wanted to depict and outline and describe with thread, that was all. Unlike my minimal cloth works for which I provided elaborate justification, Frances’s compositions were elaborate and without justification. With a kind of heft, they described scenes, mostly interiors and some landscapes: the slanted leg of a chair, the curvature of a window, a meadow tossed in braying wind.

Ms. O floated up and down the aisles and could spot an incorrectly threaded warp from any distance. Sometimes, she stood at the helm of the workshop beside a long wooden bench where we placed our finished cloth works for inspection. Her silver hair was like a single-ply warp. It was almost as if she had cultivated her hair to reflect her craft. “The craft’s taken over her identity,” Frances observed. “It’s sad.” I did not think it was sad at all. I thought it was moving but I outwardly agreed with Frances. Frances told me about a dream she had had in which she gave Ms. O a haircut. In the dream, she threaded the offcuts of Ms. O’s hair through the heddles, wove a cloth and gifted the weave to the teacher along with a snide note.

We sat at the benches, crooked and bent, threading the heddles and biting our tongues when the threads got snared and caught by the nails on the warp beams. Weaving is not unlike ballet. Years before I learned to weave, I was a dancer. I came to haltingly take pleasure in how the sport affected my posture, how it imposed on my body. I remember sitting with my feet in witch hazel, the blisters stinging, the papery skin folded back.

In Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 play The Weavers, the individuals are secondary to the collective. In the workshop, there is the loud murmur of looms humming like a swarm of bees.1 There is the sound of the beater on the warp, like the beating wings of birds. The weavers are hunched, subservient. They are creatures of the loom, their knees bent with much sitting. The manufacturer Dreißiger inspects the cloth. Too broad, too narrow; here snagged, there taut.

During the year of weaving with Frances, my body ached as I bent over the loom. I submitted to the machine. The posture came naturally enough to me. But Frances resisted her loom, she hit and swore at it. Once, she kicked the cross-beam with her square-toed boot. She grew to resent her loom and Ms. O.

We read the play in class—each of us spoke the words of a weaver. Ms. O did not want us reading alone. She wanted us to read in chorus. And so we sat at our looms and recited the play over the course of a number of mornings. Afterwards, we discussed the text.

:+& :+& :+& :+& :+& :+& :+& :+ “We are different,” Frances said, “we own the instruments of our production.” “But are we so different?” I pressed Frances. “I suppose it’s a matter of degrees,” she said, “we are neither entirely different to the weavers nor entirely the same.”

Ms. O was invested in questions of labor and production. She was conscious of the fact that our products would escape us when they went out into the world, pinned to white walls, or displayed in glass cases, the bright lights flooding the substrate leaving no part of the surface area in obscurity. She encouraged us to explore other avenues for understanding our craft. She was not interested in our unadulterated submission. Ms. O was a member of a weavers’ guild, which comprised a number of established artisans who lived in the city. Inexplicably, Ms. O took a liking to Frances and me, and half-way through the term she invited us to a guild meeting. We gathered in Ms. O’s warm sitting room, which comprised simple furniture, an ample rug and a roaring hearth. Frances wore a long-sleeved black dress with thick wool stockings and joined a few of the artisans outside in Ms. O’s courtyard smoking. The other artisans asked her questions about her craft. Frances provided her answers with quiet confidence, her eyes doing the dance of offering some suggestion of affinity and then withdrawing.

I stood beside her elbow as she smoked, but I felt spare without a cigarette and a few moments later I went inside and examined Ms. O’s library instead. There I found an array of titles that I took from the shelves and leafed through with pleasure. We gathered in the sitting room as the meeting proceeded. Members sat on benches and on the rug and drank red wine. There was much talk of semantics. Was guild the right term? What about trade union or netting? I cautiously offered my thoughts on the naming of their organization. I felt that guild carried antiquated associations and that netting spoke to the supportive structure they were interested in maintaining. I spoke about weaving, not just as craft, but as a mode of understanding relations, both social and material. The night concluded about an hour later when the bleary-eyed members began to yawn and stretch. After we left Ms. O’s, Frances and I walked the long path to the bus stop in silence. I suggested we stop for a drink at a nearby bar but Frances shook her head. We sat beside each other on the bus, winding down the white-dusted road and over the frozen river, back to the housing block where we lived beside the school. I looked out the bus window at the city lights glowing in the night. * During the transition to spring of that year, I spent my time jotting down notes in a pale blue notebook I had purchased from the stationary store in the city.

3to Exhaust Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, The End of Oulipo? An Attempt a Movement (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013).

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I found moments between combing and preparing yarn to record my observations. I sat out in the sun and rolled up my trousers, exposing my bare legs to the warming light. My preferred spot to sit was on the flight of stone stairs leading up to the textile workshop, which were flooded in light in the mornings. I soon found myself intimidated by the space on the page. I was not used to all that freedom after my time at the loom. I was frightened. In the evenings, I read weaving instruction manuals mostly—though you could obtain an instruction for most labors—even writing. I found though, that programmatic edict helps with honing one’s craft only to a point. I tried to impose limits on myself. Frances suggested I try some Oulipo techniques. I wrote a paragraph without the letter “t.” I wrote a number of pages without the letter “e.” During this period of note taking, I would go out for walks and my breath steamed on the cold air of the spring night. As I walked the perimeter of the school, I looked up to the warming yellow glow of the workshop windows. The weavers would still be there no doubt, hunched over and beating their pictures into place.

Frances and I spent most days in the workshop together and she seemed to tolerate me more than others, perhaps because I asked relatively little of her. The other weavers, who themselves knew her only remotely, told me that her distant manner should not be taken personally. Though if I am honest, I was quietly furious about her withdrawal. I heard from one of the weavers that she had been attending the guild meetings at Ms. O’s house without me. She had become quite involved in articulating their organizational codes. I kept my distance in

class, though she would not have noticed. Our intimacy—characterized by spaciousness and cultivated at a remove—was beginning to take its toll and I found myself irritable and sour. Then, one evening in mid-spring of that year, I asked her to join me for dinner down the road after class. To my surprise, she accepted my invitation. It was a decadent meal. We sat at a table in the dim restaurant. The table stood beside a large bay window that looked out onto the wet street. A starched white cloth was attached to the table with metal clips. In the middle of the table was an arrangement comprising a burning flame and an amber glass bottle holding a single plastic flower. We shared a carafe of wine and a generous serving of pasta and clams. She told me a little of Ms. O’s guild. She was characteristically dismissive of it. “Why do you attend if you find it so tedious?” I asked. She changed the subject. We spoke then a little about the other weavers and their compositions. We spoke about the shifting patterns of weather, ever more extreme. For a time, our conversation flowed as it had not before and there was, in the space between us, a thawing. But the evening ended abruptly when she looked me in the eyes and said, “I’ve had enough now. I’d like to go home.” Her eyes were a burning cold blue and for a moment they carried some semblance of feeling, some acknowledgment of our strange closeness. And then she was standing up and shimmying into her brick red coat. The next day, when I arrived at the workshop, she hardly looked up from her loom. Her intensified coldness unsettled me.

41657.Diego Velázquez, The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne,

:+& :+& :+& :+& :+& :+& :+& :+ “Is everything alright?” I asked, and I startled myself as I reached out to touch her shoulder, gently. “What do you mean?” she said, perplexed, looking sideways at my hand. I felt foolish for having inferred more than indifference from her.

We sat quietly and I focused on a tangle of threads in my weft that had caused, in another part of the weave, a strain on the matrix of the cloth. Then, one day and quite suddenly, Frances stopped coming into the workshop. I found out from the other weavers that she had gone off on a cross-country road trip. She had, the other weavers said, fallen hastily in love. She wrote to Ms. O excusing herself for a number of weeks. I was hurt not to have been told about the lover or the trip, though I am not sure what I expected. As was my way, I kept my offence to myself and sat punishingly bent over a plain weave I had been working on for some months. Ms. O encouraged me to try twill, satin or tubular. She could not understand my stubborn preference, when more elaborate options were available to me. As I constructed the weave, I imagined Frances in an open car—her head thrown back, her hair taken up by the hot wind of the desert, the sun stroking the back of her tanning shoulders and arms. To my surprise, she sent me an email with an image attached. The email did not give much away, only that she had come across a striking tapestry gathering dust at a flea

market. It was a two-ply yarn reproduction of The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne, but the tapestry was tattered and in need of repair.4 In the bottom right corner of the picture, the spinner’s long arm and hand was almost entirely unraveled. I waited for Frances to return from her trip but she kept delaying the date. It was the end of summer and I had packed up my room and was preparing to move away. I had been offered an assistantship at an artist’s studio aboard. The day before I was scheduled to leave, I went to the school to say goodbye to Ms. O and to the weavers, hoping to see Frances who was scheduled back from her trip. They told me there that Frances had once again delayed her return. She had taken a detour past the swamps and was expected only next month. * When I wake up, I think of writing to Frances. But as I get up to brew my morning coffee, I shed the desultory unreality of sleep. The time I spent abroad at the school feels like another age entirely, the worries I tended to distant and immaterial. And yet, and yet it stays lodged in the body, much like the posture adopted at the loom. I sit drinking my coffee by the window. The mainland is blue in the distance and I watch as commuters stream on and off the ferries. There are tourists too. They take photographs of the concrete buildings rising from the water, perhaps to exhibit evidence of these future worlds on their profiles.

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I take the ferry to the mainland to work at the studio for a couple of hours. There are upcoming deadlines for the retrospective exhibition that will open in a month at a gallery in the east of the city. I will go to the opening and speak about what it is to be the hands that made the works. My name will appear nowhere in the show, for which I am glad. I have received compensation, though admittedly meagre. I do not regard what I do for the artist as art. I regard it as some other occupation for which I, as yet, cannot describe with sufficient clarity. At the studio, I knot a rope from strips of discarded garments to form a small part of an elaborate installation, which, I am told, addresses questions of labor and gender.

In the evening the heat is particularly absorbent, like blotting paper. I walk out past the pillars, past the children’s small fires and I move in the direction of a café on the reclaimed rubble of the island. Here, I spend certain evenings drinking too much acidic wine and watching the water and the mainland in the distance.

In the late afternoon I return to the island on the ferry. I watch as children sail over on rafts made of driftwood, put together with faded twine. They camp out on the concrete banks of the island. Mosquitos bite their ankles and the bites develop into welts. The children catch herring and broil the fish on small fires below the spartan pillars of the buildings.

The bow doors of the ferry lower to a ramp and a little girl rushes from the crowd towards her. The woman takes the girl up into her arms—cradled, safe. A man follows the girl and pecks the woman on the lips. I feel foolish and embarrassed as I become aware of the fact that I have not been particularly discrete. The man looks over at me and the woman whispers something in his ear. I turn my gaze to the hot asphalt and walk back toward the café where a table has just become available.

Here on the island, the bird song sounds like high frequency signals. When I first arrived, I went around asking people why the birds sounded like this. Nobody knew what I meant. They could not remember the cadence of birds.

I notice a woman walking along the promenade. She carries herself with the purpose of Frances. I watch as the woman walks the length of the promenade back toward the ferry stop. Without thinking, I begin to trail her. She stops where the ferry docks and stands waiting, shifting gently from one leg to another.

Olga Micińska

THE GUILD

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Sepideh Karami

THUS SPOKE PLANKTON

Oily Stories and Decolonial Storytelling

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he boat drifts through Musa Bay in the Persian Gulf. Small islands shrink as the boat approaches the harbor. Thousands of waves poke the islands. Birds take flight to the sound of oil tankers looming on the horizon. Blue and orange colors of sky, reflected on tiny waves, conceal the pollution that the water has been carrying inside itself since the discovery of oil in 1908. Since then, these waters have witnessed many events and absorbed many stories.

among the moving crowds of plankton, perpetuate our world. Those battles make the clouds move in the sky, they bring the smell of the sea to the seashore, and they create that dark thing called oil.

Under these waters and boats there are millions of tiny creatures screaming, laughing, crying, murmuring, shouting, joking, speaking to themselves and to others. These tiny creatures are called plankton—the unseen actors in the stories of oil. Their bodies of various forms, shapes, characters, with unseen membranes, ride on waves and fish and boats and things under the seas. They drift from one part of the world to another. On this journey many things happen to them; they are occasionally caught, killed, eaten, or die naturally. Like all other beings, their corpses are recycled as part of the cycle of life and death. Subsiding to the ocean bed, they become an unheard voice in the stories of oil.

Millions of years have passed. Oil, dragged out of the deep layers of the earth, is now flowing in all aspects of our life, shaping our culture, moving us along highways, accelerating the pace of life, leaving its destructive traces in all environments it crosses.

* Millions of years ago, here, in the Persian Gulf, there were wars, but not of the kind we know today. There were no conflicts over territory and resources through war machines. There was no homicide, no dictatorship, no smuggling of weapons, no destruction of land and life. But there was a different kind of war. The sea is a silent and perpetual battlefield. We creatures with lungs would not know about this in detail. There are battles of survival among the species down there, between organisms of different sizes and biological characteristics. Those battles on the seabed, under the leaves of aquatic plants, in the gills of the fish, and

Oil. It’s all the result of that infinite battle down there. *

Dark skies of smog. Dark lands soaked in sludge. Dark hands of oil workers. Dark waves hitting beaches. Dark walls of poverty. Dark days of owning oil. Dark battles, dark wars, dark dictatorships. Dark stories. Dark story of oil. Oil fuels the story of modernization and colonization. Made, written, and told in dark words by the “major” characters of modernization and colonization, dark stories of oil make us believe that “petroculture” is the ultimate condition of modern life. These dark stories interweave our lives with the products of oil and bind us to their social, political, and economic relations. They try to convince us that there are no other stories and cultures beyond “petroculture.”

Petroculture. The culture of consumerism and individualism. The culture of extraction of owning the earth and its resources.

1BrianGilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. 3 Nicholas Thoburn, “Minor Politics, Territory, and Occupy,” in Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 116. Major or molar Occupy, A People Yet To Come, ed. Andrew Conio (London: Open politics, as described by Deleuze and Guattari, produce identities formed by dominant social relations. These relations establish norms that eliminate or delegitimize other identities that break from those very major categories. In this sense, major does not refer to quantity but to power hierarchy, “assum[ing] a state of power and domination.”

2(Montreal: Sheena Wilson et al., eds, Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). 28

Humanities Press, 2015), 175. In opposition to major politics, there is the concept of “minor politics” that, as Thoburn writes in his reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, “is a breach with such identities, when the social environment is experienced as constraint, as perception is opened to what is ‘intolerable’ in social relations.”

4Be Decoloniality,” Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality Is Far From Over, and So Must Afterall 43 (2017): 39–45. 5 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 117.

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A plastic can sinks to the seabed. Drifts with the whirlpools around schools of fish swimming together in circular routes. The plastic can rotates. Confused, bloated, and separated from the places it was produced, used and discarded, it has now become an alien in an underwater world of millions of various creatures. Inside its belly, a banquet hosted by thousands of plankton. * Plankton in a Plastic Can Knock knock Our sea is shrunk into this tiny cylinder Its color is unseen Its texture is untouched Impermeable It is a cylinder world

* To tell a different story of oil, we need to disconnect it from modernity and coloniality. In order to challenge the major narratives of oil, and de-link from them, we need to find other voices, the “minor” characters and the new protagonists who can push this story in a different trajectory— to “re-exist” differently in the existing context of petroculture. Like Walter D. Mignolo description of decolonization as the processes of “de-linking” from coloniality and “re-existing” beyond the colonial logic, these stories re-connect us to an environment from which we have been alienated by a long history of colonization, the failures of the Modern project and the imposition of petroculture.

Like the plastic can inside the ocean? Like us disconnected from the rest of the ocean. Like the defined borders of the plastic can? Like us only seeing its red impermeable walls. Where modernity and its exploitative approach to Earth fails, those minor characters can be found. Minor takes shape in response to the domination and subordination as “subsystems or outsystems” in Deleuze and Guattari’s words. These subsystems or outsystems emerge within the major structure of power relations, and are experienced as “cramped spaces” and “impossible” situations. Yet such impossible and cramped spaces are not spaces of oppression, but spaces of the creation and construction of minor forms of political engagement. Within the ecologies of oil extraction, such cramped spaces can be found where the failure of oil infrastructures have left its surrounding in a critical situation, and where getting out of it is impossible. In these cramped spaces, these stories flow like oil, fill the gaps, escape from the cracks, and enter the unpermitted spaces. Their smells spread beyond boundaries. They become Oily Stories.

When Oily Stories leak, we appear here and there. Behind a car’s exhaust, under an oil heater, on the deck of a ship, under an oil worker’s collar, in the seashells, on the seagull’s feet, under the fisherman’s slipper. Oily Stories, a series of experiments of situated storytelling, work with the materiality, history, and politics of oil and its encounter with different materials, environments, structures, bodies, and political forces. In the manner of oil, these stories are leaked, spill out of petroleum infrastructures, flow over boundaries and expand their environmental, political, and social effects by polluting the grand narratives, “white geology,” and subjugating forces. Here, Oily

6(Minneapolis: Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 4.

@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@ 29 Stories are situated in oil sludge, broken oil infrastructures, deserts, and the wetlands of southwestern Iran. This part of Iran is historically, socially, and politically interconnected with oil extraction, and internal and external colonization over hundreds of years. Rich with oil resources, this area and its human and other than human inhabitants have suffered from various forms of structural segregation, denial, and destruction: the environment suffers from various sorts of pollution; the society suffers from unemployment; the people suffer from air pollution around the oil refineries, lack of access to clean water and functional infrastructures.

Searching among the landscapes of petroculture, these characters appear here and there with their own unique stories. Oily Stories summon such characters, renew their contracts with their environment, and give them a voice to change the course of existing stories. Oily Stories push back the established protagonist and give ground to these minor characters and elements that have been silenced and excluded. In this piece of experimental storytelling, these stories are told through the lives of plankton— not only the origin of life, but the origin of extinction, of environmental crisis, of wars and conflicts due to their complicity in the creation of oil and the high dependency on petroleum in the modern world. In this text, stories of plankton merge with the narrative in order to reconcile and find a way to re-exist beyond the colonial logic of modernity. The stories start in various places in this region and interconnect the characters inhabiting these places. In this way, these characters de-link from an oppressive narrative, re-link to each other, and re-exist in a different array of stories.

Setting the Scene Place 01: Qabr-e-Nakhoda Qabr-e-Nakhoda, located in Musa Bay in the Persian Gulf, is an island without any human inhabitants, but home to many birds. The only human trace on the island is a grave about which there are different local stories. Some believe it is the grave of an Indian sailor who died on his boat on a stormy night while passing the island. Others say it is instead the grave of his beloved daughter who died that night. Musa Bay itself is an important geopolitical spot in the production and logistics of Iranian oil, as well as one of the world’s most polluted seas due to the oil industry. The island is a focal point in this story, where plankton come to the fore. Story 01: Qabr-e Nakhoda Island and the Unmoored Box Once upon a time, on a stormy night, a boat from India sailed around the edge of an island in Musa Bay in the Persian Gulf. The night was drenched in rain and salty sea waves. Heavy-bellied clouds emptied themselves over the sea, making the night dense. The sailor heaved himself on deck and wailed at the sky, the lifeless body of his daughter, who had lost the battle to fever, weighing heavily in his arms. His screams hollowed out the curtain of rain like a shell in an air raid. His lament vibrated mightily, so strong that it broke the waves and pierced the depths of the sea. The plankton were shaken, scattered, scared, and spouted out by the waves. Mixed with rain, they landed on the sailor and his daughter, who had become undistinguishable from the wild storm that surrounded them. Thousands of plankton clung to the limp black hair of the dead daughter. The sailor navigated his way out, wrestling the wind, the rain, the sea and its phantoms, and reached out to the rough

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surface of the island. He fell to his knees and clawed at the earth until the hole was deep enough to bury his daughter. The grief however swallowed him at once; it was as if he had never existed before, absorbed in the storm or dissolved in the rain and waves. The next morning, the island held in its belly the daughter, or the sailor, or both, and the thousands of plankton that the waves had brought to their bodies were being gently digested into the muscles of the island. The boat had disappeared, but the seagulls, terns, crab-plovers, herons, lizards, and turtles of the island noticed an unmoored box floating just by the shore. When a fisherman found the floating box, he discovered that it spoke continuously, as if it were telling stories in a language he did not know. Device 01, Character 01: The Floating Box and the Fisherman The floating box is heavy. Seawater has rusted its different plates. A piece of seaweed is hanging from its edge. It smells of sea salt. The fisherman sits next to it, shakes it, turns it over, and as with the habit of listening to found seashells, he puts his ear next to it and listens. This time though, the sound is not really the sound of ocean, but an unheard mixture of crying, laughing, whispering, drilling, murmuring, thundering, and a clamor of sort. Against the fisherman’s shack, the sea is becoming restless at sunset. Roaring waves are calling back the creatures from which they are now separated, screaming from the box. Opposite the sea, the careless town is sinking into its rituals of night songs and melodies.

Place 02: In the Fisherman’s Room The fisherman collects found things from the sea. His room, according to local legend, is “solid sea.” Seashells, bones, plastic bags, metal cans, blind dolls, rusted coins, polished fishing rods, lost fishing nets, broken anchors, an oily piece of pipe. He keeps a biography of each found object. He clears some space on the table in the middle of his shack and observes the floating box for hours. He puts his ear next to it and listens again, trying to find sounds that could be interpreted as words. He imagines. He writes. He imagines again. He takes a picture of the box, uploads it to the web, and finally finds out what the box is. The box is called “Continuous Plankton Recorder.” He takes notes in his notebook. A Biography of the Floating Box The Continuous Plankton Recorder was invented in 1931 by Alister Hardy, a British marine biologist, to study the changing marine environment and its impact on plankton. It was designed to be towed behind merchant ships or ships of opportunity. Inside the device, a slowmoving band of silk is wound onto a spool in a storage tank, collecting the plankton that enter the device. Hardy traveled across oceans, towing his CPD through various bodies of water. The device, in its various forms, is still used today by marine biologists. Plankton is trapped by the CPD while drifting around and exposed to the device’s entrance aperture. They are then moved into a laboratory, where the effects of sea pollution on plankton is studied, and thereby different contaminating elements in specific seas are investigated. He sits back. Then looks again. Stands up. Walks around it. Tilts his head and places his ear close to the opening. There is silence. He knocks on the bigger plate. Murmuring resumes. Then occasional cries. Something like a speech, but with words unknown to him. He sits back and writes in the notebook:

The plankton shown over the following pages is the imagined haul collected by this device. The drawings, by the author, were exhibited at the exhibition Oily Stories: Those Planktons at All Art Now Lab, Stockholm, April 2021.

@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@ 31 The Floating Box AKA Continuous Storyteller This device has a long history of transformation. The device was designed to be towed behind merchant ships or ships of opportunity. Inside the device, a slowmoving band of silk is wound onto a spool in a storage tank that collects the plankton that enter the device for further investigation. Hardy traveled across the oceans, towing his CPD through various volumes of water. Plankton were trapped in this device as they leisurely drifted, or when they were curiously skirting the device, or adventurously exposing themselves to the device’s entrance aperture. While the plankton have mixed feelings about the device, they have adapted to cohabit with it. It has since become a famous alien creature in the wet world of plankton. I have called it the Continuous Storyteller, as it collects all the minor stories that are hidden under the water and on the seashores of the Persian Gulf. It detects all the buried, silenced, and invisible stories. The device is sensitive to political, social, and environmental turbulences and crises and their impacts not only on the aquatic species, but also on inanimate things that are drawn into the sea by the tides. The device revives the grey cells of the social collective brain and the memories that had been washed off into the seas. It reads the invisible stories inscribed in the bodies of marine creatures, most importantly plankton. He then continues: Plankton have incredible memories. Changes and events are inscribed in their bodies, and the Continuous Storyteller can detect them all. One needs to find a language to unravel and decode what they are talking about and which stories they tell.

Thus Spoke Planktons Emergence of New Protagonists Millions of years ago, there were no borders cutting through seas and oceans, only a moving territory being fought over by different species from huge whales to plankton. Plankton were the freest migrants, hitchhiking on molecules of water, the skin of whales, and the scales of fish, moving from one sea to another. These free drifters died on their inevitable journeys from sea to sea; they were smashed, eaten, torn apart, lost, taken by waves and disappeared. Their corpses subsided and became sediment in the seabed, interspersed with the dead bodies of animals and plants, things of water and soil, brought in by the rivers. It all became mixed down there, squeezing closer in a banquet of death, drinking in one another’s liquids and smells, sinking deeper and deeper into the layers of the earth. In the dark, and under the pressure in between the rocks, they slept in the warmth of the Earth’s core. After years of drinking each other’s blood, eating each other’s flesh, and smelling each other’s odors, after years of cohabitation, they became one—a broad, dark, fluid, and viscous body called oil. Millions of years had passed. * The Sound from the Underground There is no space here. We are all compressed in this massive underground tomb. The memory of the Earth and sea. My hands are your legs, your eyelashes are my hair, my nose is your eyes, your ear is my foot, your finger is my leg, your eye is my head, your teeth are my bones, my toe is your eye. My wrist is her waist, his cheek is my bum.

Rosie Heinrich and Sepideh Karami, “Language Involution,” performance/presentation at the conference “Affinities + Urgencies in Language-based Artistic Research (Part II),” February 15, 2022.

@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@j@ Her lips are my eyebrows, his palm is my belly, his finger is my spine, my spine is her leg, your blood is my saliva. My flesh is your food, your food is his brain. My brain is her tongue. Her gums are my heels. His knee is her skull. Her lungs are your bum, my tendons are his hair. Your sweat is my perfume. Her urine is your wine. Her wings are my legs, my legs are your antenna, your antenna is his sting, his sting is her beak, her beak is your nail, your nail is my nose, my nose is your paw. And we sleep together, here, in this tomb, under the rock, close to the heat of the Earth. Intimate and dark. Silent and under pressure.

Our vivid colors are heaped on top of each other, mixed, we’ve become a colorful black creature with a viscous massive body that gradually extends through the cracks of the Earth and seeps out onto the surface. “We confound together—our manifold hues mixing, melding con-fusing—we fuse and with one another, we join-join, we with-with one another, involving in our involutions, we pour together-with one another, we juice and gush, confounding our primordial syrup soup.”

@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@ 33 01 We still remember our lives in the oceans, and when the rocks slid forward and pressed us together we drew closer and closer and the banquet commenced.

Llllllovvvve The dark sm e l l h e r e. The smellllllll of the de a d F I re R R R

R R R R R e

What Is Seen After being caught by the Continuous Plankton Recorder, the plankton were studied under a microscope. The microscope was enhanced with a special tiny statoscope. Therefore, the form, shape, and sound were studied. Plankton arrive and depart, with bodies half-animal, half-human, half-plant, half-things. Let’s start again. Plankton arrive and depart with bodies half-animal-half‫ناویح‬. Half-roots-half-eyes. Bees’ antennae grown on a sheep’s eye. A single finger. A single eyeball with loose radial membranes. A hairy lamp. A fish with the head of a deer. A bloated spider. A free-standing eye. 01

dark fire dark ark rk k

The Fisherman’s Findings

the dead fire Runnnnnnning mischievously upward into the surface of the Earth A N D Then Puts the Earth into fire F I re F I re

Carrying a ball full of stories. This plankton resists giving the ball away. It seems there are secrets in it. If you shake the plankton, there will be a flash f iction read aloud in a hidden language. Has swallowed a tragedy, but it can never cry. The tragedy is black and red. The red has become brown after being exposed to air. It cries its eyes out. It’s half liquid half solid. Scientists might come to the conclusion that the possibility of producing tar is due to this type of plankton. When the eyes are cried out, there will be black sticky ooze on the microscope’s stage.

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What Is Heard Some plankton can be introverted. Some extroverted. Some outspoken. Some don’t say much. That is not a problem in itself, but it causes problems when the Continuous Storyteller tries to catch them. Only those who are outspoken are willing to release stories. Yet the silent ones either avoid getting into the Continuous Storyteller or, when they are caught, they remain mute. They prefer to go to the ocean bed, and wait there for one million years, covered by sediment, rocks. Waiting for earthquakes, for natural disasters. To find their underground chambers. They want to wait for a million years. Invention of a Translator, or, Excerpts from the Fishermans Notebook Friday, January 29 I have caught 39 plankton, trapped in the storage tank in the Continuous Plankton Recorder. I have named each of them based on their appearance with reference to species I have seen in real life, such as: Abandoned Single Eye, Five-Hands Belly, Hairy Lamp, Spider Pin, Crown Tooth Fish, Comb Worm, Deer Head, Electron Eye, Big-Head Spider. Saturday, January 30 After observing them closely, I put them back in the storage tank one by one. I placed the storage tank back into the Continuous Plankton Recorder and closed it. I then put my ear close to the device and listened carefully. I listened and tried to write down the consonants and vowels I could hear. I want to document the sounds and then later decode their language. Friday, February 5 I worked on this over the past week. The notation technique doesn’t work. I need to think of a different method.

Saturday, February 6 I’m trying to connect the recorder I found last year around Qabr-e-Nakhoda Island to the Continuous Plankton Recorder. I want to invent a system that will translate the sound into signs, images. This will take a long time. Tuesday, March 21 It’s the start of spring. Finally, I invented a system with the help of a cardiac monitor machine I found in a half-abandoned, half-demolished hospital. The cardiac monitor machine visualizes the plankton’s language. I attach the electrodes onto the outer body of the Continuous Plankton Recorder. Friday, June 21 The visual output transcends spoken languages. The beating heart of a buried sun.

Millions of Years Later Place 03: Seas Millions of Years Later, a Plankton Millions of years later, on a dark journey from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, I caught a boat that was smuggling weapons and ink. By then I had realized what ink was. And I knew what weapons were. I saw people’s bodies on the boat deforming like powder by the sea winds. Ink splashing on waters. Weapons exploding. The boat a floating fireplace. I drifted by an explosion. And found myself on the gulls of a fish scared to death by seeing that formless agglomeration of fire, ink, human, and war. *

@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@{j@ 35 Place 04: Deserts Millions of Years Later, a Human Millions of Years Later, Far from the Persian Gulf. Gulf, inland, vast deserts stretch to the foot of the Zagros mountains. Pierced lands. Complicated terrains. Ancient seas. Lands, wherein oil is exploited, are left wounded. Here and there the exhausted oil wells are frozen in a victorious past. Silence frames such landscapes as a photograph renders history as fragmented, discontinued, disconnected. Silence. Only occasionally disturbed by the wiz of a truck crossing a faraway road, or a lizard crawling among the sands. Deserts, the ancient seas. Memories of plankton. A human in thick black-framed glasses and with sunburnt skin tugs a Continuous Plankton Recorder onto the sand. A deep line left behind him shows their struggle to move forward. The disappearing line exposes the resistance the recorder shows against moving forward. The human’s feet get stuck with every step taken. Under the burning sun the human’s shadow trembles on the dunes. The rope is wet from the palm’s sweat. Dark lines around the fingernails. Dark eyebrows turned grey under a fine layer of dust. Radial wrinkles on the eyes’ corners. Hair thickened by a mix of dust and sweat. Triumph over the Earth. The body odor attracts the flies. Khessssshhh, kheshhhhh, khessssh……………… khessssh……………… khessssh………………

A spell to awaken the ghosts of plankton, make them elevate and capture them with the Continuous Plankton Recorder. One by one, millions of them, arise from their tombs—the tiny particles of sand. Like a mist that stands still over the sands. A mist that has obscured our view to see the planet. The mist of modernity. * Plankton. Waiting to go back to the seas. Waiting for another million years. Waiting for earthquakes, for natural disasters. To die. To subside to the seabed. To be covered by sediment, by rocks. To find their underground chambers. And wait for another million years to become oil. The stories in this text were originally composed for the exhibition Oily Stories: Those Planktons as part of the curatorial project, Troubled Home, curated by Maryam Omrani at All Art Now Lab in Stockholm in April 2021. The exhibition contained two video installations and a series of drawings and texts that together made a performing ground for the plankton to speak and to tell the stories of oil. The two videos that play simultaneously indicate the complexity of oil and its multi-layered narratives. In one video, 39 plankton that are drawn and animated enter the frame and take the whole space for some seconds. In this way, as the minor elements of oil, every single plankton is given a singular character and voice in the story of oil. The video of plankton is accompanied by another video that gives a story of formation of oil through performative storytelling. In this video, drawings and machineries extract the oil and the plankton through a choreography of rotation.

Madeleine Morley

THE HAUNTING OF EPSON

jnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnj hen the fingerprints first appeared, I thought they were my own.

I checked my hands for dust. I washed my fingers with detergent. I wiped down all the surfaces in my apartment with wet paper towels. But the fingerprints kept appearing no matter what I did, even when my hands were scrubbed to the bone and the living room was cleaner than it had ever been. Finally, I ran my hands around the plastic exterior of the Epson WorkForce WF-M1560, trying to find the source of the mystery ink. I was printing out three chapters of a draft for a book when I first spotted them, a book I’d been working on during the nights in which deadlines had been tidily met. Maybe the prints had been around long before that though, on the corners of boarding passes and receipts for my annual tax return, or on the drafts I wrote for different magazines. But when I sat down at my desk with a red pen and a stack of 76 newly printed, double spaced sheets, it was impossible not to notice them. Each sooty oval marked the top and bottom of a page’s left-side margin. They were small— almost the size of a child’s—and snaked with lines like the rings of a tree. Judging from their shape and placement on the page, they seemed to belong to thumbs, as if someone had lightly gripped each piece of paper in their left and right hand. When I placed my own fingertip on top of one of them, I felt my lungs strangely contract—and I thought I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. The fingerprints were on each and every page. After careful study, I realized they weren’t always in exactly the same place; some were tilted higher or lower, and some were spread a little bit further apart. Sometimes, only the left or right thumb was visible, and occasionally on the back of a

page, I thought I spied the faint outline of an index, middle, ring, and little finger opposite to where a thumb would have been. After dusting the apartment, I checked the remaining pages in the A4 paper pack in case the fingerprints were some defect in that run, but all the sheets were clear and markless, so I opened a blank document on my computer, typed “lkdajdiofjdshkhiojlufmtdddffaa;fjasdf;l” onto the page, and pressed “print,” watching as the rectangle slowly ejected from the Epson’s solid mouth. And there they were—on the top and bottom of the left margin—as if someone had just caught the page in their hands while standing to the left of the machine. Unsure of what else to do, I took a screwdriver to the printer with the WF-M1560 User’s Guide open beside me. After dissecting the printer part by part, and checking to see if I’d left my own prints on one of the plastic or metal elements at some point (I hadn’t), an eerie feeling rose up in my chest. Between the paper support, the guides, the cover, and the output tray, something integral was missing: The sheet feeder’s gears were gone. * In 1863, she was looking for work. Some girls in her women’s meeting had mentioned that they’d heard of a girl making $4 dollars a week in a printing office for ten hours a day. Another girl said that she heard of a girl who was earning $5 a week. The conditions weren’t favorable, said the girls, but they knew Mr. Taylor on 14th and B Street was hiring. It was difficult to get a job these days and unemployment was on the rise. But she could afford to work for lower pay than her unmarried

jnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnj 37 colleagues, and even lower than men, who were earning up to $7 a week. She therefore had a leg up. She’d also heard that printshop owners were open to hiring more women to meet their needs. She personally hadn’t worked before: it was going to be difficult to wake and dress the children in the morning before each shift, and then clean the one-room apartment, mend clothes, and cook dinner when she got home, but money was tight and they needed the additional income. The male unions were against women entering the printing office, the girls told her. In a recent strike, the women hadn’t participated at all. Collaboration with the men was going to be impossible, they explained, because the male unions feared that women pushed down wages for men by working for less. If they demanded the same though, they’d never be considered for the job. And it was hard enough to be considered, given that they were not accepted into apprenticeship programs like the boys. But at Mr. Taylor’s, it was rumored that the girls were organizing. Maybe the wages were low and you had to stand in an overheated room for hours and your back hurt and head ached, but it was steady work, and looking to improve, if the girls could actually get organized. Plus the work was no different, really, from bending over the washing bucket all day; the only difference is that you had to be careful of catching consumption. You have small hands, one of the girls said to her. Show Mr. Taylor your hands. And mention that you’re good with the needle— he’ll like that. *

It was tough, but I fed the screen every day. I punched words into the keys, clickable words like “look” and “how” and “who,” which would reach out to quick eyes as they sped past other clickable words on a feed. I collected stories as if they were pink sticks of bubble gum for readers to chew up and blow out and pop from their mouths. After many years of writing content at home for the women’s lifestyle pages of various digital media hubs, a little hood of tense muscle had attached itself permanently to the back of my continuously tilted neck. I’d sooth it with a hot water bottle in the evenings while watching YouTube videos, waiting for them to inspire new questions in my mind, questions that no one had ever thought of but which urgently needed to be investigated and which I would do so, immediately, the next day, after I’d pitched them to an editor on one of my daily video calls. I could see questions everywhere, and I’d answered so many of them that I alone had discovered the reason why metal bed frames are actually cool, why it turns out every hot girl has IBS or endo, why tiny toys have taken over TikTok, and why all I do is look at ugly photos of food in the afternoon. The day after the fingerprints first appeared, I was investigating a new why for a Work & Money vertical that I sometimes pitched to, a vertical that I liked to write for because it let me answer questions that I felt anxious about myself, like what happens if you can’t repay your student loan. But this time, I was answering a lighter question (which was actually quite a loaded question), which was why I would never quit my Animal Crossing job, which is what I played when I should have been working on my manuscript but wasn’t, a

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manuscript that was actually about a girl who couldn’t stop asking why. It was difficult to write content today, I noticed. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t stop wondering about the fingerprints and why they’d started to appear in the first place. For each post I wrote, I would get paid $80. So if I wrote a lot, say six pieces a week, I could make around $450 by the end of that week. That would be $1,800 a month, in a good month, which wasn’t enough to hire a physiotherapist, but which was enough to cover my bills, pay my rent, buy groceries, and make a monthly repayment to the student loan company. That evening, I closed my laptop after sending off the Work & Money draft—my eyes blurry from the laptop’s shine. I closed them tight, and fell into a deep sleep right then and there on the couch. And as night drifted on, I dreamed of metal. Hot, thick smoke filled the air, stifling me and knotting up my throat. My hands, my face, my body were covered in the deepest shadow. There was a heavy clanging sound, and my fingers prickled with what felt like a thousand paper cuts. I looked around and saw that I was under a great, pounding machine: giant wheels roared above and thousands of tiny cogs crushed together like teeth. Everything was creaking, turning, rotating—while a flutter of white sheets blasted out from a hot mouth beyond. I didn’t know it then, but this was to be the first of many restless nights. The dream’s noises would echo in my ears throughout the day. I stopped writing. I stopped pitching. New ideas for content no longer bubbled up in my brain with speed. I ignored the ring of my editor’s video calls, and I watched in the mirror as dark circles slowly appeared under my eyes.

All I could think about were the fingerprints— I couldn’t understand where they came from. I bought a magnifying glass, obsessively comparing my own fingers with the ones on the sheets. Their snaking lines looked nothing like mine, I noticed, and I eventually realized there was more than one person’s fingers dirtying the left side margins of the paper. One night I was propped up in bed, trying once more to come up with a single idea, one simple question, that I could pitch to my editor—but all I could think of was why are fingerprints coming out of my Epson. I opened up a new email, desperately trying to send some semblance of a new pitch, when I suddenly heard a sound that made my heart come to a standstill. With a whir, the Epson turned on in my living room. Then, a click and a steady, repetitive shh-shhhh-shh-shhhh-sh-shhhh told me that the phantom machine had started printing. I clutched the duvet over my head. Once I mustered up the courage to walk toward my desk and see what had fallen into the output tray, I found a single sheet, dated February 19, 1863, with the logo of The Washington Chronicle on the top. My eyes took in its strange, small text: STRIKE OF THE FEMALE PRESS FEEDERS AT THE GOVERNMENT PRINTINGOFFICE. The females employed in the Government printing-office as press feeders made a demand for an increase of their weekly salary. They were receiving, as we are informed, $5 per week, and demanded $1 more per day. Their request for an advance not being complied with, yesterday morning these females, to the number of nearly twenty-five, refused to go to work, and appeared ready to oust out of the building any person who should dare to attempt to take their places. It is said considerable inconvenience was occasioned by

jnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnj 39 the failure to print a bill for the Finance Committee of the Senate. During the day the girls were informed that their wages should be increased as much as demanded. This satisfied them, and they went to work as usual. * In 1901, she was learning how to feed the machine. While she was a different girl from the last one, she was much the same in many ways, with her small hands, and her small face framed by a cloth cap, which kept tangles of hair away from the spinning, gnashing gears. The feeder, the press man told her, does nothing but feed the press. That’s all she’s got to do. She feeds it, and then she feeds it again. They were both standing to the left of the large press. Grasp the paper with one hand and place it in the proper position with the other, said the instructor, and when she did, she could just about see the outlines of her four fingers through the cream page. Look out for imperfect sheets, cut wrong or jagged, he continued, they’ll ruin the print and won’t stack right. And whatever you do, do not bend the paper. Do not get it caught on the sides. Always make sure it’s straight. The feeder, he continued, helps the press man take care of the machine. You have to make it ready in the morning. You wash up the press rollers and assist the press man whenever he needs something. But most importantly, you feed the press. Do not get your hand caught— it’ll get mangled and you’ll never work again. According to the press man, you don’t need schooling to feed the press. You only need a little knowledge of the trade. But you have

to be quick, you’ve got to have some endurance. And while it’s not that stimulating, if you’re good and if everything is in order, you might be put on color work. Then, you’ve got to be very precise—so that the colors all fit neatly together like the lines of a striped wool cardigan. You don’t want the colors to overlap, he said. You want the layers to sit next to each other cleanly. She was set to work 54 hours a week—ten Monday to Friday and four on Saturday. The feeder girls, she was told, get $10 a week. From the corner of her eye, she caught something shining—silver and smooth and growling—from the other side of the room. * The next page arrived in the morning. I was feeling stronger, but I was still terrified. I avoided my desk and tried not to fall asleep so that the hot, sticky dreams couldn’t cloud my mind. In the early hours of the morning, my thoughts sometimes drifted to my own work, and how I’d spent all these years trying to make a living off writing, and how I had, but nothing felt long or sturdy or right, how I was grinding click-bait fast onto quick pages that evaporated as soon as they’d appeared. In the end, writing had become much like most other things in my life, something that pounded on and demanded me to crank, and stamp, and feed. Despite the phantoms that were haunting my mind and the corners of my drafts, I had to keep going, and I managed to squeeze one or two pieces out in-between nightmares, churning them through my fingers, working mechanically and

jnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnj

following the structure that had ironed itself into the grooves of my brain, where I would layer a short anecdote with a question, followed with three quotes from an expert, followed with some brisk words of encouragement. I forgot entirely about my manuscript: All that mattered now were the ghosts and making repayments on time. The night before the morning of the next page, I’d thrown the Epson out onto the street, hopefully breaking it in the process. But then, my dreams became waking ones and worse than they’d ever been; in my bedroom, I thought I could see a rectangle of wood laced with little metal curves drive down towards the white duvet. I also felt little fingers scrape at my arms and legs as I lay in the dark. And so that night, in a sweat, I ran downstairs and picked up the Epson from the street corner where I’d tossed it, placing it in the kitchen cupboard, throwing an old blanket over it, and cutting its blue and red wires with scissors. But in the morning, as I poured myself a cup of coffee to try to get back to more pitching, the familiar whir echoed from beneath the counter, followed by the horrifying shh-shhhhh-shhshhhh-sh-shhhh-sh-shhhh. With a click, a newly printed page slid out from the cupboard’s crack, landing with the text upright on the kitchen tiles. It was neat, dated 1901, and said The Typographic Journal at the top of the page:

I write unto you, sisters, that ye may know the fate of one who has gone before, and who has fallen a victim of the monster.

Be ye therefore ready, and when the ghost shall work, if he does at all, save at least ten cents of your salary, for an evil hour, when ye think not, the monster cometh and taketh, and wherefore shall ye be fed?

Think not more highly of what is in the future for you than ye ought to think, but be content with what you have and handle it lightly.

Look upon it when it is in operation, for its conscience is seared with molten lead, and after you are gone it moves along just the same, and careth not at all whether you fill your stomach with angel’s food or corn cobs.

Today we spring up like grass and the rains fall and the ghost walks, and we grow fat and think that shall ever last. But tomorrow this monster cometh to town, and we wither before him, for

jnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnj 41 there is no meal in the barrel nor oil in the can, and from hunger we get so thin we blow away, while the monster stands proudly in its accustomed place, feeding on hot lead, space bands, reprint, editorial, etc. and looks wise.

in the print trade was well connected with unions. The press was an organizing tool in itself, after all. But print production required labor-saving innovation—and new inventions rendered work not only less taxing, but less dangerous. So we were doing her a favor in the end. The print office is poorly ventilated, it’s squalid, and they say it contributes to lower life expectancies. So really, it’s no place for someone like her. *

Most ghost stories have an end.

In 1915, she was gone.

In the more gruesome tales, spirits enact their revenge—throats are slit, possessed women wander off cliffs, or men ax their families as they sleep. In other, shrewder tales, phantoms and shadows of the night were never there to begin with—it was just a woman in the attic, a family secret hidden deep underground. My ghost story never ended as they do in books, though.

While this girl was different from the last ones, she was also much the same: Small fingers, small cap, a flexible mind. In 1915, all like her were gone, and a cylinder press roared in their place. It was an improvement in the trade, the print manager said. The bed had a smoother movement and not only an automated feed but an automated paper take-off, too. Since she’s been gone, there have been no more arguments in the press room when the margin wasn’t straight— and no more waste, either. At first, the press output was increased by 20%—but now it’s much higher than that. She used to feed 25 pages a minute but this sparkling giant feeds 250 a minute. That’s 15,000 an hour. Envelopes, documents, books, cards, name tags, stamps, newspapers. Rolling and rolling and rolling out of its epic, metal mouth. It took a while for her to leave, said the manager. At the beginning, the automated feeders were imperfect and difficult to come by, and manual labor was far cheaper. And it was hard to get rid of her because everyone

Nothing was ever explained to me, but the situation never turned to horror either. It just kept on going. The fingerprints kept appearing, and I returned to churning out articles; it just seemed to be how things would always be. At first, I kept the Epson hidden in the cupboard. But the fingerprints followed me to libraries and Internet cafes whenever I had something new to print. Eventually, I put the printer back onto my desk, and grew to feel comforted by the familiar sight of sooty hands marking paper margins and improbable newspaper articles appearing in the dead of night. I started writing my manuscript again, and I stopped being so frightened. I read what the printer had to say each time something mysteriously appeared on its output tray, acknowledging the sooty marks, touching my own hand to them as if they were handshakes from an old friend.

42 jnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnjnj Over time, my manuscript grew and grew, a giant sprawling thing with words that were so unclickable only slow eyes would be able to make any sense of them. It became a book of all the whys I couldn’t answer in 500 neat words, about a girl who was in debt, with bills that stacked up like swaying towers under her eyes, and why all her worries and whys had stifled her ability to imagine and to dream. The fingerprints accompanied me as I used my red marker to make edits on each page, thinking of a time when I might finish and maybe leave content behind for good. Eventually, I may have even dedicated my book to the ghostly ovals. At least I think that’s what I meant when I wrote: To the small everyday gestures that stretch endlessly back through time. Ghosts, I came to realize, are just memories that need to be heard. And so, I learned to live with them.

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AMANDA F

Published by

Maria Editions Cyprus

Concept

Olga Micińska

Copy editor Design

2022

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Meagan Down Studio Nikos Stephou

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First edition: Cover image:

7 FCA C

500 Aurélia and Laëtitia by Olga Micińska, from The Guild cycle

Copyright for the photographs and texts © the Authors Copyright for the graphic design © Nikos Stephou Copyright for this edition © Olga Micińska and Maria Editions

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789S 789 S 789 789D D 789 789F F 789 789G G 899 899J J7789B 7 8

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78 Maria Editions

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ISBN: 978-9963-2137-2-6