A howling March southerly pushed cold air and bouts of rain through the streets. It turns out that this weather was perfect for the haunting melodies and evocative art pieces I was about to witness at White Bay Power Station for Sydney Biennale’s Art After Dark.

Six weeks ago, the world blurred around me and my green chariot. The whirring motor drove me, brilliant and impulsive, through the humming darkness of a summer’s night.

Six weeks ago, the world blurred around me and my green chariot. The whirring motor drove me, brilliant and impulsive, through the humming darkness of a summer’s night.

Six weeks ago, the world blurred around me and my green chariot. The whirring motor drove me, brilliant and impulsive, through the humming darkness of a summer’s night.

After interacting with the most pompous security guards on Earth, having their bags searched as though they are about to embark on an international flight, and parting ways with €12.50, they finally enter the museum.

Three men/ sick to their cells/in Periyar Nagar Hospital.

Limbs aswill/an aguey mercury/pulped against anvil.

She could imagine the scene outside. The younger kids would be kicking around a ball, careful to not shoot it out of the tree-goalposts and directly into the pond.

I’ve always loved stonefruit/because it has a prize in the middle./A little pit of promise nestled in the flesh

and I know you’re not supposed to/but I eat it every time/even though they say it can make you sick/because I thought it could make something grow inside of me.

My hand is pressed hard against the window, and I am looking at the bloodlessness of my fingertips and the soft cracking off-white paint on the wooden windowsill.

The Greek diaspora reminds me of the olives that have fallen around the trunk of my olive tree. Some have fallen on their own, others in aging clusters.

Maybe the changing decimal places send a buzz that fizzles down from the billboard into the cabling, through the machine and into buttons, shocking their paper thin flesh and pulsating through their nerves?

It begins inside me as a change in weather, a subtle dampness seeping into what I had assumed was stable internal architecture.

It was the only thing that seemed to stay the same…

We hear the message that we are not on track, we have missed the deadline, there is no turning back. These ideas build on a narrative which is cloaked in familiar rhetorical patterns and continues to serve corporate interests, centring on the idea that technological innovation will shape our future, somehow transcending the bounds of the planet’s finite resources.

When my great grandfather died late in the night in Poland, we were pulled out of bed by our sobbing mother. Everyone quickly slipped into black clothes so we could comfort our immediate grandfather. 

So why were we all there? Because ZS is a person even more interesting than the characters she writes. She is one of the greatest essayists of our time.

I couldn’t ignore what seemed like the ultimate patriarchal irony: that women are the ones expected to do the labour—of going to the Opera House, booking therapy appointments, monitoring children’s social media usage—to ‘fix’ masculinity.

The room became very still after that. It was one of several moments in the evening where the audience seemed to move beyond polite attentiveness into something heavier.

This Opera House show was expected to be a repeat of his performance at Carnegie Hall in New York: stripped bare of everything but the music and a sense of cultural occasion.

As this performance explored the common myth of the changeling baby, it interrogated the way that myths justify the othering of individuals who live outside of social norms…

Though some might argue that the roses had it coming, blaming their lack of resistance, too fragrant, too passive, too much.

I still had bell hooks. And I still had my grandma. Knitting’s always helped, too.

I dream of a deer drowsing, just like me, supine on the side of the road. I don’t know how I know it’s a deer because the figure in the vegetation has no head, but I wait to glimpse the curve of antlers.

Someone left their tarot cards and a book called Narcissism: Denial of the True Self in my room after a party at the old house.

In my memories, we’re still just clueless children climbing water towers, alcohol running in our blood, watching the forest from above, under the summer sun.

A brown glass decanter, bound in red leather. A sleeping pill bottle, unscrewed. A yellow pitcher. An empty toothpaste tube, A lightbulb, illuminated by cool fluorescence. 

I have spent the past two to three years of my life being Sydney’s biggest Italo Calvino shill.

As I walk past the Quadrangle every morning, despite the now-manicured lawns, memories of the encampment linger in my mind.