When a whale dies, it starts a slow sink to the bottom of the sea. What arrives and remains is called a whalefall. Unlike the carcasses of most aquarian beasts, which lack rich lipids in their bones — or, like sharks, who lack bones in the first place — a whalefall is full of life when it reaches its resting place. On its long trail down it becomes an ecosystem that nourishes mussels, clams, limpets, sea snails, bacteria and other organisms. Hence, despite the darkness of this far-away sphere, biologists compare a whalefall to a sudden blooming of spring.

Das Magazin. August 2021

Seven weeks in Japan, researching bodies of water and loneliness, thanks to a grant by the Okeanos Foundation for the Sea. The 14 travelogues about our connection to the living world and the iridescence of its manifestations.

"My own pilgrimage was to feel into the connections we have with water: the sea, rivers, canals, estuaries, waterfalls, sacred lakes, mundane ponds, aquascapes and street aquariums. The lives they hold; our estrangement from their flows and the loneliness this stirs within us. I am hoping to be taken to places and thoughts I had not foreseen."

DURING THE DOG DAYS, when the air shimmered and shimmered over the wide floodplains of the Oder, the river fell silent. The silence seeped into the parched earth, penetrating the reeds and leaving the elms, willows and English oaks motionless. The cause of this paralysis could be felt more than heard, an absence of animals, insects, birds, their voices, their movements. That was days before the dead fish. Then, from 10 August, the lifeless bodies of sturgeon, burbot, pike, bleak and countless others appeared and made the news. Photos of lidless fish eyes staring out into absolute horror. Mouths open in a last gasp, unable to draw oxygen for the body, the organs, the life within. Dead fish in places they shouldn't be: floating on the surface of the water, washed up among the reeds and on the muddy banks, piled up in the breakwaters. The mussels and snails remained unseen in the riverbed, their shells open, a final silent cry. Hundreds of tonnes of biomass.

FAZ, Feb 25th, 2023

There are rivers in the sky. Fed by the oceans, called by the trees. Serving as particle messengers, fungus spores and terpenes are released from the rooted soils and leafy foliages, sent up into the air to ionize the clouds. Anthropomorphized, the summoning by the trees might translate into: „Come hither, Come hither, you droplets and driblets of water.“ Addressed in nature’s language this works — not like magic and not like an algorithm, but because of the sensual interplay of everything alive.

There are Rivers in the Sky, Lissome Magazine, illustrations by Mimi Robson, April 2021

EVEN IN A HORIZONTAL, flat landscape, cosmology runs vertical. From up – heaven, to down – hell. In between, the interface—that thin crust upon which life is rooted. A tender, fragile layer that humans can turn into infernal landscapes. Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi, or the Wolf Lake on the Mountains, was once home to the indigenous Sami people and their livestock. Now its lakes, rivers and swamps leak poison. Copper and nickel mines and smelters have overturned the sparse soils. Only the wind and some birds still sweep over the hills; most other life have faded from the subarctic Kola peninsula, where a border separates Russia from Norway. Somewhere in these barren lands, a ruined industrial tower rises. Its debris strewn across the ground. At the foot of the tower, a metal lid of sorts, an arm’s length in diameter, welded and sealed with metal screws, thick, heavy, rusted. Underneath: The entrance to the deepest artificial hole on Earth.

Orion Magazine, January 4th, 2024, with Isaac Yuen

In 2020, Jongerius asked me if I would help to bring the aspect of the “cosmic” into the loom. She saw her role as one of listening and giving shape — creating, re-creating, fabricating a Gegenstand (this German word expresses the idea that an object is something we confront and through the exchange with it, arrive at something new), that would open up to a new kind of thinking about the fabrics and fabrications of the world. Jongerius’ work always comes first from her hands; from touching, playing, experimenting. Where others feel they have exhausted the material and technique, she strives further and goes beyond, sometimes progressively, with a futuristic approach. Her hands intuitively respond, seeking the spiritual; they become teachers that eventually sensitise technology. Her approach is efficient, radical, and yet poetic and sensual.

Catalogue for Hella Jongerius, Gropiusbau. Cosmic Loom. February 2021

It takes some effort to find the start of Route 26. It leads out of the town of Kesenuma, which was destroyed by the 2011 tsunami and has since been rebuilt, to the bays of Sanriku Fukko National Park. The old road initially branches off inconspicuously between a recently built Seven Eleven and a Family Mart and soon leaves everything new and rebuilt behind to climb narrowly and steeply up into the mountains. Every hairpin bend has a round mirror reflecting oncoming traffic, a remnant from a time when the rules of the road were inscribed in the roads themselves: Driving too fast is simply impossible on this infrastructure. Today, not many people use this route. The trees form a canopy of leaves, dense and lively, with flickering rays of light in between, and where the sun hits the gaps, tree particles dance in a golden glow. It's hard to keep your eyes on the road. After about a quarter of an hour, the road descends again, and soon an even smaller path leads down to a body of water glistening in the distance.

Science Notes. August 2023

Late autumn, back office at Shogyoji temple. The chatter of the women on duty in the nearby kitchen drifts into my room. I kneel at a desk and practice shodou 書道, Japanese calligraphy; the scent of freshly ground sumi 墨 rises from my wet inkstone. In front of me a plate with slices of bright orange kaki fruits. Hirano-san had brought them around in a bucket in the afternoon. I remember their bright dots against the blue sky from my walk to the mountain earlier in the day. I breathe in, halt, then pour my intent thick and dark onto the white of the paper. Hold still. Dip my brush once more and let the horsehair run again over the surface, slightly resisting the rice fibre structure. I look up. Koujun-san, the old monk smiles at me from the doorway; in his hands, a tray with his tea tools. He nods, enters. Kneeling next to me he prepares two small cups of his favorite temomicha. The light transparent green, the fresh chlorophylls, unfurling on my taste buds like life itself. Each sip pulls me more and more into the present, until it envelops me. The Now is a hard place to reach. And to stay there is impossible.

Piece commissioned by Okapi House and Toshiba Foundation

The Inakaya celebrates the natural, the genu- ine, a fall in the eternal spring that our pre- sent day has become. Legend has it that when the first people from mainland Asia moved

to the island chain, they found a cornucopia of mushrooms, seaweed, and fish, as well
as fresh, clear water, roots, seeds, and wild plants. Shinrabanshō – the forest that covers everything and the ten thousand things in it. The first spaces in Japan not to be used

as housing or protection against the wind and weather were the Shinto shrines; this
is where nature was worshiped. Neither fence nor grille, simply a red door that had
to be walked through, marked out such a place. Crossing the threshold takes you there. Everything outside is outside and far away.

And so it is also in Tokyo, a city that is more multi-dimensional than other global cities. It’s as though someone had taken a normal capital city and condensed it, folding it into

a piece of origami in which the most diverse worlds collide in an unexpected way. The feeling of having stepped over an invisible threshold is one that you can experience anytime here. Things suddenly sit alongside each other that would conceptually be poles apart. Spaces pop up in places where you would least expect them.

Bulthaup Magazin

‘One now lets one's shadow be seen, as once one's water’, wrote Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in 1778 about the frenzy with the scissors, the folly, paper carving and flat art that had been occupying the royal houses and educated people of Europe for a few years: the silhouette, the portrait silhouette, which was crafted, interpreted and exchanged.

Spiegel Online

For just over a hundred years, pneumatic tube letters whizzed through the underground of Paris, London, Berlin, New York and many other metropolises around the world. The first ‘Pneumatic Mail Dispatch Order’ was shot through the tube in London in 1863, the last one popped out of the net in Paris in 1984. Pneumatic tube mail established itself as a nationwide communication medium in a world in which emperors and kings still ruled Europe, Jules Verne wrote about a trip to the moon and the industrial revolution was here to stay.

Spiegel Online