Dear friends of COVEN, 

Some of us were lucky enough to welcome the new season close to nature. I recently swam in a lake that already had plenty of yellow leaves in the bottom and I thought of my first swim of 2020, on Easter Sunday. I felt soothed by the continuity of water amidst all these changes happening on the mainland. The soft shiver of repulsion when something undetermined caresses my skin and the familiar sensation of weightlessness. The sun does not move.

The sun does not move. These 5 little heretic words. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed and had taken to writing from right to left so that his notes could only be read in the mirror. As you may know, here at COVEN we are famous for our vehement refusal of the Renaissance. However, the asynchronicity of Leonardo’s riddle moves me.

Sometimes we leave messages with the certainty that communication will not be achieved. Sometimes we can only really understand messages left for us after 500 hundred years time and in indirect reflection. Sometimes we spend a lifetime searching for the truth and there is no message to be found. Sometimes we are never ripe for a truth that overwhelms our minds. Sometimes the only message is our hard nipples against the cold and mildly stinky water of a Brandenburg See.

In the coming weeks, we will be creating messages based on embodied experiences of warmth and cold that will be released later on in the year. Keep your browsers and your hearts open to decipher them in heat and with cold sweat when the time comes.
 

Photo by Judy Landkammer

In the beginning of October we will set foot once again in Ausland. 

On the 1st and 2nd of the month, we invite you to 1-on-1 Art Application Advising sessions, which you can sign up for by filling out a questionnaire. Our collective has had the privilege of navigating the torturous landscape of Berlin art funding bureaucracy for some years, and we want to share our experience with you. We are not experts, but we have had our share of rejections and triumphs. 

On the evening of October 2nd, we’ll cuddle up with the writer and artist etaïnn zwer for a sleepover at Ausland. etaïnn practice-s an utopic investigation obsessed with the empowering metamorphosis of the poem, punctuated by mantras, performances, installations, and rituals to make more fuckable and decolonized worlds come true. They are part of the queer colleXtive RER Q and you can check out their tumblr. We’ll dress up, do a night walk, sing sweet karaoke songs to each other, film the whole hot mess on MiniDV, and end up with some material that may or may not be delivered to the outside world. This event will be the first of our new project called In Heat: Cold Sweat Series — Multimedia Conversations in the Virtual Space, from October until January 2021.
 

And now, welcome to edition 2.10 of…
 

“A Thing that Feels”

—This month on covenberlin.com—

Dear Galen,

Dear Raging Proll,

For others, you can do much. You are living a nightmare that many are unaware they are also at risk of experiencing. Insist that your friends ask their landlords if the pipes have been checked for lead. In fact, I am going to write to my landlord right now! 

For yourself, there are several options. Just like Anna says in Frozen 2, I encourage you to do “the next right thing.” I assume you have stopped drinking the water. Now you are looking into legal action and medical support. These are both great things to do, but you don’t have to do them all at once, you don’t have to feel bad for putting them off, and their success or failure do not determine your worth. It is simply too much to tackle everything at once. One step at a time baby, or as they say in Hebrew, “cow, cow.” 

Also, why don’t you want to be Raging, Proll? Rage away! Cry about it! Scream into a pillow! Just please don’t internalise the despair and hopelessness because these beasts don’t do well in cages. When given air to breathe and a bit of reverence, you can see their sense, and also how to react to keep them in check. 

Aside from the lifelong damage to your health, the loss of hope is perhaps the worst outcome of this whole shabang. I am so sorry. Please, hold tight to what shards of hope you have left because hope, like kefir grains, is in many ways more eager to proliferate than fear. You can find hope in long quiet walks, moon gazing, taking the S-Bahn to a place you have never been, listening to kind conversations strangers around you are having, music, and how despite how shit this year has been, people are still doing their best. It’s remarkable. 


Love,
Galen 


Got a question for Galen? Send it to us and we will include one of you anonymously in the next issue!

Recommendations corner :
ways to take a break

• Cook a meal
• Get into bed without your phone
• Pray