ALL ARTICLES | COVEN BERLIN | COVEN Berlin is a sex-positive transdisciplinary genderbender collective focused on feminism, love, gender, sexuality and art.

It is a small swamp in Grunewald on a sunny day. The picture was taken from slightly above. There is an area covered with the thick high grass in the middle of the image. One can distinguish separate plants on the first plan. Behind this area, more to the upper right and left corners of the image are green deciduous trees.

Unmeasurable Falling

The first time I stepped into marsh water was when I was about 7. One of the first sunny days in early May. My friend’s family took me along with them to the reservoir. We were all neighbors living in the same street on the outskirts, and in the summer all the kids were biking there quite often. But at that time we probably were yet too young to go there by ourselves.

This is a photo that is out of focus. It captures a small section of a wall where there are what appears to be family photos hanging.

The Art of (Not) Forgetting – photographing memories as a way to resist censorship

In my project “The Art of (Not) Forgetting”, which began in February 2021, around 4 months after the start of the protests in Belarus, I tried to use storytelling and photography as a means of opposing the regime of the last European dictator: Alexander Lukashenko. The idea that brought me to address these issues was prompted by the situation I was observing in my country since August 2020. During massive rallies against the rigged presidential election, one of the symbols used by the opposition was the white-red-white flag that refers to the period of an independent Belarus and dates back to 1918. Very soon the regime declared this combination was “extremist” and eventually banned. People wearing clothes, scarves, bracelets, and even socks with the “wrong” colors were detained, fined, and given prison sentences.

An image of birch trees in a forest. On the closest tree, a squarish red area is visible. In the middle of the area is a small oval black and white portrait.

Forest that Cares – on Belarus, Partisans, and Thicket We Can Learn A Lot From

Human culture, people’s beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the natural environment we live in. Climate defines our diets and clothing habits, but certainly the most intricate interactions occur at deeper levels – deserts or jungles, the closeness to big waters or high mountains determine the way we perceive ourselves and others and feel about this strange thing called “life”.

The End is Not an Option: Carrier Bags and the Rhythm of the Bog

I’ve spent a lot of the last years in bogland – literal and metaphysical. For six years I obsessively returned to a river in Lancashire, (U.K.). I spent most of my time on top of the peat fells (big swathes of high altitude, boggy moorland with flat tops), looking for the source of small rivers that swell out of the wetland and spill down the cracks they make in the hillsides.

This collage shows the neck and head of a human, represented as a man. His face is not visible, it is covered by a section of the universe, a black hole. Around him you can see a collection of eyes covered with semi-transparent anuses.

High Priests of Mass Data, or Surveillance is Just Astrology for White Men

Audio transcription: Pluto is the deity of the underworld, the planet of raw power, obsession and control, organized violence, reversals, and foundational transformations. In astrology, the Pluto return is the…

A glitchy image, with black ,peach, grey, red, and blue shattered pixels, which seems to have originally been a selfie-style photo of someone's lower body and feet in the bathtub

It Glitches at the Sight of Our Nipples

Day to day, I write and organize projects about the digital commons — where groups of people with aligned goals build systems of digital communication and information that they rely on and steward together. Like a community garden, but we dig our hands into signals, scatter bits and pixels so they grow into something meaningful. Platform co-operatives, community networks, digital research and cultural archives, Free and Open Source projects, are just some examples.

bogside down part ii

05.03.22 at feldfünf with Mary Maggic and Johanna Hedva //06.03.22 online with Alice Sparklykat and Mai Ishikawa Sutton // We’re witnessing a revival in occultism and esoteric practices, at least…

A four color image on a white background. In the center, three women wearing grecian dresses raise an offering toward the sky. They are outlined in blue with a light blue over color, and some yellow over wash on the bottom. On the edges, two piles of spirals sit under two black line illustrations of Lofi girl, a girl with bangs wearing headphones and a sweater and sitting with her head on one hand, looking pensive. A yellow circle is behind each illustration. The lofi girls face each other.

An ode to the cybernetic patron saint of work and procrastination, Lofi girl.

To hear some beats to relax/study to,
I invoke Lofi girl.In a mythic time of human/cyborg symbiosis, she and I are one. By the grace of her beats, I can achieve my best self.

Collage of various chumbox advertisement thumbnails: images of people, skin, and runny eggs.

Feelings at the Edge: A Chumbox Tour

The scene is all too familiar, the gestures rehearsed. It begins with the innocence of casual browsing, the wide-eyed wonder as you click and scroll, traipsing around some mildly interesting news article. Then it leers at you, inevitable and horrible.

Two people sit at a desk outdoors in front of a gallery, in warm evening summer light. On the left is Anisha, a brownskinned person with long dark hair wearing a pink shirt and skirt and smiling. The other person is Schwarzrund, a Black person with curly black hair, wearing a long black floral dress and talking into a microphone.

A Conversation on Care

‘A Conversation on Care’ was the official name of the talk SchwarzRund and I gave in Summer 2021, as part of COVEN BERLIN’s event “an invitation to sink in to the bog.” Watching it back though, I realise that another title could have been ‘A long overdue catch up between friends who are always keen to work together, could forever talk to each other, but don’t always have the energy to do so.’