This book is a temporal journey of my experience on stolen land. As personal archives meet and merge with architecture and land, this book invites the reader to experience settler colonialism and its quiet violence. This book tells the story of my experience reckoning with colonial ghosts. It is conceived as a multiplicity of lines and spaces collapsing and meeting in many points creating events. As the beginning opens on topics such as selfhood and networks, the end of the book rather focuses on the notion of time through movements and archives. If these two extremities sound distinct and clear, this process engages in a play of superposition and juxtaposition where the accumulation recontextualizes experience. All of the elements in this project act as clues, but none of them alone can encapsulate the complexity of my anti-colonial, anti-supremacist and anti-capitalist practice. Accept this book as a trace, a dissolution, a potential. Accept this book as a love letter to my friends and acolytes. This is only one breath in a marathon.

“This is mine” is an expression that performs relationality between three different elements. Moving through forces and dynamics of language: (a)“this” circumscribes a cellular recognition of the fixed existence of something as being else. (b)The verb “to be” conjugated to the third person singular opens a door for a thingness to the matter. “This” is recognized an existence of its own because something has been recognized as affective flux and therefore has had its presence conjugated through the verb being. The fall of the sentence comes under the shape of the possessiveness of the first person singular possessive pronoun. (c)“Mine” is the expression of an empty space. For something to be mine, there has to be space in “me” to fill with the thing that previously was else than me. I want to equally mention the homonym mine that describes the space of extraction of minerals. Whether it is lithium, coal, gold or mica, the matter is never in a mine until someone decides to displace or empty the space it exists in. Mine expresses a space of transfer. It is where resources are taken from their else-than-useful (read as: turned into transactional value) into the possibilities offered by the transformation of the material. This is also true for the “this” who exists in the realm of being, but is extracted from its state of existence. Philosophically speaking, “This” is the object in the sentence. Mine is a realization of the subject as something differentiated from the environment. “This” exists only because of the assumed existence of the me in “mine”.

For something to be mine, it probably had to be mined first. The realization of the “this” to become part of the realm of possessiveness is somehow linked to a past action of making mine. 

“This is Mine” describes the imposition of a binary dynamic on the potentiality of gatherings of matter. The assumption that other gatherings of matter do not have agency over the movement of being mined traverses the ontological perspective of coloniality and is the syntaxical and the existential realization of a subject-object relationship where the subject is the center and the object its realized desired-appendixes.

It was a real moment of innovation when rocks were laid as a technology for road making. Movements of bodies and goods were made safer for humans. On the other hand the use of technologies is often oriented towards a greater supremacist reach for a few. As rolling, crawling, dancing and following paths can be a generative practice of spacing (and roads could be part of it), the orientation of the technology of roading by means of control has set a field of relation preaccelerating certain networks of navigation. The specific preacceleration of highways, railroads and streets for the vehicles to carry ressources lead to an ever more frictionless circulation of goods and an evermore growing safety for the accumulation of wealth and power. (this safety barely extends to common bodies as the most vulnerable people in this world  have very often a lesser access to fast and safe transportations).

Moving armies+connecting territories to a metropole+moving goods faster+reducing the dangers of theft and aggression+improving comfort

The ways in which affects, objects and identities are strange to the safety of the pipelined movements shadows a discussion on an off-trails relationship to spaces and times. 

Ways and roads are the expression of a network of movements. In this stage of life on earth, the extreme complexity of networks that have been developed to facilitate movements of goods (physical, immaterial or speculative) is limited in its creativity to the transition and the accumulation of value. For instance the transit of the information through waves and the accumulation of dematerialized money are great demonstrations that the things themselves for their materiality are not as important anymore as their capacity to move swiftly. Speed of information between the 5G and a letter sent by pigeon is a differentiation of friction between space and time (times).

The point here is not to talk about submarine cables, space satellites or the speed at which AI moves information, but rather to point at the technologies of movement, of goods in movement and information in movement. Colonization depends on the fast speed at which it can move in time. Other spaces can’t be mined if there is no possibility to control the mined body.

It is not to say that there were no paths before the making of roads, but rather to point at the difference between carving a path (and how easy it is to go off-trail) and exploding dynamite on  a road (and how hard it is to exit their course).

How has my body been oriented? What are the ways it was forcibly made into a certain navigation practice?

I remember a few different times when I cried as an adult. I was sometimes in transit in a train, a plane or a bus and other times I was in a coffee shop. In my life, it had never been a question of if I was allowed to or not. Even though I was not encouraged to cry, no one ever told me not to do it. It was something in my body. Like a swamp that had been dried for agricultural purposes.

[Jehan Terriau had learned to dry wetlands from Dutch agricultural technologies in 1632]

A destroyed ecology from the past generations who thought only certain crops and a certain way to relate to living creatures was sustainable (vital to colonize). 

Turning a body back into a swamp is a project that never arrives. 

I first tried to stop planting anything. Trying to see what grows on its own. How do I self-regulate? And since a self is only sustained through fences and borders and I have no desires for more walls in this life, I started to talk about myself in plural. How do we (me-ecosystem) regulate?

I’m so sorry my belly. We won’t go back to swamp.

we just don't want to…maybe and don't know how. 

I let me soak. Literally swimming more than I have before in my life, but also letting the failed relationships affect me and turn me into permafrost, frozen lake, lichen, swamp, bakeapple berry.

It is not a me-against-me kinda thing

Because I am of the world.

Ways of white men have first and foremost made lines in me. Grids and cubes. Graphics for if my transactional personality is likable, stronger, efficient or sufficient. Choreographic ancestrality is uncatered sorrow, self-hatred and systemic oppression with no time to honor things. Because I didn’t know what bakeapple berries are  doesn’t mean they aren’t delicious.  Systemic oppression is rhythmical. Ways of white men have first and foremost silenced my agency(and my surrendering) to rhythm. 

(Agency) Being agent expresses being part of the discussion about desires and the direction of the body. Agency allows me to be otherwise, to be other than what I know of myself. It is to stop resisting the queerness of the world. It is about holes, sex, love, accounting, debts, laughter and cries. It is about seduction and safety.

It begins with stories. A story is the door through which many children enter the night. A charm against fears coming under the shape of stories while we are defenseless. Stories as a charm. Stories as a possibility of the world otherwise.
As if adults know how powerless they are in that realm and that stories are the only thing they can offer to their children to let them know that this is a journey they can do safely and trust they will rejoin again on the other side.

When life is actually A life.
And the stories are all we have to be sure that at the end of our dayS(read life), when sleep comes, we will wake up to rejoin the one who loved us and who always showed up for us on the other side of the fear of disappearance.

Stories for adults, magic spells and sorcery. Poetry, friendships, the smell of a hand-picked mushroom. 

My horoscope: “You don’t know your face until someone loves it”

A Booklet can contain drawings, watercolors, accounting (it is always accounting). My booklets contain the prophecies my friends have told me about the worlds. I keep them close because they dissolve so easily in time here on this piece of life. My booklets contain the name of my lovers, the name of the people who showed me how to love and the people who were so vehemently and aggressively in love, they become outcasts.