VERSO / volume 7 — August editorial
Dear readers,
This month’s contributors are Taylor Le Melle and Victoria Catalina. Their zines, though different in style and content, propelled me on a journey through time and space. Engaging with the two zines and writing this letter was a way for me to process my own thoughts as I moved through the multiplicity of the works, breathing as slowly as I could to slow time and stay grounded in one place.
Taylor Le Melle’s “UNTITLED [work-in-progress first draft towards a piece of writing on the work of Aslan Goisum]” is analytical, critical, honest, inquisitive, and at times pure poetry; inviting the reader to look at that which has been redacted historically and topographically, but also emotionally. The work does not follow a linear narrative structure, using non-chronological entries and timelines. Even the endnotes are non numerical, forcing the reader to read and reread as a way of cross-referencing or to be moving in tandem with Le Melle’s insight. The artist has the power to make atrocity familiar, yet Le Melle works against that in their text with the refusal to frame the content, keeping it unfixed as “first draft”.
There are moments where the narration happens from a bench situated in the English countryside—so many of us have sat on versions of that park-bench taking in versions of that view. There are layers in what we see, un/intentional, owned and wild, occupied, stolen. Mass land cultivation is an act of colonialism. Taylor Le Melle invites us to look at the land again and ask questions. Rather than following the impulses of the traditional ‘sublime’, they propose a different reading of landscape as a whole. Namely, we cannot look at The View and not get the full violence of what shaped/es it. We are part of it, the power and powerlessness of it. We are in danger of becoming gawkers, if we lack the tools to help us observe critically, provoking the question whether we should look at it at all?
Victoria Catalina’s striking zine, “Melting”, intimately and expansively questions who we are in reference to others. The dreamlike progression through the pages is a contemplation of intentional absorption into a relationship. The tension between desire and intent is palpable as we observe the characters’ progression towards each other. The amalgamation of identity is amplified by the questions, “Are you me/Am I you”. We have all been there, receiving pain and joy from a relationship. The immersion that Victoria Catalina is taking us through, is meditative. I found myself looking through it front-to-back but also back-to-front, receiving the same satisfaction akin to watching an ice cube melting in reverse. The question being, can we lose someone by being too close? Can we lose ourselves?
In their zines, Victoria Catalina and Taylor Le Melle, are interrogating modes of definition and the elision of certainty in the context of intimacy and topography. So perhaps next time you sit on a park-bench you will be transported on an experiential journey of internal and external borders, seeking the information and the tools to understand the particular draft of what you are looking at.
