I have wanted to be an artist since I was a very small child. I’ve attended several art and design schools, I have worked as an artist, performer, writer, editor and artisan craftsman for some years now, both throughout and after my education. After eight(!!!) years of art and art-related education, practical and theoretical, and around four(???) years of performances and exhibitions, working towards the advent of a quote-unquote breakthrough, I’ve had the epiphany to throw in the towel. I have struck ‘artist’ from my list of self-identifiers, where it has inhabited the apex for many many years.

I was telling my friend Jimena about my newfound impulse. She protested, telling me ‘no, isa, you are an artist! It doesn’t matter what you do, you will always be an artist,’ and I know what she means and she’s right. But there is a vast difference between seeing the world and being in it as an artist and making a living as an autonomous artist in the art world. For a long time, I’ve conflated one with the other. Separating the two is very important and has made it easier for me to understand why I feel such ambivalence towards inhabiting the artist identity today.

This is not going to be an in-depth analysis or chronology of the function of art or the role of the artist through time. These are purely ~my thoughts~.

Saying goodbye to being an artist predominantly means saying goodbye or rather good riddance to the contemporary art world. The art world is in a weird place. To the curious observer, such as myself, evidence of this crops up every now and again. In an article on Kunstkritikk titled ‘Dubious Business’, its author, Frans Josef Petersson, is scandalised to find that Stockholm’s Market Art Fair would include a booth displaying the Swedish bank SEB’s art collection. SEB finances arms companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Petersson writes, ‘SEB ranks at the top studies of Swedish banks’ support for arms exports to countries with extensive human rights violations […]. A suitable partner for one of the Nordic region’s largest art fairs? I think not.’ Pause for effect. The implications here are multiple and, to me, strange and disconcerting. The idea that the ‘Nordic region’s largest art fair’ is inherently in discordance with funding genocide and human rights violations is misleading. This claiming of lacking suitability does a disservice to the fair, implying a de facto resistance to the exploitative forces present in our contemporary society, when in fact, its behaviour exhibits compliance. This type of knee-jerk reaction forecloses the discourse, quickly steering into the deeply etched groove that proclaims art as politically left-leaning, progressive and critical1. Here is of course also the soft implication of the Nordic countries being against financing arms in countries ‘with extensive human rights violations’, which is a bit of a stretch.

Petersson goes on to write about the SEB booth that ‘not only do such problematic sponsorships lend legitimacy to dubious actors, but they also cast art itself in a questionable light,’ with which I would agree—the light is coming from inside the building.

In their book Telepathy 传心术 (2018), artist duo Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas open the first chapter with the following:

‘Art is utilized at any point along the ideological spectra. It is naïve at best, and more often slight-of-hand [sic], to assume or claim that art weighs heavier on the left, sides with the oppressed, or is socially, intellectually, or critically progressive at its core.’ (pg. 21)

It is this type of behaviour exhibited in Petersson’s writing and the art world at large. It seems caught between two opposing poles: its subsumption in our shared neoliberal capitalist world order and its outward claim to be inclusive, diverse, decolonial, critically progressive, etc. Bergman and Salinas are quick to point out that contemporary art that criticises the art world’s implication in systemic exploitation can still be included in the art world itself. ‘Even art that is openly critical of values such as capitalism, racism, greed, war, poverty, and exploitation is welcome at the party [ie. the contemporary art industry]’ (pg. 24). By subsuming its critique into the industry itself, the art world can turn a profit while proverbially washing its hands of its actions, claiming self-awareness. Institutional critique has come to serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

In an interview with Hito Steyerl by Joshua Citarella, they have the following exchange:

HS: The contemporary art world is already changing dramatically. On the surface it still looks as if there was a unified universal art world, but the underlying dynamics point in a different direction. They point in the direction that the medium of contemporary art as a kind of tax evasion mechanism and reputation enhancement is no longer really necessary, because betting markets are starting to take that function in a much more easy and frictionless way.

JC: So contemporary art, not just the philosophical project of showing society’s values and whatever, but also a by-product of tax evasion… Do we still have prestige?

HS: Maybe?

According to Steyerl, the art world as we know it is singing its swan song. And yet, the midst of abstract mag’s summer residency scam, it seems that there are ever more artists out there. So many that whoever runs abstract mag’s instagram page thought it a viable business model to siphon 15 USD from thousands of them in application and administration fees to this purported residency. The field is over-saturated.

Every year, around 150 students graduate from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where I studied (and the GRA is just one of several art academies the Netherlands alone). When I started at the academy, our teachers told us that one fifth of us would ‘make it’ as artists. Not sure where they got this statistic, but naturally we all looked around the room wondering who it would be (in hindsight, the academy producing 30 autonomous artists per year feels like an over-estimation). I’ve since wondered what inspired all of us to want to be artists. Not just as a fleeting childhood desire, but to the degree that we would apply to art school, and, for many of us coming from abroad, travel for the interview, enrol upon acceptance, then relocate to Amsterdam. As a child and teenager, my idea of being an artist was informed by the modernist conception of the artist figure: Picasso in his studio. Singular. Genius. (Male.) (White.) At the height of his fame, he doodles on a napkin and signs it instead of paying his tab (or was that Dalí?). The waitstaff express their gratitude.

Although this has always been a fantasy, the art world looks very different today (even the fantasy version of it). There is no one waiting to discover you or provide you with patronage. Being an emerging artist is a life of open calls, funding applications, residencies, of entering one’s practice into art world speak. At the biennales, all of the projects deal with the same subject matters, despite having been produced in all four corners of the world. In an art world flattened by globalisation, inclusivity has not diversified perspectives. There’s a sense of moral marketability that informs the art world, which exploits the marginalised: artists that are queer, from the global south (to use a dubious term), racialised, differently abled, etc. The art world uses these artists to anxiously perpetuate its position of righteousness in our increasingly complex and unrighteous world. Who genuinely expects a high profile art fair in a European capital to not have some dubious sponsorship in the rolodex? Again, to refer back to Bergman and Salinas, this behaviour is naïve at best and more often sleight of hand. Those working in the art industry are incentivised to legitimise the field and their position in it.

Here’s one way to look at it: if you want to be an autonomous contemporary artist, the industry will partially dictate how you communicate and therefore think about your practice; if you want to make money from your art you have to make your art marketable to the industry, which implies playing by its rules.

Opting out of pledging entrance to the contemporary art world not only frees me from tedious applications to residencies, open calls and funding bodies, but also allows me to view my practice with newfound romance. The legacies of the Salon de Refusés, of the many artists who rejected or were rejected by the status quo of the art world of their time, they all apply a rose-coloured tint to this decision. To be an artist in the idealised sense is to move through the world with a heightened sense of curiosity, wonder and sensitivity; an appreciation for/prioritisation of form and poetics; a persistent questioning of established norms.

Of course, I still need to make money. Fortunately for me, I have spent the past five+ years cultivating a job as an independent artisan craftsman that can sustain me. Time spent writing applications will now be put into experimenting and deepening my craftsmanship, writing and research. Creative efforts aside from my work will be dictated by my own curiosities and urgencies. Research trips and production of personal projects will be self-funded.

I have an entire other essay on embracing craft and practice in me, but I will save that for part two. For now, having meditated on this decision for several months, it has made its way deeper into the fibres of my being and I am ready to say goodbye. Goodbye, artist self~ hello, undefined and limitless creative self~~~

There is nothing directly wrong with my life currently; objectively everything is going well, better than ever actually. And yet, having reached certain milestones, I don’t feel empowered. I feel husk-like and frail.

There could be many reasons for this. Maybe I’m burning out, maybe I just need a break, maybe my life needs to be completely recalibrated. Maybe I should focus my time better. Maybe I should work even less. Or more? Smarter, not harder? I don’t know exactly what’s going on and that’s the problem.

I’m trying to identify the root cause, but it keeps eluding me. What do you want??? I ask myself as I walk around in the parks of Amsterdam around my new home. The question echoes in my empty head.

Nearly five years ago, the same question was posed to me, though not by myself. It was posed by Jason, the person running the yoga teacher training I was enrolled in. I was 25, I had just graduated from my BFA in audiovisual art, I had just started making jewellery, I worked in a ramen shop to pay the bills and at my art school running a writing class platform with my friends. I was in a long-term long-distance relationship with my high school sweetheart. We were eight people in the rather intimate and intensive YTT, and part of the training was sitting in a circle and talking about why we were there, what we wanted out of the training and, more broadly, what we wanted to change in our lives. When it was my turn, I had nothing to say. ‘I’m content,’ I said. We all had individual talks with Jason, and again he probed me. I still had no idea what I wanted; I was fine, I was happy with my life. In hindsight, it seemed like he wasn’t buying it.

The YTT ended in December; cut to April and I had broken up with my boyfriend of nine years. Suddenly, there was nothing that I didn’t want. I had never felt more desirous in my entire life: I wanted love, sex, knowledge, friendship, etc. I moved into an artist collective of 14 people located on the fifth floor of a dilapidated former rehab facility. I started dating for the first time in my life(!!!). I had casual sex. I developed deeper and more meaningful friendships. I joined a jewellery collective. I got into an MA at the University of Amsterdam. I peeled off layers of myself over and over, and I let myself want things that I had never been able to admit to myself that I wanted, let alone to other people. The years that followed the break-up were beautiful and transformative. New parts of me emerged, parts that had been coagulating beneath the surface. I allowed myself to be ambitious, to take up space, to be obnoxious, verbose, charismatic, intelligent, irritating, confident, loud, exuberant, hot, opinionated, unapologetic, uncompromising, vital. Vibrant. Alive. I dyed my hair black, bleached my brows and got tattoos on my back, chest and eventually both hands and my neck.

I went far out on a limb exploring my new personae. Some of my friends commented on how much I had changed and it didn’t feel like a compliment. I didn’t care, I was moving so fast I didn’t have time to look back.

The fire of a thousand suns was burning inside of me, that’s the only way I can describe how I felt. I had several situationships, strange encounters, I went to university and felt like I got a new brain, I made incredible friendships. I was obsessed with my own image, my mind, my friends, my dates, my life. I wrote obsessively: e-mails to friends, in my diary, for performance, in my instagram stories, papers for university and notes from reading. I made new jewellery whenever I had a chance. In that period, I began developing what is now my signature style and way of working. In that period, I met the man who would completely change my idea of what it means to love and be loved.

I spent two years in post-break up mania (and studying) and then two years making use of the opportunities that had been generated by my newfound energy, lust for life and ability to put myself out there. Now I’m thirty and my life feels unrecognisable: I am in the type of loving and supportive relationship I never knew could be real—we’ve just moved in together; I’m a self-employed artisan jewellery maker; I am financially independent; I will soon be fulfilling my years-long dream of studying Mandarin for three months in Taiwan.

And yet I am afraid. I feel that the next chapter is lurking, but I don’t know what it contains and it scares me. I don’t know what Taiwan will do to me. I don’t know what learning Mandarin will do to me. I don’t know where my burgeoning commitment to writing will lead me. I can feel a new awakening/crisis/what’s-the-difference around the corner, and I don’t know what it will look like. I’ve shaved my head twice, at 18 and again at 20. I’ve already gotten the word Contemplation tattood across my back; it turns out you can only do that once. What’s left to do?

My former professor Diego often used to say ‘desire always misses its target’. The fact that my desire is becoming harder to locate feels like a play on the old dictum ‘protect me from what I want,’ as in my desire is protecting me by disappearing. Again. What am I hiding from myself? I’m afraid of the change I desire. Everything is going so well, why rock the boat? Will I ever be satisfied?

Truthfully, I’m far from where I want to be in life. Life is good, but I want more. Turning thirty has come with its own host of realisations, one of them being that I am the type of person who will work for the rest of my life. Not because I have to, but because I can’t help myself. It doesn’t suit me to be idle. I get nervous, sad, I feel like I’m wasting away. I need to be reading, writing, looking, thinking, making, cooking, arranging, playing, talking. Not with any end-goal in mind but because that is how I can maintain my health and sanity. With that knowledge comes my new, current ethos: pace yourself. We’re going to be doing this for a long time, whatever this is. It will require your sustained time, energy and attention. Pace yourself. In life, I feel that I’m a late bloomer. I definitely haven’t peaked in my twenties, and hopefully I won’t peak in my thirties either. One of my favourite writers, Karl Ove Knausgård, wanted to be a published author since the age of 18 and didn’t manage until he was 30. He wrote two novels in a decade and finally had his big breakthrough at 41. One of my favourite scholars, 98-year-old Sylvia Wynter, has had an extremely varied literary and academic career before becoming a widely regarded significant voice in postcolonial studies. These examples give me some relief. They remind me that the work extends over vast periods of time, that it can change, that the output doesn’t reflect the process, and that, contrary to popular belief, one does get better with age.

I know the energy and the motivation and the desire will come back, they always do. Until then I will do my best to heal my withered body, preparing for the next one thousand suns to commence their burning.

That’s all I’m doing. I’m opening windows. There’s a vulnerability in the air, a quiet germination taking place. I don’t want to startle or suffocate it.

Earlier today, I started reading Roland Barthes’ autobiography. In place of a dedication, Barthes has simply written ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’. I read this line first, even earlier today, in Kate Zambreno’s book To Write As If Already Dead, which was lent to me by my friend Dominik’s boyfriend Victor. It took me a while to get into it, but at around page 22 I was hooked. In exchange for this book, I lent Victor Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, shocked that he had never heard of it, as we were talking about autobiographical writing, memoir, autotheory and the like.

Zambreno’s writing is making prevalent to me the intimacy of, well, writing. Of sharing text, of textual friendships. In Victor’s copy, he’s underlined certain words and passages in pencil. He dog-ears both the top and bottom of pages, which is a new practice to me (I’m a top-page dog-earer myself). At certain paragraphs, he inscribes the page with <3 which I find incredibly endearing. I’ve done similar things in my copy of The Argonauts that Victor has been reading, except I always draw out the loveheart, as I’m not bound by the keyboard. Victor sticks to writing out the heart with symbols. There’s something comforting about the slight differences in our similarities.

Victor and I don’t know each other so well, but soon (when I finish 'To Write As If Already Dead’) we’ll have read the same two books. That feels a bit like having a shared brain. And not only that but we’ll have read the other’s book with the presence of the other in the margins, little pencil marks to emphasise what was important to the other. As there is such intimacy in reading, in this sanctified space to experience the mind of another person, I feel an enhanced intimacy with Victor because of the traces of his presence in the sanctified space.

The book is lying open next to me, spine facing up. I put it down to get out my phone and photograph a passage in it about Eva Hesse, but I couldn’t locate the phone so I started writing this instead. Naturally, I can’t keep reading until I’ve documented the Eva Hesse paragraph. As the book is not mine, I won’t inscribe it with pencil. All I can do is take photos of the pages, sometimes with Victor’s emphasis in them.

Barthes again. The resonance I felt with this paragraph caught me off guard. I’m a single child and I was a very shy one at that. Boredom was my frequent companion. Like Barthes, I have made boredom my bitch, thanks in part to work and friends. Yesterday I did a forty minute incline walk on the treadmill in the gym, no music, no podcast, no visual other than my chest reflected in the screen exhibiting the stats of my walk. Calories burnt, meters ascended, minutes passed, etc. Just the tinny ringing of my own head and the thoughts cycling through it. Perhaps my way of dealing with boredom (something akin to exposure therapy) is also a kind of hysteria, a strange insistence on the feeling itself, of wanting to deepen it to try and glean something from it.

I took the screenshot above from Barthes’ autobiography and sent it to my friend Naomi, as I often do when I really like a bit of text. A friendship that has an important textual element to it. A few months ago, I was packing up my studio and as I was going through my documents I found a print out of a beautiful poem, The Connoisseuse of Slugs. There was no author on it, but it was accompanied by a Spanish translation on the other side. As a result, I was sure it had to do with my friend Jimena, whom I used to organise writing feedback sessions with at uni. Among the poem were other texts I had brought to our sessions. I took the photo below and sent it to Naomi, and she replied ‘I wrote that’. I lost my mind, I was euphoric. YOU WROTE THAT ??? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE??? THIS POEM WAS IN A STACK OF PAPERS FROM A TIME IN MY LIFE BEFORE I KNEW YOU !!! BUT YOUR POETRY WAS ALREADY IN MY LIFE !!! HOW SERENDIPITOUS !!! WE WERE DESTINED TO MEET AND BECOME FRIENDS !!! HOW BEAUTIFUL !!! I sent her an ecstatic voice note on my way home from the studio, and later she replied that she didn’t write it. My face fell. Upon looking it up, it turns out Sharon Olds wrote it.

I asked Naomi why she said she wrote the poem (it should be mentioned that Naomi is a published poet and thus the poem being hers was not utterly impossible… as you can tell, I really want to believe). She said, ‘oh, it’s just a thing I have with my friend. When we share something we really like, we say ‘I wrote that,’ or ‘I made that,’ and for some reason I thought you and I did that too.’

In the context of Victor’s copy of Kate Zambreno’s book, of text friendships, I find it very beautiful. ‘I wrote that.’ That’s how it feels to read, when something really resonates. When I read that paragraph by Barthes on boredom, I felt it. I wrote that. There is something that gets reorganised inside of me, when someone has put into words a feeling that is so familiar to me. It cements the feeling inside of me, makes it knowable. Gives it a shape, gives it a sensation in my body, and it does feel like it’s mine. Insert some thoughts about the death of the author here, if you please.

On page 34, Zambreno writes (this has also been underlined by Victor), ‘I have come to see that it is more important to be a reader than a writer’. Zambreno’s friend Sofia writes her, ‘how bitter at the world and full of despair I can feel […], and how much I realize that this can be cured by an hour of reading.’ Again, recognisable. Victor seems to agree.

Sofia follows this up with a Pessoa quote: ‘Seeing is so superior to thinking, and reading is superior to writing! I may be deceived by what I see, but at least I never think it’s mine. What I read may depress me, but at least I’m not troubled by the thought I wrote it,’ to which I would say, no, Fernando, you did write it! We all did. Maybe that’s the beauty of reading, it feels like writing but without the responsibility.

I’ll admit that I’ve never read any Fernando Pessoa. My boyfriend Mateusz really likes him. Naomi was reading Book of Disquiet for a while, but she had to put it down, I think it wasn’t sitting right with her, or with the time of her life. She read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep instead. We live together, that’s why I can provide such a detailed account of her literary diet. After hearing about Pessoa’s heteronymic writing practice, I felt the need to look up his date of birth and, lo and behold, he’s a gemini (would it really be a substack of mine without an astrological mention?). Reading this book about heteronymic writing, about a friendship that works the best via e-mail, feeling how the words of a writer can conjure up a new person in you, feels very, well, apt, for gemini season. And being a gemini myself, I feel content, luxuriating in my room all day with the windows open and the flimsy curtains billowing and the thoughts of many people cycling through my head.

in less than a month, i’ll be thirty, saturn is in aries again, as it was when i was born, uranus is in gemini, my sun sign. the air is electric, full of latent energy, the world constantly seeming to be on the brink of collapse and rebirth, stalling, about to implode. and still, i bike lazily through the marshes in Osdorp out to my studio. the banks of the canals are extremely lush, brimming with big leaves and rapeseed flowers.

spring is a strange season, it compels you at once to stop and smell the roses and to rev up, do EVERYTHING. i find myself suspended between this place of rest and action, between dreamy contemplation and manic urgency. today i decided to honour the former, to lay down my weapons and pray to the gods of R&R. in this spirit, i did a guided meditation on my new green couch that teetered on the edge of a nap for the full thirty minutes. i decided to read poetry, and i picked up Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings (2019) and read her poem Birds’ Funeral. at about a third of the way, she writes,

But why does my voice swirl in one spot like water in a well?

Why do I talk like the eulogist?

The almost half-split birds lift their heads from the gaps in the funeral program

At times, bird with a human face

kicks up dust between page 4 and 6

Waiters wearing bird masks pour wine

Blood flows inside my head—shht shht shht

why does my voice swirl in one spot like water in a well? in the first fourty-four pages of this poetry collection that i’ve read so far, every poem is about birds, about being bird, GIRL IS BIRD, and reading this poem brought me back into this bird world to such an extent that the roosters crowing outside the window of my studio started to sound absurd. what do you mean you’re a ‘male’ bird??? rooster, cock, phallus??? GIRL IS BIRD! therefore bird is girl. duh.

anyway, i digress. for the past few days, i’ve been listening to live recordings of HIM covering Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, which was a song i listened to on repeat when i was sixteen. the sound of it brings me back into my teenage bedroom, and to that feeling of laziness and inertia interlaced with all-consuming desire and longing without knowing what for. while i love the video in which Ville Valo introduces the song saying, ‘we’re sick and tired of it, but now we’re going to put all the rest of our… inner amphetamines into this performance,’ from 2000, i am of course partial to this version performed in 1999, where he takes his shirt off and smokes a cigarette whilst performing the song. with his scrawny, pale physique, long hair tied low at the nape of his neck, thick hoop earrings, beautiful face and low, growling voice, 23-year-old Ville Valo exhibits a (to me) very compelling androgyny. there’s something awkward and unpossessed about his physicality, the way he lifts his right arm and pumps it unconvincingly during the chorus, while his thin legs wrapped in their black trousers are buckling inwards at the knees. i like it. i like it in combination with the intensity of his gaze, the power of his voice, the scary tattoo sleeve on his left arm, with his confidence. my friend Thea often points out how i’m prone to chasing contrasts, and she’s not wrong. at the bridge, Ville alters Billy Idol’s lyrics to ‘I dried your tears of pain, baby/six hundred and sixty-six times for you’ followed by a low ‘whooo’, falsetto, obviously finding himself hilarious.

Ville Valo is a star that only the Nordics could breed: intense, feeble-looking, steely.

on tuesday, i’m going to Finland for the first time. this year is proving to be somewhat of a Scandinavian/Nordic homecoming for me professionally, as nearly all of my performance and exhibition gigs from now until February are scheduled in the Nordic countries. after having spent so many years feeling alienated from my place of birth, i feel a newfound appreciation for what it means to be Danish, Scandinavian, Northern, hence the loving analysis of Ville Valo’s stage presence. with this homecoming follows perhaps that Copenhagen-teenage-bedroom-feeling, that feeling of laziness and inertia interlaced with all-consuming desire and longing without knowing what for, without knowing what for.

at the cusp of a new personal decade, i feel a newness setting in, a wiping clean of the slate. the all-consuming desire and longing of my teenage years never left me, only the objects of their direction changed. cycles of unmasking the false promises of the world, of unmasking my subsequent false desires, are closing. the desire is searching for a new object, one that can finally satisfy its intensity. now that i have studied and worked and built a career for myself, i feel that i can focus on scratching that unbearable itch: to create meaning in my life, to love, to expand, to write a eulogy for my old self, my bird self, like Kim Hyesoon does, to return to that feeling of intensity that i couldn’t contain when i was sixteen. but i have spent the past fourteen years cultivating capaciousness, and now it’s apparently time to listen to Billy Idol again, if only through the instrumentation of HIM and the voice-box of Ville Valo, and to allow the feelings to come rushing back in as the lyrics hit my brain, ‘I’d give you all and have none, babe/Just to, just to, just do, a-just to, to have you here by me’

here i am nearly two months ago, packing up my old studio, showing off my abdomen and flipping you off~

x isabel

GPOY

For the past twenty days, I have been trying to relax and work at the same time. It’s not going terribly, but it’s not going as well as I had hoped it would (it never does). I’m not getting enough work done and I’m also not feeling that relaxed. I’m wound pretty tight, despite taking long walks on the beach or in the forest and reading Knausgård each day. For days I’ve felt disturbed, unable to put my finger on the cognitive dissonance. I am working, things are being checked off the list, and I’m also relaxing, I can feel it in my body. I feel strong, limber, healthy, rested. But still, in a back corner of my mind, I feel a sense of alarm. I’m not making enough jewellery, I’m not writing enough stories or e-mails or researching enough or having enough meetings. My body longs for the days when I was doing a master’s degree and working at the same time, when every day was sucked dry of my capacity to Do Stuff. Back then, when I had a moment to myself, I would journal excessively or sit in my windowsill on the fifth floor of the dilapidated rehab-facility-turned-housing-for-artists I called a home and stare at the moon. Life was simpler back then, not because the things I was doing were less complex, but perhaps because I had less of a capacity to feel how I was doing.

Today, however, I’ve identified the root of my anxieties, which persist despite my staunch efforts at doing things by the book, ie. Relaxing and Working in Moderate Amounts. The reason for my discomfort is that I am afraid. The rest of the year looms over me, enormous and intimidating, and it scares me. This year, I’m doing a lot of things for the first time: I am organising a symposium; I am making new work for a solo exhibition; I’m even taking an intern! I haven’t made any money in two months. In my conscious mind I know everything will turn out fine, even well, but this information has not caught up with my stomach. Every day I tremble with fear; I want to have all of the pieces for the exhibition ready NOW, I want to book all of the speakers and the venue for the symposium NOW, I want to launch my webshop NOW, I want to make commissions NOW! Anything to dull the feeling. Unfortunately for me, these are not tasks that can be completed in a day. Instead of tirelessly grinding through the weeks and destroying myself like I have done for years, I know I have to read Knausgård and walk on the beach and enjoy empty time.

What I’m experiencing is a classic case of New Level, New Devil. Every time you reach a new place in life, there will be a new, unexpected evil waiting there for you. This can happen in both work and personal development and I always have to remind myself that facing the New Devil is a good sign! It means you have gotten somewhere! But the problem with the New Devil is that it does not inspire a warm feeling of familiarity like the Old Devil does. Consequently, the New Devil can chase us back into the arms of the Old Devil, suckling on that familiar poison teat, relief spreading as symptoms of the old disease surface again.

Okay, that imagery went far. The real query is the following: how to not give in to the New Devil and let it scare you into paralysis. It’s important to be appreciative of how far you’ve come (when I write ‘you’ or ‘us’ or ‘we’ I mean ‘me’ or ‘I’). The New Devil wants to deter you, to plant fear in your heart, to see you stray from your path, as devils are wont to do. The New Devil wants me to think that my jewellery is bad and not interesting, that nobody wants to see it exhibited anywhere, especially if there is nothing else to look at, that nobody cares about my point of view and would certainly never attend a symposium that I put together, that I have nothing valuable to offer anyone, that I will surely fail to live up to the opportunities that have been presented before me and that I will die poor and broken in a muddy trench because I entertained the laughable idea that I could live from being an artist. I may as well give up and lie down and wait for my inevitable, crusty end.

Usually, I enjoy a certain level of naïveté (I apologise for using the pretentious spelling, but I couldn’t help myself) that borders on hubris. When I have an idea, like a symposium, I think ‘I could do that! And everything about it will be wonderful!’ This is good, because I tend to say yes to a lot of things, to put myself out there and have new experiences. I am happy when I get to expand myself and my inner wisdom; when I feel bored or stagnant I feel that I’m withering. Above all, I chase the new and exciting and I run away from bad feelings because I am afraid of depression. But so then it always catches me by surprise when what used to feel new and exciting suddenly becomes dull and riddled with responsibility. Every time, the evil thoughts come spooling out all over my brain without a warning and catch me off guard. The weight and sadness stops me in my tracks. The New Devil laughs.

I think a lot these days about being an artist and what it means in the small, pragmatic, dusty moments, the ones that are stripped of glamour and creativity and the shiny shiny of other people telling you that you are good. Whittled bank accounts, anxiety, motivating yourself to work when you feel empty and sad. It’s a process to feel comfortable with it, especially when you have a tendency to run away from bad feelings. As I write this, I feel so bored. I’m so tired of thinking and writing and talking about this part of my life being hard when, arguably, other parts are incredibly easy and, dare I say, fulfilling, and when such immense unfreedom and exploitation proliferates around the world.

Why is it so hard to tap into gratitude?

It’s two days later. I’ve finished Min Kamp pt. 3 and am at a loss for what to do with myself now. Parts 4-6 are waiting for me in Copenhagen. I read Ocean Vuong’s new novel instead, The Emperor of Gladness, but it’s so heartbreaking that I have to put it down every few pages. Knausgård is really swallowable, every page builds on the others in microscopic but cumulative ways so that now, 1500+ pages later, I feel, profoundly, that I am Karl Ove Knausgård. In this way, the intensely detailed autiobiographical writing of Min Kamp is a beautiful release from the other things that I am, namely ‘isabel’, ‘jewellery maker’, ‘artist’, ‘cultural programmer’ and the like. They all fade away into the child-version of Karl Ove that narrates the pages I’ve just read, into the vivid memories of Norwegian nature and burgeoning puberty and the unjust behaviour of my evil father.

Perhaps the greatest antidote to this neurotic, narcissistic spiraling are things like intense reading that allow me to forget that I exist, so absorbed in the tales of another that my own lose their gravity, get thin and transparent. That feeling, almost transcendent, feels like a reminder of Maya, the smoke-screen of reality upon which life is projected, according to the yogic philosophy I was taught. When the urgency of my problems feels so suffocating and all-encompassing that it obstructs my feeling of joy and aliveness, my ability to empathise and be present, I know the jig is up. Then it’s time to put the e-mails down, step away from the jewellery bench, put my hands where I can see them so to speak. That kind of thing. Time to erase the features of my own face, to engage in some practices of ego-release. Meditation is good and I’m finding now that reading, especially Knausgård, is excellent as well.

How closely related are the devil and the jester??? The question interrupts my serene beach walk on the Danish seaside. The cold water of the North Sea crashes around my ankles, always with terrifying force, as the waves pull back much sand and rocks on their way back out. Ever since I saw Wyczółkowski’s Stańczyk in Kraków last December, this image of the depressed man clad in red is the one that fills my mind at the word ‘jester’. The way his hand and forehead were painted was so delicious, so luxurious, and the rest was red, red, red, everywhere, contrasted by green shadow on the right side of his body and cuff of his sleeve.

The jester and the devil are thus both associated with the colour red, if we follow the Polish Stańczyk, and are both depicted as… multi-faceted characters. In Jan Matejko’s painting, the jester is the only person who is perturbed by the 1514 loss of Smolensk to Russia (here is a link to a wikipedia article, for your pleasure), the painting bearing the full title ‘Stańczyk during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk’. His eyes are dark in the shadow of his brow bone below the neat line of golden bells decorating his jester’s hat. In the background, the nobles are partying, unbothered. The jester, the entertainment for hire, is simultaneously the only person in the court who is cares for his nation, who possesses depth of feeling.

The devil too, outside of his religious confines, is a multi-purpose thing; in the tarot The Devil card represents addiction, sexuality, our shadow sides. Evil becomes transgression, subversion, hedonism. The devil is an anti-hero, the jester is depressed (cue sad clown paradox). There is a version of the story of Judas Iscariot in which he, knowing that Jesus must be crucified in order to atone for the sins of humanity, chooses to betray Jesus for the greater the good (ie. for the plot); proponents of this story point to the fact that thirty silver coins would not be enough of a bribe for a disciple (also, rumours are that Judas came from money). Judas loved Jesus, believed in his cause; why would he betray him for a few pieces of silver? I feel sympathetic towards the devil, the new and the old, these eternal scapegoats, the Judases, the real martyrs, who pay not with their bodies but with their reputations, becoming ubiquitous symbols of evil.

The Fool card of the tarot represents spontaneity, new beginnings, innocence, naïveté, depicted as a vagabond in the Rider-Waite deck, but often illustrated as a jester, joker or harlequin in other versions of the tarot. I think about the superimposition of these different characters, the fool, the joker, the jester, the devil, and the position of ‘trickster’ that sort of emerges in the overlap. And if you peel back the ‘it’s not that deep’ of these supposed gleeful trickster characters, there it is—the depths of the abyss, staring you in the face like the barrel of a gun.

There is a wild and dizzying oscillation between extremes that occurs in Western-coded dichomatic set-ups of Good & Evil, Happy & Sad, etc. when the two poles are so singular, so antithetical, yet so close and co-constitutive that you can slip from one to the other and back in a matter of seconds. This shouldn’t be possible, but it happens. The jester weeps, Judas was the most committed disciple of all, and I, I flicker between ecstasy and despondence several times a day, between feeling myself to be a momentary wave of the ocean of consciousness and the filthy mire of my ego, and so on and so forth. I was born on June 2nd, with the sun and venus in Gemini. Gemini, sometimes symbolised by the jester, perhaps enjoys the jester’s privilege: saying everything, saying nothing.

my attempt at documenting Wyczółkowski’s Stańczyk in the National Museum in Kraków.

These days the one thing that seems to define my condition is waiting. Waiting for the train to start again. Waiting to arrive. Waiting for a response. Many applications have been sent off in the past few months, by myself and by people close to me. We wait with bated breath for chips to fall. The next three months will be (what feels to me) a rapid succession of acceptance letters and/or rejections which will decide what the succeeding year of my life looks like. I’m excited. I’m scared. I’m nervous. I’ve been studying for a long time, and now I’m self employed and an artist and I can (read, have to) apply for funding and open calls and therefore I also have to wait.

I often re-visit this Paul B. Preciado quote in my mind: ‘femininity sticks to me like a greasy hand [...] I keep waiting to be taken into someone’s arms, waiting for life to begin, waiting to be loved, for pleasure to arrive, waiting...’ (Testo Junkie, pg. 137). Preciado is a brilliant last name. It just rolls off the tongue. In this passage, Preciado links the act of waiting (is it an act? If so, then why does it feel so passive?) to femininity. To be a woman is to sit around and wait for someone to pick up your wilting handkerchief. It is the feminine condition, and regularly smearing testosterone gel on your skin can’t rid you of that, according to Preciado.

I’m severely dehydrated so I think this might lack some sense but that’s a good exercise for me (I refuse to buy the overpriced bottled water in the train, so for the past seven hours I’ve been running on 500 ml of water from home, the 96% of a cucumber that is water, two cups of coffee and what I can now identify as a burgeoning headache).

While being an early-career autonomous artist is not a universally relatable position, waiting is. It seems that the feminine tendency to sit around and yearn is not exclusive to the feminine. We all suffer from this malaise. Although I can understand why Preciado makes that connection: think Emma Bovary sitting in her home, looking out the window and pining away, drenched in reverie, imagining a life vastly different from her own. Think Charlotte from Sex and the City placing her forehead on the table of the unnamed brunch place the girls always frequent after professing those iconic words: “I’ve been dating since I was 15. I’m exhausted. Where is he?”

Flaubert flips the script by (allegedly) declaring: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ The greasy hand of femininity sticks to us all (although some would probably argue that non, Rodolphe Boulanger, the 19th century fuckboy who breaks Emma’s heart, c’est toi).

I wonder how much of my life I’ve lived actually quote-unquote being present, and how much of it was spent in heated anticipation of the future. Desire always misses its target; once you get what you want the allure is gone and you have to sit with that thing. When fantasies become realities, they always arrive with a host of unforeseen logistics or feelings that are unsavoury compared to the pink, sparkly sheen of your imagination.

But then on the other hand, I think the best things in my life have come to me without asking, exceeding my imaginative capabilities. That’s when life is at it’s best and I’m just along for the ride. This trip to Munich is one of those times; I find myself at the press opening of a big Warwick Freeman exhibition asking the artist questions directly. Who am I? I’m not an important figure in the field of contemporary jewellery or its criticism. I’m just a li’l girl. What led me here is a series of saying yes to very random events. Faith & aforementioned optimism. But more on Munich and jewellery in another substack.

While I’m not in a Charlotte or Emma Bovary situation of pining for romance-novel love, I do yearn for the life of an artist. Maybe I’ve read one too many Patti Smith novels. To be frank, I’m waiting for my career to start. I’m constantly tortured and caressed by this unrelenting feeling that everything is just around the corner, that everything is just about to start, that the gun will go off at any moment, any moment now. My breath is ragged from being held in all the time. My stepdad, who is a well-known Danish goldsmith and jewellery artist (he does not like this term but it’s the truth) told me that when he was my age and his career was taking off, he had a recurring dream that he could fly. He would spread his arms and lean forward gently and the wind would just take him and carry him off. ‘You’ll start having flying dreams soon too,’ he tells me.

I wonder if I’ll ever fly, will I ever be satisfied? My hunger feels endless, so voracious. If things are going well with jewellery, I want to write and perform and when I get to write or perform, I want to make jewellery. When all three are happening I want to make video work. And so on and so forth. Perhaps there is something innately feminine (that’s not to say exclusive to women; q.v. Preciado & Flaubert) about this condition, which is marked not only by waiting but by the dream of something other than what is now. The preference for fantasy.

A few days ago, I was on the phone with my dad on his 54th birthday. He was telling me that he feels like his career is behind him. ‘That’s what happens when you get older; your future is behind you,’ he said. We are either dreaming about the future or the past. These musings are not a call to necessarily ‘practice presence’. I think there is something beautiful about Emma Bovary eating apricots and her fantasy being choked by Rodolphe’s letter, revealing that he does not intend to run away with her (apricot basket with message delivered the day there were to put this plan into action). The heartache so absolute: the stuff of romance novels—perhaps that’s what she wanted, deep down? It’s important to dream and desire things, even if it means you can be disappointed and nearly die of heartache.

I always get what I want, but often my desires take a very unexpected form when they manifest. They can be so bent out of shape that I hardly recognise them as that thing I wanted so fervently. But it always arrives. So all I have to do is want and that’s all I do, I want and I want and I want and I want and I want.

And I wanted to re-evaluate my relationship with these substances. The prevalence of coffee, cigarettes and alcohol in Amsterdam, where I live, makes them seem like a naturally occurring part of life. But more and more I began to think of the arbitrariness of some substances being legal and/or culturally significant and others not. It seemed as though I never chose to drink alcohol or coffee or smoke cigarettes any more than I chose to learn to speak Danish as a baby. And while the Danish language has a continuous function in my life, alcohol and cigarettes had worn out their welcome. Drinking especially felt like a knee-jerk reaction to meeting friends or being out in the city, as opposed to a choice driven by desire. The summer before I quit drinking, I was in Copenhagen and I drank a lot, also when I didn’t feel like it, just because it was a thing to do with others. And smoking always followed 2-3 beers.

But so once September rolled around again to mark the end of the Year of the Hermit Monk, I felt no desire to drink. Smoking seemed plain dumb. Coffee is delicious, but I’m more into tea.

It seemed more clear than ever that alcohol and cigarettes had been social crutches. I started smoking when I was 16, drinking when I was 14. My parents smoked when I was a child and I would make no-smoking signs for our house. I was very against smoking until the moment I started doing it myself. I never looked back; I became a daily smoker in the span of two months. It was 2012, the summer we moved from Beijing back to Copenhagen. One late summer evening, I stole a pack of cigarettes from a street vendor in the bar street of Sanlitun (iykyk). The package was beautiful and the cigarettes were heavy, the smoke that came out of them was velvety and it tasted of liquorice and vanilla. I loved it from the very beginning and I continued to love smoking for eleven years (we were on and off in the final years). I loved how it felt, I loved to look at the figure in the reflection of shop windows as I walked past with a cigarette between my fingers. I learned to blow smoke rings. I learned to roll cigarettes by hand when I moved to Paris at age 18 (to devote my life to oil painting, no less), I learned to roll perfectly straight and very thin cigarettes. I preferred to smoke Golden Virginia tobacco and to use extra slim filters.

unfortunately, i look stupid good smoking

Despite it being so harmful to my health, it was a good habit. I loved the ritual of it. I loved hunching over my papers in the rain, protecting them, tobacco pouch tucked in my armpit, filter stuck to my bottom lip with spit. I loved making a little cave for the puny flame of my lighter in the harsh wind. Watching the fire flicker and the paper burn. Having a beer and a cigarette with others and feeling unspoken, shared enjoyment. It was good for thinking, for brooding, for contemplating, for ruminating, for connecting with other smokers.

The summer before I quit smoking, I read Nicotine by Gregor Hens. It’s a sort of memoir, Hens’ life punctuated by his addiction to smoking, passionately rendered. The book is a nice Fitzcarraldo Edition; my friend Dominik gifted it to me. One passage in particular made an impact on me. Spoiler alert: in the book, Hens recalls being mutilated in a traffic accident and asking someone, blood clotting on his face, for a cigarette after having abstained for years. Afterwards, after quitting again and healing his body, he then starts to fear that he would one day purposely put himself in a dangerous, life-threatening situation so that he might have a warranted, well-deserved cigarette again. No one will berate you for smoking if you’ve just been mauled by a bear. For instance.

It made me think. Think about why I smoke and drink, why I started and why I continued. What are the years and years of ingestion of these stimulants and depressants doing to me?

And, more crucially: what is the difference between liking something and just being used to it? What is the difference between liking something and being dependent on it, not just physically, but having your sense of self so intimately tethered to it? This can be applied to many things: people, jobs, places, wardrobes. Relationships. You get the idea.

There’s only one way to find out. I’m a practical person: cut off the festering limb. Quit your job. Dye your hair, move to another city. At about 3-4 months of sobriety, I began to feel the cumulative effects of never being hungover, never having my trains of thought interrupted by alcohol. It was intoxicating in its own way. I felt powerful. I was also meditating for thirty minutes every morning and the combined practices led to unprecedented levels of mental clarity. In the Year of the Hermit Monk, I accomplished more than I could have imagined. I wrote my master’s thesis, I graduated from university, I published articles, I made much jewellery, I taught a four week creative writing course with my platonic wife Jimena Casas, I published two articles, I performed in Perdu, I taught wax carving workshops twice a month, I dated a not insignificant amount of people and I fell in love. I was rather tired at the end of it, but it was amazing and I would be remiss to not give some credit to sobriety. Having a clear mind turned out to be its own kind of high. I felt like I was sharpening the blade of my mind, every day, sharpening the blade. I felt like I could see everything and do everything.

here i am sober & dancing to Rihanna on a boat full of drunk people in Copenhagen

I also felt naturally uninhibited. Alcohol, drugs, these substance work to disinhibit us and we do things we wouldn’t do sober. Yes? But I think that the desire to talk to strangers, to dance wild, to scream, to jump in the canal and to bike hard into the night is something that lives inside of us always. Disinhibiting substances allow us to do these things, but we’re not doing them because we’re intoxicated. I want to sing ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’ at the top of my lungs as I bike through the city—the desire exists inside me, drugs and alcohol just unlock them. And then I can blame the desire on the substance. But that is false. The desire is mine first. The sooner you realise this the better. No one is putting a gun to your head. Your desire is yours, as much as that might be disturbing. You should not think ‘oh no, every time I get inebriated I key cars in fancy parking lots!’ but rather ‘oh no, I have the desire to key cars in fancy parking lots!’ For example.

Anyway, I digress. Disinhibiting substances allow us to do things we would not ‘normally’ do. When you have those regular outlets of ‘letting loose’ then you can go back to your inhibited life in the in-betweens. Not chatting up strangers, not doing belly shots, not making out with your friends on the floor, not writhing to cumbia. But once this behaviour has no monthly or bi-monthly or weekly outlet, it starts to creep into your day-to-day-life. You start to dance wild and scream and writhe to cumbia without the aid of mind-altering substances. Because the desire is too strong. Like, in my experience.

I think I thrive with restriction. Sometimes certain things need to be closed off so that others can grow. Find out what’s sapping you. Things that served you in your past may be sucking you dry now. Redirect your juices back into yourself.

Restriction is like cutting off a limb to grow a new one. You never know what is going to emerge from your body unless you give it a chance to sprout a new appendage. But that requires nutrients and energy. Something must be sacrificed for the new to flourish. Sure, drinking is fun but what could sobriety do to me?

Now, I have always enjoyed alcohol—the way it tastes, the way it feels to be tipsy and then drunk, the way it feels conceptually to be a young person drinking with friends, the way a glass of beer gets foggy with condensation on the outside after it’s served, the way drinking is associated with leisure and relaxation, the way you can splurge and feel fancy by getting a delicious cocktail, the way you can identity with being a craft beer drinker or a natural wine drinker or a cheap vodka mixed with orange juice from concentrate in the parking lot drinker or all three, the way you can enjoy a can of beer on your bicycle or on your way to the next bar or in line for the club because god forbid the steady climb of your blood-alcohol content should suffer a drop or even just a plateau—the maintenance of the ‘promille,’ as we say in Danish, is paramount. And so on and so forth. Okay, fine, you know what? I love drinking.

I love drinking and I love smoking. It’s only meaningful to give up the things you love, but which no longer serve you. In the bidding farewell of cigarettes and alcohol, I also wave goodbye to the idea of myself as a smoker and drinker. What might be most painful is the detachment from that identity, from the knowledge that in the future there lies a rowdy night of drinking or a contemplative cigarette when I’m feeling blurry. The idea of these moments is more seductive than the moments themselves.

I always meant to start drinking again after a year, to re-introduce alcohol in a quote-unquote mindful way. But this summer I was meditating on the beach and it came to me that I need to continue meditating and that I need to stay sober. You can’t stop now, the meditation told me, you’re three feet from gold, it said, you can’t stop now, you can’t stop now, you can’t stop now. We’ve only just begun. It’s five months since then and I’m still sober, 17 months now. I might drink again one day but today is not that day.

Being sober for me is a part of a greater spiritual journey. One that I do not fully understand, but which is happening to me without a doubt. I want to have fun, but I think that means something other than it used to. Being sober is about presence and about paying attention. About cutting out distractions and honing in and feeling something. About having the space to dig deep inside myself and see what is in there and privileging my desires. My desires that are latent, that are throbbing, that are sleeping, that are rioting. To live and to feel alive.

Today it’s lunar new year. Happy year of the snake, I wish you an abundant and auspicious year to come <3