Tag Archives: off the map

Stories and streets are powerful venues for contradicting the imminent doom of loneliness. The public art we make of ourselves in the street, the languages of our bodies tracing postures and assuming them, the paths of our eyes grazing each other,  are either participatory or resistant. Here, in public, we can choose to change our immediate world by remaking our myths and telling our own stories, by remembering how to ask and listen, and by learning to show our most real faces to each other and celebrating them. Show your warts, and you defy the very process of airbrushing the truth. Risk smiling at the person sitting next to you on the bus, and immediately the message of isolation is undermined. Not just for the two of you, but also for these watching this unusual event unfold. The moment we notice that we can meake fresh choices every minute the moment we take Funky’s advice and think for ourselves, it’s easy to see that we’re all in this together. Isolation was somebody else’s bad idea.

pg 43-44 from ‘off the map’

There are so many ideas I agree with outlined in this piece. So many. I miss doing my own writing.

3 august.

life cracks open with just a little tap, pours sweet milky sap right down your throat. Learn to read the signs and you’ll find yourself right where you nee to be, another world open at your feet. This is the place we’ve been looking for since we were small girls chasing fairies in the garden, high schoolers in scowls  and witchy black clothes, angry young women who want to get out, out, out of the systems we hate & learn to shape our own lives.

This is a doorway, this beautiful ruined house with its facade of vines & mirrors, and the world behind it has a thousand faces. Faces like hte women who have lived here in Verottu Krottu for two years now, in steady encroachment of developers. Lucy walking like a warrior through cobbled streets. Annet slouched against the counter at the squatters pub, snorting with laughter ‘i’m not gonna work, not me.’ Micah leaning suddenly out a broken attic window, one arm around her scrawny cat and one reaching out ot toss the keys to su in the street below.

Sometimes this not-quite-secret world makes itself impossible to ignore; it’s like the brilliant dragon mural painted four stories high and 100 colours bright, leaping out from a s2quatted building in the heart of Amsterdam. It’s asking you – where can we go when we let go of what binds us? What do youw ant most in the world, in this world of the possible?

source: off the map by Hib & Kika, pg. 18