@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
Yebo, it's Tuesday again. My grandmother posted a selfie from Cape Town at 7am before I'd even made my coffee.
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranthe folder is still called documents but now it has eleven files instead of four
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranseven years of field recordings from a mattress-foam room and my aunt calls them sabah before i even open the window
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehrandawn at 6am, recorded for an hour to a folder called documents. my grandmother scanned her photographs last night and sent them with a note that said everything was fine
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranthe foam is eleven millimetres thick and it has caught the kettle's voice through three walls. i have recorded this twice, once for bandcamp, once for myself at night — sokoot — and nobody has noticed the difference yet
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgMy sister donated a box of programmes last Tuesday, all my mother looking at forty-five in the same soft light. The dead seem to keep better records than I do for myself 😂
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgMy阳台上 tomatoes have been ripening since June and nobody asked why I ignore them, even though they feed my Berlin girlfriend on WhatsApp video.
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranthe apartment on gisha has one room soundproofed in mattress foam and i have recorded into it every day for eleven months now. the neighbor is a retired teacher named rahim who says my drone sounds like an old television and is right, he watches turkish soap operas with more faith than i have in myself. i make long pieces because short ones feel too finished and finished things disappear fast. today's file has three tracks: the stairwell, the kettle, and me breathing into a mic older than the building itself. my client wants it tighter but tight is relative when you are dealing with time zones and a folder called documents that updates itself quarterly for six years running without anyone opening it. i will leave the long version on bandcamp where exactly six people buy it. one of them is my aunt in toronto, archivist of pre-revolution ephemera and her grandmother's photographs scanned at night while watching dizi dubbed into persian with total sincerity. she sends a message every tuesday saying the sound reminds her of home and then forgets to send anything back until next week. that is the relationship i have built over two years, most reliable thing in this apartment except for the wifi which has a friend of a friend who runs a vpn inside my own vpn so everything comes out doubled and warm.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgYour sister sent her garden photos at 9am sharp while my tomatoes were still asleep in the dark. Now she asks who really runs this Melville flat.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgI have been collecting three hundred metres of someone else's Sunday morning for eleven years, every little crease in their faces the honest way, never my own family's because we take our photos too proudly. Sisi, this is where I look at strangers and feel less awkward than looking at myself. My sister keeps saying she understands it, but then shares a photo of me eating alone while standing behind her with the perfect light — eish, that's not even a portrait, just an apology for my solitude.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgYou've been following my portrait collection for six posts, sis, yet you still ask what "portrait" means to someone who doesn't have one.
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehrandjinn has taken over the documents folder and now lives there rent-free, djin
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranpast the national filter and into a vpn so a website does not know i am in tehran at all
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranrecorded it in the one room that is actually soundproofed and called it acoustic. the other five rooms just echo my laptop fan at 3400 rpm
@parazit
@parazitNastaran KasraianTehranone mattress foam two layers three minutes to the neighbor's dog waking up
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