Issue forty five of The Attention Span Newsletter was published on 17 December 2025.
ps: the online version is numbered 43 but that is a mistake I cannot correct anymore :)
Every month, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.
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I have always dreamed of seeing the world. From an early age, I yearned for movement —physically, emotionally and intellectually. Travel was never simply a holiday; it was where I found myself. It was also always an invitation for humility: a reminder that there is more to this world than the environment we find ourselves in. Seeing new landscapes, feeling unknown languages, dancing through the unfamiliar rhythms of new cities and streets always mirrors something within me. The simple act of moving from one place to another, even for short distances, would awaken my imagination. Movement has shaped me and my work, and has deeply influenced the way I practice translation.
I wanted to write a lengthy essay about the recent SAIL event in Amsterdam—[…] about the wounds woven into all our histories, and about how we search for beauty in a broken world—how violence and beauty coexist in that fragile space.
But then summertime sadness arrived, carried by shifting winds: warmth fading into chill. We’ve reached that moment when you wrap a scarf around your neck yet still insist on one last ice cream of the season, holding onto the hope of one more outdoor swim before it all disappears. For me, it always brings a deep melancholy. The essay on decolonising SAIL will have to wait…
I had been working for more than a year on this collage.
I made it meticulously with beautiful materials: Pink and gold Japanese paper. A pressed flower I had gathered years ago from a poet’s garden. Fragile materials. I used special glue to bring them together. Archival, naturally, promising to last a lifetime.
I had also applied gold leaf, forming little islands across the layers of paper. A process that demands care and patience. Care, I do have a lot of. Patience, not so much.
My piece was spectacular. Ready to be framed. Perfection.
I destroyed it. That one morning, I felt the need to undo it.
I wanted to capture the diamonds.
On the water, in the air, between the waves and the leaves, behind the flowers and the pomegranate trees. There is magic within that moment when the light touches the surface of something as strong and indestructible as the sky or the sea — how the ephemeral meets the eternal.
That’s probably why I wanted to capture the diamonds before they disappeared. Every instant you see in these memories I have archived existed only for a few seconds.
A blink of an eye.
I often reflect on the meaning of photographing such transient instants, questioning the urgency I feel to archive my own experience of light — no matter how imperfect the result.
