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The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist…
Mary Buchinger, whose recent books include Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award), and The Book of Shores (2024) and Virology (2022), both from Lily Poetry Review Books, is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof…
I’m in my own process of trying to find my way through this. My earlier attempts at activism were hampered by how I related to my own identity, which went something like this: I’m here as a white person to…
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse,…
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse,…
Chiharu Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin, draws inspiration from personal experiences and emotions, exploring universal themes such as life, death, and relationships. Through immersive thread installations enveloping everyday objects like shoes, keys, and dresses, she…
The screen reflected back not just environmental catastrophe but my own complicity in the systems that perpetuate it. My car keys sat heavy in my pocket. The plastic water bottle on my desk suddenly felt like an accusation. In that…
Having ambition and drive is the usual thing to have in Aleppo. My name is Ammar and I am part of this culture.
Ann Shenfield works across a number of media. Her animated films have received various international honors including selection in the Berlin Film Festival. Her poetry has also received numerous awards including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her poetry book A…
Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and…
It’s when you leave your inner self and move into the unknown; it’s when you are forced to flee from your awareness, from your assets, from yourself, to move as a physical creature and start to find any place or…
I have not had the luxury to mourn fully, to scream, to collapse under the weight of it all. Every time I feel the pull to surrender, to collapse under the immense weight of my grief and exhaustion, I remind…
This collapse of the boundary between inside and outside, which induces in the spectator a sense of profound spatial disorientation, is paradigmatic of the collapse of the parameters that sustain a basic sense of reality in experiences of catastrophe. In…
This is an argument based on faith that there is right and wrong—and that at some point things will be different. Faith that no occupation lasts forever, oppressed people eventually reach independence, and justice will prevail. Faith is hard to…
Webster reminds us that breathing phenomena were and are involved in a variety of neurotic symptoms and refers to the first patients of psychoanalysis, who developed swallowing difficulties, feelings of suffocation, and coughing tics. Nowadays, we experience the importance of…
Survival Story: An Artistic Approach to Harm Reduction was inspired by my hands-on experience in harm reduction across both states. A pivotal moment occurred as I sat in a mobile phlebotomy van, under the dim glow of a headlamp, preparing…
So, in existential panic, I pulled my gaze from the claustrophobic weight and scanned the narrow tube I sat in and knew while I was not suffocating, nor in peril like those doomed cavers, I too lived in a dangerous…
Her grandmother warned her not to fall into the trap. She didn’t say what it looked like, or when or how one might typically encounter it. She used the article “the,” not “a,” as if there was only one trap…
Did everyone in Honolulu know about the man on the balcony? Did the lead vocalist mean him? Was he famous, even? A local phenomenon? A freak, showpiece? Or were there many people in Honolulu missing chunks of themselves?
Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our…
