APRIL 2020. I’m scrolling through my Instagram feed and I see a post from @ofcommoninterest offering a free-of-charge 5-weeks long remote workshop. It’s a collective research looking into feminist periodicals in collaboration with @lesigne_cndg. The possibility of taking part in something exciting is plutôt rare these days! I applied immediately. A few days later my participation in the workshop is confirmed. Continue reading
Back to the museums!
During these crazy times when this world has been turned upside down, we look for some moments of distraction from this new ‘reality 2.0’ that we live in nowadays. After living in another city for four years and in the Netherlands this past year, I moved back to my hometown, Madrid, in July. It’s astonishing seeing how fast a city changes. And it felt even more weird being back with the world upside down. For me, being able to go to museums after they re-opened became a big way to reconnect with my city, my new reality, and with the life we all had before the pandemic.
Mel Bochner’s pieces resonate with this year, It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This, 2013 and I’ve Had It Up to Here, 2012. Part of the exhibition “The american dream” in Caixaforum Madrid.
The Benefits of Hiking
A significant part of a typeface designer’s job is looking at small details. A regular person might look at a font and be able to identify the difference between a sans and a serif. But if they take the time to look and learn, they could appreciate the little quirks that make each typeface unique. It’s the same with hiking; For a first stroll in the woods, someone might only be able to distinguish between trees and bushes. But they might look closer, at the tiny differences, at the blossoms and berries and lichens. They’re in a fascinating world with so much to explore.
Cherry blossoms, Northern bayberries, and Old Man’s Beard growing on branches.
Happy gardening
Zappa liked the cooling, crumbling concrete
Actually I am not ‘the’ gardener, don’t have a green thumb nor the required patience…usually! 2020 was different. I discovered the joy of having flowers around and to take interest in rose slugs (sawfly) who were determined to eat all the roses I had planted. The little green patch in my yard had been a mess for years, waiting to be transformed. Well, this summer I finally had some extra time on my hands — thank you COVID-19 — and raised the motivation and energy together with my partner and we started buying plants, rose bushes, oleanders, lavender, hibiscus, bougainvillea, and others that I can’t remember the names. Continue reading
Laundry
I pride myself with being an early 2020 adopter as my 2020 suddenly turned to poo at the end of January.
As pretty much the rest of the world I spent a lot of this year indoors. I baked sourdough bread and pizza, looked outside the window, checked out the weekly fox fight, envied the small balconies in the building opposite to mine and admired the persistence of the second floor lady sitting in one of the aforementioned balconies, working on her suntan, 9 to 6, Mon to Sun, April to September. In the UK. Talk about optimism…
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Sisterhood and the joy of simple things 🐱🥑🍷👭👭🌳
My days of uncertainty began a bit earlier than the pandemic. In the May of 2019, my husband and I decided to move out of India, packed up our home in Mumbai, and started what turned out to be a very very long journey to Europe. We were initially hoping to move to Vienna, but encountered a lot of obstacles with the visa application and long story short, after spending five months, figured that wasn’t going to be possible after all. Finally in January of 2020 we decided to relocate to Berlin instead and Rob was able to get a visa in just two days! This seemed fantastic and we assumed we would be in Berlin by April, but little did we know… Continue reading
Flowers are so inconsistent!
I never disliked flowers per se, I just didn’t really understand the fuss. Sure they were pretty, maybe colorful, but I could never justify the expense. They don’t satisfy cravings like chocolate, and I find a bouquet of roses impersonal. Their worst offense, however, is that they don’t last.
At some point, I began to see flowers as an Adult Thing, a financial marker of having my shit together enough to splurge on something ephemeral and maybe a little vain (see also: manicures). My partner and I moved in together at the beginning of the pandemic and as a housewarming gift to myself, since no one else was going to come by anytime soon, I purchased a subscription to UrbanStems. A bouquet delivered to the lobby of our building every two weeks. I learned how to keep flowers fresh for as long as possible, how to handle them. And I learned to love them. Continue reading
Solidarity right now
Around this time last year, I accidentally got really involved in US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s unprecedentedly large texting program. When he suspended his campaign, 30,000 volunteers had sent 259 million texts, and among them were tens of volunteers, including me, who’d been spending tens of hours a week to help run the program: making materials, training new texters, answering questions on Slack in real time, double checking texts on the backend. And on that day in April, all of those people suddenly had a lot more free time. Continue reading
Finding my lessons to teach
A nearly full calendar year of mandatory work from home has been a mixed bag for me. I’m good at working from home, and have a long freelance career behind me, so that wasn’t really the tough part. Working at an agency, but from home, was a bit harder. In the typical office setting you’re collaborating, and you’re sharing a lot of the small stuff, the stuff that makes the work better in hard-to-measure ways. But at some point this year, I did start to try and measure those ways.
And what I found was, sure, the lockdowns and social anxieties are not helping my general mood, but there was something else that was eating at me. It took me a while to realise that, in the transition from a 50-colleagues office to a one-dog-on-my-lap office, I lost the little moments of education. The sharing of arcane design tool knowledge, the brief can-you-come-have-a-look sparring… the education. The teaching that we do, back and forth, while we work to answer design questions together. And suddenly a lot of my frustration made sense. I wanted to teach more than I could. Continue reading