1
NEW YORK, 2019

Us have mapped the places that make us safe; scoring crevices of light into the shadows cast by the cities imposed on us. Yet map and territory never matched. How often have I thought: I belong here and still have no place.

The city is a forest which generates its own topography, shaping my movement, leading me around the concrete pits of municipal civilisation where I find stone to carve my sculptures. Its language is transformation, the flexibility to shape shift according to demography, power, and economy.

Can it ever belong to us? Us women, us migrants, us exploited, us marginalized? Can it incorporate our ability to imagine and reinvent, to see what isn’t yet but what can be: how places inspire feeling if only we could end the arbitrary binary between what is nature, and what is not? What if we could access every space with the confidence of co-ownership and acceptance, overwriting the discrepancy between identity and representation, through being visible and fluidly inscribed into place?

‘The forest is a city’ Paulo Tavares wrote. A garden, a field, a shelter. Home to the multiplicity of (1) beings that dwell their life here on earth. Built by societies that don’t conceptualize difference into the world.

2
ENGADIN, 2021

Supposedly the archetype of nature is the alps. And yet, I find myself underneath an exalted concrete bridge crossing the steep and narrow valley of the river En. The bridge divides the image I have of the valley in two. A mountain peak lurks over the monolithic line that is drawn from one side to the other. The city is already here.

My glance turns away from the mountains and down to the forest floor, where I pick the first wild strawberries of this year.

I once read ‘Life is necessarily complex’. However here, where it’s either mountain or valley, (2) forest or meadow, the concept of ‘heimat’, as a home or habitat, a place of longing, seems utterly plausible. Romanticised and politically charged it pictures generations of nuclear families farming the land in control of its wilderness. A lineage and tradition, a place to belong; a lie. In reverse this projection paints us with the colour of otherness.

I imagine us being the wild forest strawberries, a collective of nuts disguised as fruit, but actually roses, growing in horizontal connections of stolons, building our map through a woven network of arms, and legs that hold each other. A safe passage through our city.

3
NIDA, 2022

From where I stand, I can barely see the border through the white-covered dunes. Maybe later, in the spring or summer, who knows when this war will end, will the border reappear from under the ice. It might have changed its appearance or location or disappeared altogether. I am hoping for the latter, but who gets to decide?

We bring up fluidity when we talk about identity while ignoring water’s other states of aggregate. This feeling of not belonging is that of ostracism. As if I am told I am ice, but not gas when I am water. As if the collocation of my molecules and atoms would change by the power of your words.

I’d rather not say who I am. Words manifest, like monuments, or border stones, through differentiation new hegemonies are forming, as further we fraction. I refuse to determine myself, so I can satisfy your need to identify me, as who I might no longer be.

As for my location, I am in a place, between places, maybe a crossroad, a buzzing intersection, or a calm hermitage. I don’t know yet where I am, and honestly, I don’t need to know. Refusing to identify is a dialectical issue, but not a problem I have for myself. Who am I? Me seems, as so often, not enough.

Where does it leave me? Paul B. Preciado proposed utopian gender before transcending to Uranus. (3) Snowy like the border, making the distinctions, the territories, the insides and outsides, the dualisms and hegemonies disappear under its shell of ice, that is protecting my soft but boiling hot core.

One day the past and our current present will reappear. And it won't be the ice that will reveal them but the sand that formed this landscape's soft but violent dunes. Uncovering layers of complex and ambiguous times, one would wish for borders to have never been established.

(1) Paulo Tavares: Forests, in Post Human Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 2018 
(2) Life is Necessarily Complex: Unnatural Participations, edited by Anna Mikkola and Louis Mason, 2018
(3) Paul B. Preciado: An Apartment on Uranus, 2019