Hosted in Bozar in Bruxelles, the exhibition aims to welcome visitors to [a space where idea connect, multiply, collide, and keep changing].

The idea of the artist’s philosphy is looping ad infinitum in different films, which concepts are divided by the dictionary-based names: one is T for time, one is P for Power.

In T for Time, Ho Tu Nyan contemplates that the idea of time both in Western and Eastern cultures, how it is also a way to section and control. He draws comparisons between the two while explaining his ideals in a chant, talking about the time loops and the concept of the ouroboros, a mythical serpent eating its own tail, creating infinity. He uses AI a lot to create the images and gifs that are scattered in the films and the corridor.

The conversation in P for Power is between the artist and a kid, for sure interested in philosophy and asking so many questions, the artists says that the reasons behind some tough questions are… “Unclear. Go to bed now.”

some of my notes from watching the P for Power film:

Power acts without a face

Not everything that desires has a face

Power goes through repetition

Then practice always becomes power

Clarify with values

Choose mentors wisely

Cannot whimsy decide

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I never noticed if there was glances in the bathroom of the park, but form then on I thought about it every time the MRT was strolling beneath the park itself.

While mapping - out of curiosity - the queer historical places of Taipei, I ran across the novel about the gay boys that lived at the park around the 1970s, outcasted by families and society.

I’ve heard about it before, Crystal Boys was a book, then a movie and a series. It was published in Italian but I found the English translation, published by the San Francisco Gay sunshine press. Second printing, in my birth year.

Crystal Boys (孽子, the dictionary puts it under concubine’s son, sons of sin) tells the story the stories about Aqing and the young men in the park who find survival in sex work.

Their lives are told touching deeply in melancholy: the boys’ dreams filled with both hopelessness and hopefulness. I think the book is all-consuming the hearts of the queer people who have walked in the park. It is now quiet in the dark, and when I lived in Taipei I saw it as a place who did not struggle with modernity, feeling at peace with its shape of being a bit passé.

I keep thinking about a podcast (reference missing) about this artist who regarded sex work as something he had to do to survived but also drew him closer to the queer workers who people before him.

It makes me think of a book I’d like to read: the Queer Thing About Sin by Harry Tanner.

A gripping new journey through ancient history, uncovering the origins of homophobia and the untold stories of those who dared to love. […]

This is a powerful story that draws on the rich world of the ancients to reveal how homophobia infected Western religion and ideology - the consequences of which we are still living with today - and to that end how we can move forward and resist homophobia in the future.

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I remember the runs to the wheat fields but also the anxiety of the long summer before school. It’s not any better now, trying to cover every long weekend pothole.

But the wheat is beautiful this time of year and the wind blows and the hot August feels still far away.

All photos from my phone ©.

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Before that cotton was a small production - limited - very limited, maybe even little auntie and uncle and kids kind of business, and it all changed with the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. Can you imagine that one of the first avant-garde machine was a big weaving monster to weave cotton threads together? Penelope would have been in great troubles. Now I will talk you ear off for what we should use it for.

Cotton is a very thirsty plant, delicate and in need of lots of many pesticides to keep it alive (soft bitch). Next time you want to throw your cotton t shirt away, think about what else you can make with it.

Now onto the prize. It will be awarded based on the PUL: Proprieties, Use and Looks.

Proprieties: breathable (heat dispersion), not super elastic, light, hypoallergenic, insects don’t like it and won’t eat it, doesn’t get mad when dyed and doesn’t turn into a baby ball like your cashmere jumper after a silly wash.

Use: your shirt (the soft one that feels like… a sheet of paper - they are cousins afterall), your stretchy t shirt, your jeans, comfortable undies and so much more.

Looks: at least 95% plant based materials (cellulose) , soft touch, so many different weaves.

We love cotton, 80% of our clothes in our cupboards are made out of cotton. Here you can find some advice I give to friends when they tell me what to do with their old cotton stuff.

8/10 to Miss Nina Cotonina

Feel like giving you cotton a second chance?

Since it’s breathable, maybe it’s time to bring back those grey sweaty shirts to the gym and let go of the stinky N*ke shirts that have literal holes in them to push out your sweat. This is not just about what our bodies are most comfortable of (think about all the pros of wearing something other than plastic that has direct contact with your skin), but our wallets too: cotton can be mended, dyed and stitched up. Polyester cannot. We will talk about chemical textiles later.

How to recognise cotton? Except from the tag inside, cotton is soft, sturdy, has a lot of friction when touched. Now go touch your sweaters, jeans and t-shirts to become a professional cotton identifier.

Risorse

Rebecca Mombelli, Piccolo Manuale Illustrato per cercatori di stoffe, Il Saggiatore, 2025

Roland Barthes, Il senso della moda, Einaudi Milano 2006

Postrel Virginia, The fabric of civilisation, Basic Books New York, 2020

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I liked the Biennial’s prompts of spaces - I really enjoy any level of space and place, private and public spaces, who can stay and who can’t: I think of the football field next to my childhood home with the boys playing football and the girls relegated to the corner, maybe playing volleyball, probably feeling excluded and slowly retracting to their rooms….

Li Yi-Fan’s film triggers thoughts on human life and death, how communication can be strange and simple at the same time. We follow his puppet asking hot questions about everything, walking through itself and inside outside places.

Now he’s presenting Screen Melancholy (2026), a collateral event at the 61st Venezia Biennale, gamefying melanchony and 3d creations. Read full press release here.

I am curious to see what the puppet’s going to tell me at the Palazzo delle Prigioni.

Honourable mentions from the 2023 Taipei Biennial:

Takashi Ito and his experimental game-like film made with frames that enter a sequence of photographs.

Jaqueline Kyomi Gork and the sound of a hyms on cold inflating and hot deflating of a space filled with black balloons.

^{content of images copyright to the artists.}

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The “garden city” vision was introduced by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on 11 May 1967 to transform Singapore into a city with abundant lush greenery and a clean environment in order to make life more pleasant for the people.^[1] It was also envisaged that the presence of ample greenery in an environment clean of litter would signify that Singapore was a well-organised city and hence a good destination for tourists and foreign investments.^[2]

This article from the Singapore National Library goes on to say Singapore implemented the tree planting, covered the busy streets with green boulevards, and tried to create spaced between HDBs to give residents a moment to… touch grass.

When I was in Singapore I couldn’t notice the level of manicure it went into planting flower trees and ledges in the tropical sun, then rearrange them, substitute with stronger plants, who knowa where the discarded flowers went then.

Below some of my favourite manicures:

I’m curious to see which one is your favourite.

Leave a comment

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Why?

1. because it’s a graphic novel

2. it has real life examples that are so clear, it’s impossible not to think about your body being transported in the theories the writers are introducint

3. the writers, Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele present such good research and good sources

Queer theory is sometimes seen as scary, because on one hand it’s believed to be difficult to understand and on the other it’s impossible to define because queer has so many meanings…

But the book’s aim is to be helpful to us humans. It’s a pot where to fish out what interests us, a dictionary, an archive of found things that may or may not work.

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What makes a gay bar and why is it so important for queer people?

Sasha Velour pays homage to C Street, the Gay bar She was born, in her theatrical performance in ‘Travesty’. Little to say how important the Gay Bar is for her.

Gay Bar is a book I’ve read a some time ago, it describes author Jeremy Atherton Lin’s archival research of the remaining gay bars. The book functions both as his biography and recalls some naughty affairs.

A book I’d be interested in reading is about the place for dining - the limbo between the before and after a night out: Dining Out - First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants. (does this go in the Gay Bar category? Chippies edition?)

Then again on the Gay Bar, one episode of the podcast Savage Love when author Dan Savage talks about the relief of walking into onr, like a threshold where there’s an outside (unwelcoming) and inside (welcoming).

I do find myself in a bar sometimes, but I don’t feel such a strong relief when I get into one. Maybe cultural differences? In Italy bars are open 6 am to midnight, cater post office services, sell cigarettes, serve glasses of wine to the oldies…

I don’t always need a Gay Bar, and I turn my attention to the spaces I can freely express myself: the park, the outside of the club, the car with friends driving to the beach, dinner at home.

These are the things the perfect place needs for me:

• a place I can be alone

• a place where I can be with friends

• a place where people around me are kind and relaxed > welcoming

• a space the queer community is called without saying it out loud.

• …you tell me?

Dong café, Taipei | Dalida, Taipei | Rathaus, Piacenza | Café Zart, Berlin | Tipografia alimentare, Milano | casual poet library and its block, Singapore | All the libraries

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Ciwas Tahos is indigenous Atayal artist, she performs, makes and creates her artworks on queerness, tradition and the stories of her people.

Yumin parks in the forest and we start going in, we’re all lost except him and his son. He can see with light and shades when the bees are flying out or coming back to their home. We go around a crevice and stop next to a rock: elder Yumin opens it and the wild bees fly out of their home. I remember looking at the wasp that tried to eat the larvae, and the dead bees that attacked it that died protecting the colony. Yumin tells us that decades ago his family could live from selling the honey of the wild bees, but now they’re lucky if they find any. We are lucky to find quite a bit of honey to bring back to Yumin’s family, but it feels so eerie that climate change is a force that these brave bees can’t attack.

When we return to elder Yumin’s home, his family prepared a feast for us and they shared the honey around a campfire.

In my final project at the University in Taiwan there’s a lot of references about this day. Also, I think it’s one of the best of my life.

Ciwas and Jule’s kindness to share with me their world had such a big impact on me.

The story that Ciwas wants to tell while looking at the bees is the story of Temahahoi: a place deep in the forest, where queer women are protected by wild bees. Today we would perhaps say gender non conforming, because the women of Temahahoi sit on a rock and let the wind blow through them to become pregnant and have babies.

I still get chills thinking about this story.

Ciwas Tahos found the story of Temahahoi and connected it to a queer meaning. It’s possible to draw lines between genre, cultural identity and stories and histories.

Her art making celebrates the importance of creating a queer space through art.

From Ciwas Tahos’ website:

Ciwas Tahos (also known as Anchi Lin 林安琪) is a visual artist of Atayal descent from Taiwan. Working across performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics, and kinetic installation, her body-centred practice interweaves Atayal worldviews to claim self-determined space and presence.

Her work explores cultural and gender identity, using the body as a vessel to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement—opening pathways toward new ways of understanding, remembering, and relating.

Listen to the BBC coverage of that day and Ciwas Tahos’ interview.

Follow Ciwas’ next steps on her Instagram here.

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Grazie di aver letto Samurama. Dimmi cosa ne pensi con un’email o un messaggio su Instagram. Guarda qui l’archivio completo.

There are no artificial lights to encourage the sexy activities of moths and fireflies (how gay), so you would get a perfect view of the moon - and if she was bright enough, you could see the forest covered in moonshine.

Thank you for reading Samurama. If you want to tell me what you think, send me an email or a message on Instagram. Find here the full archive.

Grazie di aver letto Samurama. Dimmi cosa ne pensi con un’email o un messaggio su Instagram. Guarda qui l’archivio completo.

The queue at the library to get The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was so long, and I think it’s because the cover is so wonderful. I like to support the library or get surprised by books at the second hand shop: what if I stumble into a queer story…

At the end I got it (how could one separate with it…) and the bubble wrap only made it more mysterious.

I love a story where the chaotic characters struggle to be good and sometimes end up being mean and make mistakes. Definitely nobody in this book is completely good but some people are just bad. The ghost of the narrator sees his dismember body being dumped on the first page. The war photographer Maali Almeinda is left to navigate a messy bureaucratic afterlife while trying to solve his own murder, only having seven moons to find his friends and get them to show photographs that could change the fate of the civil war in Sri Lanka. He’s surrounded by demons both in the afterlife - giant mythological animals, and in his previous life: where the same people who despised him because he’s gay also wanted him at the same time. At first I was thinking that he lives in a closet with the door open, but deep into the book I realised he lives out of his closet, and the people around him, afraid and embarrassed of queerness, want to force him in it for their own peace of mind.

He’s relentless and the hopes are so faint. Maali is so intense, melanchonic and full of sarcasm. Maybe his death is not useless after all?

Third Moon

You’ve always thought the voice in your head belonged to someone else. Telling you the story of your life as if it had already happened. The omniscient narrator adding a voiceover to your day. The coach telling you to stop feeling sorry and to do what you were good at. Which was winning at blackjack, seducing young peasants and photographing scary places.

It was the voice that led you to tour the war zone on five occasions, each for a different master. It was the voice that led you to casinos and alleyways and strange boys in dark jungles. And yet you wonder about that voice. If you had a spirit on your back whispering in your ear, how would you possibly know? And, even if you did, how could you separate that voice from every other whisper?

I was reading the book while eating breakfast, before and after work, holding it with one hand and the other in a bag of chips…

This is my favourite book of the year (it’s only April).

I will go lie down now.

Shehan Karunatilaka won the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2011, the DSL and Gratiaen Prize for his debut novel, Chinaman. Born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, Karunatilaka grew up in Colombo, studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam and Singapore.

Minor literatures has a wonderful description of the book.

Thank you for reading Samurama. If you want to tell me what you think, send me an email or a message on Instagram. Find here the full archive.

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I am lucky I paid attention - Wongsy

The result of a lifetime spent ‘having a nosy’. I am lucky Wongsy shares their experience and knowledge, showing me their playgrounds.

We combined this research in a zine: Sad or not??? Shopping centres of Singapore, where we describe in minute detail 13 (thirteen!!!) shopping centres, in all their sad glory, printed on the glossiest paper ever existed.

The more sad stars are awarded, the saddest the shopping centre is.

There’s nothing left to do, except finding out if your favourite shopping centre is sad or not.

Follow farmhouse press on Instagram.

If you like the project, you can show your support us by getting the zine:

Sad or not - the zine

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Following this class, I started thinking about the dramatic clouds that would rapidly grow into a storm on my way to the MRT and the slow rain clouds and their bored tic-tic-tic wetting the ground in the countryside in North Italy.

I didn’t think about clouds until I spotted dark puffs while on a satellite trip to the Taiwanese mountains on google maps… They were the cheeky shadows of travelling clouds.

The satellite photographed. They then transformed in rain, rivers and oceans, and their photo will last only until the next website update.

Ultranuvola is the volatile archive of clouds on Taiwan.

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Samurama is a space where I keep track of my chaotic research, populated with narratives, meanings and humor.

After reading Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology the concepts of orientation and direction, significance of objects and ideas are all stuck on the walls of my brain.

Everything I touch is queer coated, like a glittery King Mida: this diorama is gay joy.

Thank you for reading.

Samurama è il posto in cui racconto delle mie ricerche per tenere insieme cose storie e i miei pensieri.

Dopo aver letto (e riletto) Queer Phenomenology di Sara Ahmed mi sono ritrovato spesso a pensare all’orientamento e le direzioni, al significato degli oggetti e delle idee.

La conclusione è che tutto ciò che tocco diventa queer, come un Re Mida glitterato. Tutto ciò che esiste in questo diorama è felicemente gay.

Grazie.