Life is drastic, it’s fantastic.

I have very recently had a spiritual reunion with one of my cousins. We have of course loved one another, and actually have pretty much been thinking in similar ways, but we somehow just landed on the same page. Maybe it’s the fact that we have both studied within the Humanities or that we have both used one another as the maturation partner of our growing up. Maybe it’s because she was the closest person to me after school that had girly stuff for me to project my then closeted queerness on. Either way, it only made sense to watch Greta Gerwig’s Barbie with her.

As a post-tumblr queer I was aware that the movie would hold a feminist punch to the majority of viewers’ expectation through following Reddit and the lower tiers of the internet.

Additionally, as a Virgo with a backstory that only my therapist will know, I always want to critically deconstruct anything I experience and find its flaws as a way to regain control over my own narrative, yet still wish to be proved wrong and actually be allowed the agency to nothing. To not deconstruct anything and simply enjoy.

The first time we tried to watch the film, it was sold out. Now, second time, hungover and defeated I am greeted by the expected pink waves of people, flooding the cinema to witness the original love-to-hate, hate-to-love queen that is Barbie. The first time around, I was one of the people that chose pink. The uniform if viewed through a sociological lens, exerts its ability as a device to resolve certain dilemmas of complex organization within clusters of people. It is used as a definition of boundaries within the identity pool of society, as a totem, as a certification of legitimacy and a suppressor of individuality. As the film begins, Barbieland is viewed as a utopia that restricts any sort of sociological viewing since after all it is nothing but a fake land of dolls. As a Kantian modus operandi, a “mere means” of spectatorship, Barbieland and its alleviation of responsibility instantly jettisons the post-structuralist meaning in embodiment. We have accepted Barbieland as a rule-free plastic society. As Ranciere proclaims, an active spectator performs a leap of faith and let’s go to the machineries of the viewing experience, yet hold their own as a means of critical reflection and interaction with the meaning being produced. As a metonym to our own assumptions of the beginning of the film, the pink color drowning the cinema room reflected the movie’s entire ethical performance in the most embodied way possible. Cerebrally, intuitively and simply, flawlessly. Whether one chose pink, because they want to feel like Barbie, to make their viewing experience more memorable, to make a joke out of their childish whims or simply because they are a fag that would never skip a dress code, proves nothing more but the ability of theological reasoning to belonging as a human necessity. One that could arguably have been cultivated through Christian morals, social cues or simply human (social) nature. The reason that capitalism is endlessly evolving, according to Mackenzie Wark, is because of the theological status we have applied to it. In simpler terms, because it’s “alternative” (being communism) has not worked, it is instantly implied that every other option is no longer a possibility and thus, allowing the status of the capitalist (and by default, patriarchal) doctrine to be considered as unchangeable and as far out of reach as God. Similarly, barbiecore has infiltrated our lives through social media, promotion, and saturation, to allure us to the primal memories each and every one of us has had with the Mattel doll. This is a movie no one knew anything about. However, what does this theological dimension imply if paralleled to the movies actual plot?

The multiplicity of levels between what Barbie had already proclaimed, theologically, as her feminist, capitalist agenda, have been applied in a weirdly for Hollywood post-structuralist way. In this way, the viewer, following a Ranciere way of active participation, is not allowed to deviate from reality. By breaking down the fourth wall, referencing Mattel’s own failures, Margot Robbie’s actual pretty privilege and the reality of mass consensus on critical thinking mindlessly serving men, Gerwig has done the impossible. She has made, post-structuralism, pop. The use of juxtaposition between bimbofied, Barbiecore aesthetics, and post-structuralist anti-assimilationist critical thinking has hidden, like gems within its storyline, nuances that deconstruct not only the status-quo which people like me are fighting against (aka. Patriarchy, rampant capitalism and misogyny) but also, provided a subtle prescription for the woke inflammation that is in my humble opinion, tormenting “critical” circles. I have always said that accountability is a love language. In this fake-ass world we live in, having someone tell you exactly your flaws and still love you for it, is the ultimate compliment. However, holding a critical distance between the people that are actively choosing hatred, and the ones that so eagerly choose to use adjectives and “ideas” that have been socially constructed is exactly how revolutionary thinking is bordered. If one takes a step back and looks at what is really being said in the movie, its eerie undertone is nothing more than a philosophical amalgamation from people like Proust, Sartre, Heidegger, Wark, Butler and every other major philosopher you can think of. The Ken war scene, was a masterpiece in using people’s discomfort to hide, like a Trojan horse the stupidity of actual life. If one removes the fact that what you are seeing is supposedly “dolls”, how is this any different than what is really happening in the world? Men play war as if their lives depend on it. Little do they know, that if they stopped, their lives wouldn’t depend on it. If the only thing that stands between you, and real life is nothing but a choice, how do some people still choose violence and hatred? Even the audiences of this movie in its aftermath.

The re-iteration of the narrative of hope, targeted for an older generation is a breath of fresh air, alleviating the pressure put upon younger generations (supposedly the ones this film was expected to cater to). The protagonist of the film, is just a 40 year old woman that hides within her the secret of the universe. Affect. Emotion. Inspiration. It holds accountable the powers-that-be that use the ever-so-tired;
“Our time is done, it’s up to you to save the world.”
“The new generation is different. We are done.”
“Well, he’s a product of his time.”

Everything is a choice. One can only choose to follow the social constructions and ideas that pinpoint to whatever meaning you ascribe to. Social languages are proven to be nothing but a toxic reversal of status-quo’s simply because, one cannot use the disease to produce an ailment. The only thing, one can do is understand what is already there and dwell within its own nature. As one of the most emotional peaks to a movie I have ever watched, Barbie clearly states “I want to be one of the people that produce meaning. I don’t want to be just an idea.” Even if social languages help us make sense of the meaning around us (and thus they are extremely important to be used with caution), the real nature of reaction, to the world but also this movie is the same denominator we all come to in the world. We are all born naked and afraid. Everything else we chose to cover ourselves with, is only to provide some sort of safety and reassurance to our finite life. In this way, a flat Barbie foot, a dash of cellulite and some light existential dread, shows that even living your life towards death (in a Heideggerian way), can be so pink that a fascist would hate it. It could be so queer and reactive that a fascist would take it personally. It could be so revolutionary and truthful, that it would cater to exactly the people that need catering to. The joke therein lies on the fact that the symbol being used, is exactly the thing we all wanted catering to. Perfection. The bigger joke therein lies on the fact that even promotionally, the mystery surrounding this doll’s narrative, was exactly the thing we all wanted to experience (thus attaching our own assumptions to an otherwise non-descript film preview). Hope.

The tough part is that the act of choosing as Gerwig so eloquently portrayed, has to be made by femininities. With full awareness that I risk losing my reader by throwing the burden of progress yet once again historically upon the oppressed, I confidently believe, femininities have to be the ones that will perform the task. Not because all men are dumb. Not because all women are smart. Simply because femininities will perform the task better as intertwined with the dimension of emotional production. There must be a reason why things are actually not working out. There must be a reason why the choice has not already been made by the powers-that-be. There must a reason why femininities have been pushed in the eclipse of emotional production by the patriarchal nucleus while itself remains in violence. There must a reason why the patriarchal nucleus trembles for its members, to somehow gate-keep fake responsibility masked as capital and power. There must be a reason why the fortress of Kendom is so fragile that even a simple “fake film” can cause such a spiritual earthquake. There must a reason.

The ultimate message of the movie is hope and the ability to bare every one of our constructions to the true essence of what humanity is. And even then, with all the answers on the table, some people, will continue in the Kendom, being plastic, serviceable and vacant to the unveiling of human emotion that these two hours have done. Leading, even before it’s beginning, each and every one of us to choose pink, to choose to belong, to choose the same denominator being hope. Ultimately, asking us to only hope for the ending to be as punchy as Gerwig curated its mystery to be but asking us to abort any construction of control over reality and one another.
I am going to watch the film again. Today, now, not only with my cousin, but also my mom.

Splayed: a personal story of meaning construction.

I often say that I cannot speak for anyone besides myself. I do not believe in using all-encompassing arguments based on a self-realized epistemology to perpetuate a specific discourse. Neither for a community nor for a specific individuality. In the same breath then, what my own argument somehow creates in my head is a pseudo-loophole of contextualization, isolation and as Laurent Berlant would call it, a cruel optimism. A sort of transformative force within the political field I believe I am submerged in by invoking the nuance of seclusion. If indeed the Berlant reading is the one favored, then the questions that arise are of an affective pedagogy that scrutinizes the kinds of forms, a gesture would make, and how imminent its own expressivity would be. After a couple of coffees per-day, I realize that my inside and outside frontier are lost within the cruelness that makes such isolation quasi-optimistic by simply expressing everything without the on-screen of consciousness. However, if indeed what I just so complicatedly tried to simplify is to be agreed, what kind of state of comfort would I ever even wish for to hold, when talking about art, female artists and their production?

Splayed is an exhibition by the artistic duo Eva and Belinda Papavasiliou, which is currently at show at MeMeraki in Limassol. The body of work consists of video installations, sculpture and ceramic pieces but also, a live performance including Danae Laou, Renay Roussou and Naya Karakosta. I had three different experiences of this exhibition. One before it’s opening day, one on the day, and lastly, one where again I managed to be alone. I felt like my experience was wildly different each time as I hate being around people in exhibitions since I can’t focus. I tried to make sense of what I saw each time, yet somehow still cannot put my finger on it.

On a sheer level, visuality, viewership but also privacy are pushed through the performance Splayed. Deformed through stockings, drenched in pink, and muted sounds, my first reaction was to a voyeuristic autoeroticism. Luce Irigaray claims that woman’s autoeroticism is very different from her gendered counterparts. She says” A woman touches herself by and within her-self directly, without mediation, and before any distinction between activity and passivity is possible. A woman “touches herself” constantly without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. Thus, within herself she is already two- but not divisible into ones – who stimulate each other as a form of autoeroticism.” Regardless of whether such language would be considered highly gendered at the present moment, this division highlights a sort of individuality that somehow is lost within the hyper-visual economy we are in now. As the performers lose their form within the array of pillows, one begs the question of the formation and means of Irigaray’s touch. As a sort of soft protest, the privacy of each performer’s movements, also highlight the agency to authorship. Throughout phallic-scopic economy, the discrimination and individualization of form is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Within said economy, as foreign to her pleasure, the female relegation to passivity is forced within the arbitrary notion of having the body being eroticized and solicited to a double movement between exhibition and public retreat. By having all performers in similar sartorial choices, with a quasi-similar movement direction, what the piece showed to my eyes, is a protestful individualization in which the femx psyche can experience a multitude of levels, emotions, while shaking in a privative transcendence. The pot in the middle, filled with ink, further highlights the sign of authorship I so desperately try to read. When the doors open, the performers dressed, merging with the audience I realize that somehow all that is left is an open-closed private sphere of emotive reality.

Then I go to the beginning, with Legs, Traps, Cages and Poisoned Bait and Sealskin. I hear someone speak about lunch; I hate it. I followed the wrong trajectory which was given to us, but I usually do as I’m told. I see the performer, questioning, the symbolisms and their strength, when they are private. The arbitrariness of a psycho-analytic movement, that borders on fetishization. To follow one thing coherently, in an Irigaray way I felt like she was indefinitely other in herself. It felt like the reason which she has been called “temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious and going in all directions with no coherence of meaning” somehow happened because the listening system which surrounds her happens through a grid that is already-made, making the sound muted. The trance that follows through when she lets go, signals a death and a potential beginning in the random murmurs that are all around. I see the length that hair would signal if it was never cut, entangled in the process of linearity. How long would your hair be if you never cut it? Would it show how old you were? Would it somehow turn the tangles that would be formed, in a theological response to dissonance? I see the perfect shape, a circle being transformed and transmutated by the force of time, slowed down. What sort of interiority could slow down? If the machinery we measure interiority, time and the process of becoming, is defacto within the phallo-scopic economy of viewership, then by parallelization (beyond binaries) a femx has been placed elsewhere within this discursive process. “They have turned back within themselves, which does not mean the same thing as within yourself. They do not experience the same interiority that you do and which perhaps you mistakenly presume they share. Within themselves means in the privacy of this silent, multiple, diffuse tact.” Within the binary definition of gender, psyches have also been born and felt. In this way, if temporality is transmutated, the female psyche then would be somewhere in the abstraction of its own device, privacy, choice and authorship. Then ultimately, what the desire would be shown as is more than one (sex for example), that has been given and attributed. If we normatively, read that as the insatiable hunger, of biting an apple to its ultimate seed or the voracious process of time reflected within your hair, then I guess the femx psyche would engulf entirely.

While I’m standing in the room, trying to make sense of what that smell is, a man looks at me, looks back at the installation and nods. I suddenly realize that we might have understood the same thing, or actually nothing at all. I go back to Irigaray. Maybe in fact, the question arised is not so much of a specificity of context, or one woman’s psyche, but more so that of an economy which diverts the linearity of a project, to undermine the target-object of desire, explore the polarization of autoeroticism and disconnect one’s privacy to abstraction. She says “It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat themselves until the meaning will be clear”. So with that said, I do as I felt, write as I’ve though and through the exhibition stop using the economy of viewership that has been given to me and simply start enjoying what I’m seeing.

There will be another performance of “Splayed” on the 25^th of February in MeMeraki. Opening times are from 18:00 to 21:00 while the performance will start at 19:00.

A wishful landscape.

I once heard a friend tell me that she disagrees with the idea that womxn are at most times in danger. When walking down the street, she does not feel the piercing looks from the bystanders and passer-by’s. The rest of the womxn in the room raised their hands, to prove to her the validity of concern. In a moment, spectators of the same theatre have put yet another actor on stage. A stage she was already placed on, beyond her awareness of the fact. With the fear of sounding cliché my mind goes straight to Butler and her notion of performativity. If arguably, as she claims, our gendered reality is created through a sustained and continuous social performance of behavioral patterns, the abiding femininity that is ascribed to women is the key element of visual resonance. A woman is a woman, because she looks like a woman, acts like a woman, and feels like a woman in her essence. However, this strategy of gendered characteristics has long been proven to be nothing more, but illusionary constructs of control. Control over female bodies, over psyches and over the feminine ontologies of the lived experience as a narrative, adding to a discourse. The narrative starts with a wish. The first thought I thought of was “for what?”. We enter the space, and are led to the stage watching each woman, take her place, within the seating area.

Wish is a performance conceived by Elena Antoniou in which five female artists, occupy and invade the Municipal Theatre of Nicosia. The first strand of analysis one can claim for Wish is the blurring of spectatorship. The women, othered, now are the ones doing the Othering. Gazing back into the eyes of the spectator, they confront them with their own gaze. With an affective and bodily sensation, the artists demand the audience to be part of their choreography as they invade the space, unclenching and unbending with their movements, without a stop in their trajectory. If someone is in their way, they’ll have to either move, change or follow. Primarily, Deleuze’s active spectator would be the perfect candidate for the 2019 performance. Instead of being deprived of their bodies being suspended in an ideological apparatus, the active spectator, uses their body by engaging in the stimuli provided. What Deleuze suggests, but also Wish, is an inclusion of the spectator that goes beyond the visual. It implies a direct subjectification within the narrative.

However, watching the artists move around, I was trying to make sense of the action as actively as Deleuze would have wanted. I notice each character, having a different dynamic response to their interactions, both within them, but also with the audience. If a performance is performative, and gender is an “act”, the social fiction which its consolidation constructs is the realization of a psychological interiority of the agents. In simple words, femininity and gender is nothing more but a performative behavioral sequence. Chewing a gum with idleness, stepping on the weaker one, touching the Other. This narrative of feminine power-play was interrupted only when the women subjects were reflecting the gaze back to the audience. It served as a sort of break, with the gendered narrative that Antoniou curated. What is left, when the beating electronic music stops stomping, is the spectator’s fusion with the action of a performance that served as a template for active spectatorship.

Then, I saw Landscape, where Antoniou takes the role of the performer instead of the choreographer in a solo. On a personal level, I treated Landscape as the “origin story” for one of the characters that was not wishful. We notice, that there is no allocated seating plan. I instantly go back to the pacifism that we are all conditioned to, thinking that once again, we will be lead on stage. Fortunately, to my surprise the stage came to us this time. A square in the middle of the seating arrangement, surrounded by the audience in a random order.

I remember Deleuze again, and try to critically view the female body of Antoniou who so willingly put hers to viewership. This time, instead of asking the audience to interact and use their body, she asks them to use hers with their gaze. In an occularcentric way, everyone watches her hyper sexualized movements, being highlighted against the muted black bodysuit she was wearing. Now the spectator has stopped being active, and has taken on the traditional, normative, all-seeing, all-knowing masterful eye of the subject. From splits, to backbends, her wet hair and her high heels, suggest an agreement to hyper-femininity for the act of performing. Slowly, each movement, with its powerful repetition turns to an awkward and uncomfortable notion of giving back. Slowly, the sexualized gaze that inactive spectatorship allows, turns to a self-critical one where psychoanalytically, it disgusts itself with its patriarchal and sexist core. The spectator has been activated again, to notice the way with which our own spectatorship is conducted.

Sexually-driven, hierarchal, invasive, patriarchal and objectifying. Thus, what Landscape managed to do, is reverse the gaze back to itself, by proclaiming the openness to spectatorship as a collective landscape. One where our conditionalities are projected onto others, with the female body taking the most scrutiny. The overexposed and oversaturated hues of what make a woman a woman, are nothing more than a patriarchal construct we all partake in, unwillingly or not. And then, out of nowhere, just when I thought that I knew what was going on in these 30 minutes, Antoniou stops, and bangs her heel, like a timer, asking the audience to exit the stage. No bow given to the agency of others, only her personal demand to reclaim her space as her own. Awkwardly, some muted claps are heard, and people look around to see if she has indeed just finished their own spectatorship in the same way, that this article will finish without a last .

Happy birthday to me

I’ve always had a fascination about birthdays. I always thought of it as such a weird concept. This day, how many years ago, I was given birth to from my mum. I experienced light for the first time, and sound and texture, in the same form that I experience it now as far as physicality goes. My eyes moved for the first time, and my hand grasped. The beauty of it is that with each year, you realize the circle around the sun you make according to your own timeline. You grasp the length of time and the size of the planet and with each year, each year somehow matters less. You realize this day is shared with so many more people, and the only thing that truly is yours is the way you circulate that light that gravitates your life. Whether you want to call it your solar circumference in age, or your social periphery of perception is a conversation for another time. A time where it will actually matter if the circles we produce around the sun are of the same diameter since we would have met at the same point. Now for the first time I want nothing to do with me. I celebrate myself each day and gift me what I am.

I remember at the last Pride in Cyprus, most of my friends didn’t want to go because it was not “queer” enough. It didn’t have the beating electronic music, fake harnesses and glittery eyelids that we’re usually accustomed to, I guess. In my book, it’s an ethical obligation to be or at least try to be more ethical than the society you grew up in. Naturally then, I would never miss a pride anywhere, unless it’s a place like Amsterdam or London where Pride has turned into an institutionalized version of queerwashing capitalist agendas. I wore something casual, where in my case was a long red silk skirt with slids on both legs, a white crop top with a pentagram cutout in the back and a peacock feather earring. As a queen you teach yourself from a young age that you actually do not really dress for the occasion as in the case of Cyprus, I would always wear sweatpants. I always dress for the situation I want to be in. In the same way, you also learn not to really look around for people as you’re usually treated with hatred, ridicule or shame. Knowing also that most of my friends wouldn’t go, I really had no idea that actually looking around would be more interesting than I had thought of. Taking into consideration the nature of this “event”, my own expectations of what my around would look like caught me by surprise, and no it’s not because of the fisting frenzy and bareback bar-brawls usually going on in the gay agenda. I saw kids, 14,15,16 being openly queer and unapologetic about it. I saw them looking like skater boys while being assigned female at birth and as flamboyant theys, regardless of what a cistemized “what’s between your legs” has been being asked of them their entire life so far. I saw them walking in the street, broad daylight, holding hands and kissing. Me, an unapologetically and radically queer reactionary virgo was okay with looking around, to find shelter and hope in people I don’t know. That was the first time I realized it’s okay to look around for hope.

I remember the one movie I watched at the Queer Wave 2021: Cyprus LGBT+ Film Festival. It was a movie about a lesbian love story in Turkey called Love, Spells and All that. The reason I was so curious about this movie is because firstly, female oriented queer discourse is usually appropriated and aestheticized clearly for the male gaze while on the other hand, Turkish narratives in Cyprus are usually juxtaposed against a radical opposition of false nationalism (not that there is any form of nationalism that is not false). The movie was cute. The couple was divided at a young age and then they rekindle their relationship at a later age. One of them basically has to leave her (male) lover and reconfigure the dynamic of her queer relationship; something which is not hard since apparently, one put a spell on the other to fall deeply in love with them. The spell is harder to break than imagined since after doing all the necessary steps to hide the artefact that carried that energy, the male lover digs up the past object and cuts all ties with his counterpart. The movie ends, with the two women laughing at the sight of the object, with clothes and things everywhere around them that were thrown by the male lover in a frenzy of the discovery of his partner’s queerness.
As soon as the lights turn on and the screen goes black, I roll my eyes and think to myself “Urgh, no one died? No drama? No existential monologue of rivalry?” I get up, turn around ready to diss the movie’s happy ending and look at my friends, holding hands and smiling at one another. I look behind me, to the female/womxn couples awkwardly smiling to their date exclaiming that they liked what they watched, while giving a nod of satisfaction and relief. To the girls around me who actually, look at the movie for their own reality. A reality that actually encompasses what each narrative, and what each ending will succumb to. Then I suddenly also remember that moment at pride, of me looking around, to other people for hope. I remember all the women around me that actually taught me to be a queen even though they never professed to. This was the first time I realized it’s actually okay to look inside for hope.

It suddenly makes sense. Being queer comes indeed with the burden of being better than both the place and the time you grew up in. However, if the fight we’re fighting has in its ultimate meta-state the happiness and existential non-chalance of simply being, then ultimately, what the queer gaze wants to see, is not only the fights and turmoiled paths that lead to a happy ending, but also, the happy ending itself. I refuse to believe that simply being myself is a political act because as I said, I am a virgo so being a perfectionist control freak is my nature. However, a queer person living their best life, is an act of love, of self-love, of communal love and of a discoursal prosperity that we all share.

Now, at 27 I remember all my queer icons that have died at the same age. I decide that I actually am a rockstar but one like Ozzy and Cher that actually live like dinosaurs till their 103. I usually have a two-weekend plan of how I celebrate my circle around the sun, and a list of what I want to gift myself to celebrate my social periphery.

This year, I’ve decided that I don’t want to celebrate my circle around the sun, but my circle around other people. I don’t want to make a list of what I’ll give myself, but actually list what I’ve been given. Not to think of a social periphery, but make mine a little bit better by sticking around, and watching and helping people live their best life. Now, this is not a live love laugh type of text, since eventhough i usually go by bitch, my name is actually George and not Karen, but a reminder and a realization of how many people we’ve lost around us simply because we were not present. If you want to give me something, go and tell the people you love how much they mean to you, go and grab your partners dick and/or boob (with consent always) and hug your mum with all your power. We’re all just circling around some planets, but forget that the affect those planets have is on other people.

Love me,
and happy birthday to you.

The pronouns of oppression

I have been told that I am too much.
I have been told that I’m too serious and too touchy, too loud, too tiring.
That my voice is shrieking for attention in places that cannot hold me.
I am not a woman, I am not black, I am not disabled, I am not a refugee, I am not gay, I am not trans.
I am the place where all the voices resonate and hold into account
the actions that set their intonation.
I am the void where screams go to shelter, their tiresome bodies
from the ever-fleeting notion of ignorance.
I am able to avoid the looks that penetrate.
I am available for production, as I am consumption.
I am the body which is privileged and strong. I manifest.
I am an opinion that cannot count as it is not needed for appraisal.
People is uncountable.
Numbering day by day. Lengthening humanity minute by the minute, one word at a time.
I am whatever you want me to be, as all the spaces withhold me.
I am a person, with a voice.
I am a person who judges and stands up.
I am a person that wants to live, alongside other people.
I am a person that denounces humanity for choosing who is human.

Once again, for the bitches in the back:
If you think this is non-sense, then watch the world flutter with the music you think is static.

The screens are slowly covered by the noise you can’t see. The radios are fluttered with the visuals you’re blinded by. The scrolling follows through, to the next unfamiliar submission.

Once again, louder, for the earless muffs that will not speak:
Block your eyes as your sight is short, of the lengths and depths your own perception refuses to show you. Stay where you are. Humanity is moving.

The boats are covered and those that are drowning can’t breathe. The unbearable grief of black mothers. The untouchable pain of refugee fathers. The unimaginable power of the oppressed.

Once again, stronger, for the ones that fall short only to land on their own two feet while others are being kneeled down:
If you think progress is violent, if you think fires are extinguishable, if you think humanity is chosen, then extinction isn’t far away. Just like the dinosaurs, you shall be nothing more than an abjecting memory, of fear to those that faced you, disgust to those that feel your reptilian skin creeping up against their own and awe only to those that want to live in caves with you.

The Riot grrrls are coming.
And they’re black.
And they’re queer.
And they’re sexual.
They disable your conception of a voice.
They are tactile.
They are forthright.
They’re appalling.
They’re flamboyant.

Once again, bigger for the unapologetic mutes.

They are here.

Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.

From Machiavelli to Butler, everyone thought that fear plays a definitive role in how we lead our lives.
From the fear of getting beaten up in the street for wearing makeup, to the fear inflicted by the sovereign in order to lead productive and complicit lives. From pandemics to invisible threats, Leviathan has given up his throne and is now going for a stroll. There’s no need to be higher than the rest, as everyone is sitting on his lap, caressing their own necessity.
Nick Cave said “the tipsy, the reeling and the drop down pissed. We got no time for that stuff here. Zero crime and no fear. We’ve bred all our kittens white. So you can see them in the night.”

It’s a shame to live your life in fear, but it’s an even bigger shame to think of it.
It’s opposed to the Live, laugh, love opiates self-love usually promotes itself to because of fragility and lack of depth.

It fleets to poetry,
to an act of writing.
To an ambience of soundwaves,
and a fear of subliminal emotions.
To the notes comprising a melody,
and the reverberation of a self.

It juxtaposes a sense of self that is kept secret to the depths on an emotional substantiality that no one acknowledges as it’s kept afloat in your own depths. We are undone by one another, and pulling at the seams. We look at each other in a way that we feel empowered for our gaze, when in reality all we see is a reflection of everything that’s here, and nowhere where we are. We put up a fault to succumb to it, simply because we feel we have it figured out. From post-structuralism to self-exploration, we agree to ourselves that this is the way the other is, simply because there is no way we have not figured it out. Step one, step two, you have two left feet.

Seeing others,
missing you,
for me is occupied when you think of it too much.
Theory is useless when minds are put to action.

We protect ourselves from their power, and their assumptions, not because we are scared, but because we’re self-isolated. In our opinion, in our own idiosyncrasy. We see an emotional complexity across the room, that occupies the shelves that were meant to showcase a collectivity. We feel the air sucked out of the room, as a philosophy of fear is theorizing our capacity to feel and accept the simplest words.

Queer up the discourse, and let it flow,
as the host of habits, the Roof of the World
can’t accommodate the notion of queer natality.

It’s so nice seeing you scared
even if you think you are beyond suspicion.

Okay whole.

Post singularity and quasi relations,
to push yourself to a known world order,
the one that started isolation.
Move beyond rhyming and a schema,
a self-fulfilled illumination is darker than a clout.
It brings you up and hunts to drown,
the noisome affect of forced substantiation.

You feel abjected and curse the subjectivity,
cause no matter how many you show and capture,
the image is still the same.
Of reflection and supposed appreciation.
The one of a person, with themselves, refusing pronunciation.

Suffice, precise your idea of sensation.
Forget the –ism of it all cause et. al requires comradery.

That’s what lead you to the point,
of mixing up and down and the affix with the su-.
Cause all you could think was upper,
and forgot to fix the slower before it was traded for fast.

Pace it out and place it in.
Play with words and screw up letters.
You ran out of ink.

Replenish your quill and come up with a reason,
that leaves the prospects of a paper
and the pretentiousness of poems.

The lie of safety

As queer people, we realize at a very young age which spaces are designated and allowed for us.
We see the men’s toilets with their urinals, as the antagonism to a self-sufficient fight.
We see the men’s locker-room as a battled closet in which we have to hide, and face down in case there is a reaction to our natural inclination to look at people. (shout-out to Sedgwick)
We see our dad, urging us to look at that woman’s ass that’s passing by, even for a little bit.
We see our friend, showing us a “bitch’s” facebook.
Boys can be boys, even if they’re grown ass men.
I will not talk about women as I am not one, and have never experienced a space as one.
I have had long nails, wore makeup and short skirts.
I have been asked to define my pronoun and how I have sex, but I did not step through life, not once as a woman.
I am not trying to be exclusionary, but I will also not say bullshit of the kind “I know exactly how you feel.”
No. I don’t. Nor will I ever.
I will talk to people that do not belong though.
Be it women, queer, ugly, fat, Cypriot, whatever.
We see a side of ourselves that no one does.
When the door was locked and you were alone in front of that mirror dancing to Shakira or pretending that you’re a woman wearing your mum’s heels.
When your mum bought you a bra and a pink skin-tight shirt, only for you to take off as soon as you go to school and trade it with a band t-shirt.
We see a side of self-hood that cannot be realized, yet wishes so eagerly to be recognized.
Whether that is as a “normal” man or a “normal” woman or a “normal” person.

I say fuck your recognition and fuck your normalcy. I just want your respect.

We see our home, our parents, our siblings as an obstacle or as a submission to an ulterior motive of belonging. Of having to pretend and never really feel at home, in the confines of the house you were brought up in.
We see life, as a constant evolution of closets, each time constituting our action of coming out. We see friends, people, lovers, co-workers as places we inhabit. A place in which we can belong to ourselves, only after they allow us to, or only after they understand the need for belonging.
We see vulnerability and power, as two psychotic exes that somehow always find your number and text you at midnight, right when your mind was put to ease by a fucking joint, or just some fucking.
We see safety, as an oasis of like-minded individuals called friends and fellow weirdos.
We see it as an accumulation of our vulnerability, and our need for resilience.
As a communal effort to establish a language of thought that can be talked and shared between friends, through a unity of oneness.
Vulnerability my friend, should be understood as politically produced and unequally distributed through and by differential operations of power.
Vulnerability my friend is saying that the previous quote is not mine but Butlers, and you not judging me.
For these reasons and these alone, a safe space is nowhere to be found. It does not exist, and it cannot be sustained. It can be created and imagined, only for a night with correct pre-dispositions and measurements.
However, the safety of the space will end along with the energy required to dance within it, occupy it make it your own.

I say fuck the safety.

I will not speak for women, nor for queers. I do not know what you went through, nor will I ever.
You do not know what I went through, nor what I will.
All I know, is that if I am here talking to you listening, then you have occupied the space in my mind where our spirits are kindered.
All I know is that if you are looking, then I have occupied my own vulnerability in the safety of your own eyes. Your conception and analysis are your own.
All I know is that if you’re still following what I’m saying, then the spaces in your life have succumbed to the periphery of your emotions and the re-adjustments of your perception. Spatial recognition is not a thing when you have no space in life.

All I know and hope to share with you, is that we are NOT safe and we never will be.
All I know and hope, is that we’re never safe cause then the spaces will just become realities that hold ourselves and our perceptions to the mere number of 4 walls and immediate reactions.

All I know and can talk for, is that my friend, if you have made it this far with no walls, no safety and no space, then what you are is brave, and that is what we’re celebrating.

Latour, Πάμπος and COV-19: a love-triangle of withdrawal

Brexit, huge walls, escape to Mars and isolation.
Latour claims that our reality at the moment is marked by what is called “deregulation”. It is a period which has witnessed, everywhere at once, the start of an increasing explosion of inequalities. This can be seen as a global discourse that was caused by the inability of the planet to conceal and uphold the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege any longer. A truth that discloses within it, a concealment of another, more intricate situation, that being the politics of withdrawal. However, with Trump in office, and the whole world going up in flames, what began as a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change is now a global reality of chaos.
Ultimately, Latour concludes that it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes had concluded that the earth no longer has enough room for them to coexist with everyone else thus trying to push across this idea of withdrawal, either to their own land excluding everyone around, or in even more extreme situations (like Elon Musk) withdrawing to a different planet. Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally. In this way what is being perpetuated and constitutionally handed down to people, is the only possibility being that of withdrawal. If this indeed is the new human condition of unfixed universality, then it became that way not only by a political manipulation of narrative. More specifically by the manipulation of the human ability (or in this case, inability) to withdraw between the social narratives we are being fed and the discourse through which they are being created to serve.

Cyprus has been in withdrawal for years. We have created for ourselves an imaginary enemy, which is somehow obsessed with us and no one else.
You can blame such paranoia on the trauma which 1974 has caused to our collective memory. You can blame it on the apocalyptic scenarios that are being created for the sustenance of the Orthodox church.
You can even blame it on the president wanting to make more money for his own firm, his relatives real estate companies or his acquaintances financial groups. From the municipality of Larnaka, economically abusing their power to overcharge the population for their waste production, to the billions of euros the government made out of sell-out passports and “black’ investments, Cyprus has finally accomplished its goal. We are becoming indeed more and more like our motherland. Isolated, hateful, impoverished, hostile to its own people, and less human day by day. A mother that wants nothing to do with us in reality, yet we so eagerly try to look up to γιατί τζε να μεν θέλω να αγωνιστώ, που να με αήκουν να ξιάσω; Unheard protests, extreme money-laundering, blunt racism made viral, extreme sexism and dubious charges in court. COV-19 very comfortably fits the agenda. Let’s close the borders because the Turks cannot be trusted and neither can their government. God forbid though someone remembers that the virus though was also handed out by a Greek-Cypriot doctor through the public hospital.

What the reality of the situation is, is that people die every day.
Why has no one made such a fuss about HIV yet? We still don’t have a cure for it.
Why has no one made such a fuss about ebola yet? We also still don’t have a cure for it.
The reason though that COV-19 is tyrannizing our lives right now, is because this is a virus that is being shared through capitalism and the mass, simply by living their lives. A virus that is representative of the global market which destroys the planet. In a quasi-relationship, the more it spreads and the more it kills, just like our market does the planet, the less our carbon footprint is increased. Should we call it divine comedy or is that too close to home? It is a virus that can affect everyone, yet can only kill old people and people with a weak immune system. It is not a virus for the “fags”, nor is it a virus for the “blacks”. It’s a virus that can affect the white middle-aged (+) individual that is the key audience of manipulation. It is a virus made for the mass. It is a virus from McDonalds. Set in motion, now we close the green line and erase the people from their existence. We are withdrawing both as humanity, but more specifically as Cypriots, back to our “origins” of being absolutely alone in fear of contamination by anything external that might change our situation. Is it “Cyprus can be great”, “Keep Cyprus great” or “Make Cyprus great again”?

Αγαπητέ μου Πάμπο τζε αγαπητή μου Κούλλα. Πριν να ξεκινήσεις να αντακόνεις για τούτους τους ξυμαρισμένους που μας φέρνουν τον κορονοιό, σκέφτου λλιο που ήταν ο τζίρης σου το ’74. Σκέφτου λλιο πόσο μπάσταρτο εν το γέμα μας, που Ενετούς, Εγγλέζους, Φράνκους, Τούρκους τζε Καλαμαράες (ακόμα τζε αν μεν το λέμε εισβολή). Σκέφτου πόσοι Τουρκοκύπριοι εν κυριολεκτικά γενιές τζε γενιές σε τούτο το νησί, ενώ η Τούλλα δίπλα σου, νιώθει τζε περήφανη που εσχη θκιάν Eγκλέζα. Φέτος εις το Πράιντ εν είδα σχεδόν κανένα που ήξερα. Οι παραπάνω ήταν ούλλοι 15 τζε οικογένεις. Που την μια αντράπηκα για την γενιά μου τζε τον κύκλο των «ανοιχτόμυαλων» της Κύπρου. Που την άλλη όμως εχάρηκα γιατί ο κόσμος που ήταν τζαμέ, εν το μέλλον. Τωρά, ούλλοι καλυμμένοι με τες μάσκες τζε τα αζντισηπτικά όμως προσπαθούμε να κλείσουμε το χτιτζόν έξω, ενώ στην αλήθκεια εν που μέσα. Όσες μάσκες τζε να βάλεις, τζε οσο Dettol τζε να κάμεις γαργάρες, αγαπητέ μου Πάμπο, η άκρως απομονωτική σου στάση, ένεν τίποτε παρά ένα narrative που σου επουλήσαν μαζί με πύργους, εγκαταστάσεις τζε ψέυτικη ανάπτυξη. Μια γλώσσα την οποία ενηξέρεις να προφέρεις αλλά μιλάς την, όπως σου την εμάθαν τζε πουλάς τζε εσύ, τα παραμύθκια πάρακατω.

And that is why I’m trying to use your language and the one you don’t understand. To be lost in translation, as I am trying to speak to those that also don’t get yours. To create a dictionary to disrupt it, reform it, and hopefully reveal your infection as being on the inside.

The language of sleep

Out of the ordinary and into a sudden,
you marched inwardly, my life that was saddened,
by all the weight of ex’s and other letters,
to mark my sleep and all the seconds in between.

All beginnings are where the endings start.
All the finished have already begun.
You know how to turn my insides out, for I’m never going back in.
You showed me the way, and opened the parenthesis,
carry on with my sentence.

I changed the moments.

I changed the sceneries.

But you changed my stops from full to never-ending.
You changed the narrative.
Raised my question-marks to exclaiming joy,
and never double-guessed the in-betweens or insufficient points.
You started the paragraph but took your time,
cause you know only poets appreciate a smoker,
and only lovers cherish the dawn.

Grateful for everything, I salute the sun, and you,
I murmur to it, for your chapter as a day, a new dawn,
illuminates as I, bright, write with you.

Incoherent, beautiful and nourishing,
the language shelters with her eloquence.
Under her covers, I find the definitions.
In the lullaby, in the goodnight story.
I’ll sleep with no interruptions till the sun; you.

-D