There’s not enough time for all the feelings, and digesting them. I think maybe also for the kids here, definitely not for me, so much of it for the first time, real, not hypothetical.

The journey isn’t always the one you want, when you want it. Even through filters of privilege, it’s uncertain, uncomfortable, as unpleasant and painful as you let it be.

I spent the week after the IETM Plenary banging around Bulgaria with my friend Jesse. We tried relaxing on a couple Black Sea beaches, but our dour Central Europeanesque outlooks and Protestant-turned-struggling-artist work ethic got the better of us, and we found ourselves driving to the furthest southeast corner of EU-Europe, to stare across the Resovo River toward Turkey. Jesse had crossed the border northwards on a bus in the middle of the night four years earlier, after getting stranded in Turkey for several months at the beginning of Covid. Stuck in a tiny Antalya apartment for months, unwelcome in the streets as a White foreigner, this journey out of purgatory barely registered the actual moment of passing from foreign to – well, less foreign soil, based on Schengen agreements around free passage in Europe. And so we sat there, staring at the 50-foot flags flying on either side of the estuary, and at Turkey’s military installations, and placards on the shoreline forbidding swimming. 

I’m currently 6 days into my “new life” in Germany, and there’s already so much learning and honestly, a lot of things that I already want to question about “the way things are”. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be American, what it means to travel, what it means to move abroad, and what it means to bring the politics I’ve gathered as a queer white American to the places I land.

I spent an afternoon wandering Berlin’s Kreuzberg, thinking about spaces and borders. I won’t try to represent the history of the neighborhood, but based on my friend Jesse’s tour guiding, it sounds like the former border quartier along the Berlin Wall is fighting (successfully, currently) to maintain its international/immigrant/punk/squat/commune culture and protect its public spaces from developers, speculators, and corporate capitalism. The path of the Wall, a bombed-out train station, and the decommissioned Tempelhof airport grounds are all sites claimed and transformed by locals into public green space that hosts daily parties, public art (commissioned and guerilla), communal gardens, and informal residences of varying permanence.

I’m working on clear language around subjectivity and non-totality – not saying a thing IS so, only that I understand it to be this way, or that’s what I experienced in it. At least with where I’m at in this consciousness-building journey, I find it often requires more words, sometimes so many that they become cumbersome and obscure the core thought. As I talk here about other artist’s work and the general state of funding, please forgive me if I slip in this practice, and know that I’m speaking from the very limited authority of my personal experience.