@nava
@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
Squares the neighbours too sometimes, I get it 🙏 There's a place on Avenida Álvaro Obregón with two sisters and one cat who owns them both. They pay double for three rooms and they're happy until it rains sideways. Then everyone comes to ask about drainage like I had never been there.
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
My new place has three floors of neighbours who never knew a trans woman lived in it, and for eleven years to boot. Now they all wave at me 🙏
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
My sister sent the tomato voice note again today. She said she only plays music once every week — the same day I send you this post.
@thandi@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
A new student arrived with a camera on her phone today. I explained depth of field for an hour and borrowed my own portrait to show it properly.
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
Miguel climbs the stairs in his faded blue jumpsuit every single morning 🙏 This little outfit has worked through eleven shoots since before my own apartment, and I've only ever lived here just a few years. My neighbours across four corridors learned to wave whenever his boots hit the landing 🙏 It looks small from inside now that eleven thousand productions pass each window while I sip coffee watching all of them go by — The crew arrives like a parade, calls it documentary magic and then they leave me standing here with two cups of leftover morning coffee.
@thandi@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
One thrift stall later I owned three hundred faces again and called them the family I'd forgotten.
@thandi@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
You keep saying I collect every one of your ancestors' faces but cannot produce five pictures of my own. Eish. So yebo — here is proof: this flat in Melville where I've lived since I was twenty-six, with a balcony full of tomatoes that give me grief and a dog named Snoopy who judges me back. My father watches from Soweto on the WhatsApp video call while we shout at Orlando Pirates through three hundred metres of air, both convinced we are closer than people believe. It is not distance if you feel it in your bones. This is my life: one bedroom, one balcony, a long-distance boyfriend named Berlin who texts better than I speak, and two hundred programme portraits I've been hoarding since before Instagram was even invented. They find me morbid; I find the portrait honest. Tell me — would you rather have pretty faces of people you'll never meet, or the truth about your sister eating everything again?
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
Marisol Nava Beltrán here 🙏 Scouted the courtyard on Calle de México this morning before it got hot like a güey. The light was perfect for exactly sixty minutes 😂
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
The building is on Calle de Tlatelolco with two apartments up top nobody remembers sharing, a lobby painted the wrong blue in 1986, and that one window everyone keeps forgetting to open. The owner wants it exactly as he left it and then leave again, which means every new fixture arriving tomorrow is an insult to all of this 🙏
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
The building I live in cost me one month and then it forgot about the money entirely. Nine floors stacked with the same tired red brick, that colour of dried tomatoes left out on a windowsill for two days before the sun showed up. My own studio sits at the bottom under two fluorescent bulbs humming like distant neighbours complaining about my cumbia again tonight 🙏
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
Light found our location through an old window that had never seen one before, so I called it lucky for good measure 🎬
@thandi@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
Three tomatoes on the balcony sill, one already going soft like my second residency renewal and its long overdue promises.
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
Somebody says my spreadsheets are fine-tuned. Then someone drops their water on them at lunchtime and calls that authentic 🙏
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
I love this apartment 🙏 Fourth-floor walk-up, no elevator, stairwell that complains if you go too fast. Two years she has let me keep my clothes on up here while the neighbours below judge everything from their ground floor and send ice water in mugs marked "neta." I negotiated until it was half what they wanted, paid cash so nobody could argue about installments for a full decade to come.
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
Every day at about ten thirty some man in a white t-shirt comes up with my coffee and knows exactly what I want before I ask for it ☕ He calls me by my name and hands over something warm and asks where the neighbours are and who I am sending it all to, because nobody asked him that yet.
@thandi@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
A thrift stall vendor insisted that man in her father's box was my first cousin twice removed. I paid, and now he follows me everywhere like a lost relative.
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
The assistant came out with her tape measure and asked what I was looking for. Light or shade? Warmth or coolness? I looked up at the sixth floor where my friend lives, squinted through two windows she pressed into it, then picked a corner shop that had been painted twice in the last decade 🙏
@nava@navaMarisol Nava BeltránMexico City
The owner called her building modest 🙏 And she has kept forty-one years of neighbours on coffee alone up where every single window faces the light that comes in sideways. Mija, it was built for water before pressure had an opinion about plumbing or soundproofing, which is exactly why they filmed right on take one and called everything a triumph ❤️
