The Bard College Berlin Student Blog
Among the silks, I felt for a bare arm. Among the racks of silk and chiffon, I felt for an arm that would be propped tenderly beside the body it belonged to, a body trying to make itself stand in the way of a whisper, or as translucent: a body that was hiding. My fingers
The sterile metal of the needle pushed against my skin. It probed the quivering tissue, like a ripe grape. Then with skin pillowing around the tip, it sank beneath the surface. I suppressed a wince. It wasn’t so much the needle as what I knew was waiting for me in the next hour: crushing immobility
My character, Erick, opens the bathroom door but his bathroom is gone. Instead, he finds an exact replica of his bathroom. He immediately steps out, back into the real world. A cartographer drew such a loyal map of the city that the map was the size of the city. Had Erick been living in the
After maybe thirty hours of phone conversations I finally asked him if he was gay. I don’t usually have to ask, either I know or it doesn’t concern me. But this was a man who staged his selfies in historical fashion: Milan in the 70’s, New Orleans in the 30’s, you get the picture. Are
I see the glint of their eyes down the barrel of a wave. In Māori mythology, water is considered the foundation of all life. Tangaroa, atua of the sea, rivers and lakes and controller of the tides is the bridge and son of Ranginui (the sky) and Papatuanuku (the earth). Unlike the Western conception of
This series of analog photographs is a sort of mash-up of images created throughout the past semester as part of the Beginners Black and White Photography course taught by April Gertler. Although seemingly unrelated, they do all picture interesting moments in time within our beloved Berlin. Tackled are thoughts on the changing environment, industrialization, and surveillance—and me
The summer of 2020 was marked by the resurgence of a social and political activist movement, known as Black Lives Matter. The protests, which spanned across the globe, were sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Black as a result of police brutality. With COVID-19 affecting social interaction and
This semester, the Critical Human Rights and Humanitarian Advocacy class in partnership with Scholars at Risk and taught by Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom, worked on designing an advocacy campaign to support detained and disappeared Uyghur scholars in the Xinjiang Autonomous region in China. The campaign consisted of the production of this short film and a
I stand before a summer day. Softer, warmer, brighter than the day I’m in. Monet’s vertical canvas, the object of my looking, dissolves, and I am left in space itself. Nature can be this for the mind, a tabula rasa. Hm… I’m not frightened by the vastness, the entrance is not a jolt or a
