but thank god i I didn’t learn to put a face on like my mother
isn’t it enough to have to read her veins
like the back of my own hand?
one day they will make a beige blue belt
across the medium sky               our own made-up constellations

this day will come
i will look up to see another woman looking at the mirror

be caught glimpsing at her
in the small moments

grasping at rising signs
i will learn to love the pieces

and everyday
i will miss things

a wrinkle
a hair on a mole on a vein

her face
an indifference to the universe

TRAVEL SHIELDS

Travel Shields is a video looking at the phenomena of Out of Body Experiences or Astral Traveling and the digital scan. An Astral Traveling experience is classified as the total release of the physical body, enabling the traveller to explore and experience realms outside of the physical dimension and perhaps other universes entirely. Though labelled a pseudoscience by the scientific community, various forms of astral travelling have been recorded across history in nearly all cultures from Biblical mystics to small Inuit groups. In a dedicated subreddit, r/AstralArmy, practitioners and enthusiasts gather online to share experiences, missions, challenges, and techniques to get out of the body. The narration of the video is from one such post by an anon who had a spontaneous Astral Travel experience she was trying to understand. In the video, the artist is also exploring the notion of the 3D scanned avatar, which, through its divorce with the body and isolation into the void of the digital space, exists in a similar space as the amateur Astral Traveler. It is a space of imaginative projection, invention, dream, and potentiality.

MARIE-ALINE ROEMER poet

Marie-Aline Roemer is a graduate student of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she specializes in Feminist Science and Technology Studies and Medical Anthropology. She has a special interest in poetry and science fiction, and in exploring kinships and oddkins in all their (queer) forms. She currently resides in Berlin.

ANDREA KHÔRA artist

Andrea Khôra is an artist and researcher based in London. Her practice seeks to comprehend the malleability of reality on personal and societal scales. As a PhD researcher in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, her practice-led project New Sight: The Alchemy of Surveillance into Resistance in Near Future Worlds looks at the history of surveillance, specifically focusing on the mining of occult knowledge systems by the CIA in the cold war as well as the correlation between 1960s–1970s utopian countercultures and the rise of surveillance capitalism. She has been previously based in Seattle, WA, Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, and Florence, Italy.