SU CORPU, SA MARE E SU SOLE

 

        ©tedorè

The sun overhead is a heavy, physical force, pressing down on the landscape until the coast exhales its deepest, most hidden scents. The air is dense, saturated, pulled taut like a string ready to snap. Every step along the baked, dusty path through the pine grove feels like a slow ritual of exposure, an invitation to shed everything brought along from the cold, enclosed spaces of everyday life. Here, the world strips down to its most raw, unforgiving essence. The sharp stones beneath bare feet, the scent of resin bleeding from wounded bark, and the blinding brilliance of the horizon demand absolute surrender, unconditional and complete. 

The heat doesn’t just touch the skin here; it bruises itself into the flesh, thick with the scent of pine, salt, and sun-baked earth. 

At the edge of the cliff, the body yields to the waiting. Time stretches into a wide, pulsing expanse where every single moment carries the weight of eternity. Below, the sea opens up like a vast, breathing creature, hammering in steady intervals against the dark ribs of the rock. In that sound echoes a primordial, unyielding will. The cliff's edge stands as a sacred threshold, the place of passage between who I was a breath ago and the unknown waiting in the deep. 

My breath hitches before the fall, that single, suspended heartbeat where air leaves the lungs and gravity loses its grip, turning me into a bow drawn tight between sky and abyss. Then, the violent shock of the cold water, breaking over my chest, swallowing me whole into a muted, emerald cathedral of silence. Beneath the surface, the world collapses. I feel the blood hammering in my neck, hyper-aware of every tendon stretched tight, every muscle contracting against the surge. 

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

 

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FORMS OF DESIRE

 

      a personal image made from the exhibition

March 8th, afternoon light

Palazzo Reale. The doors open into a different kind of church.

I went alone. I always do with artists I love this much. Solitude lets me move at my own rhythm, return to what calls me, and stand as long as I need without accounting for anyone else's time.

Forms of Desire - the title already knows what I came for. What I've been circling toward. The pull is stronger than reason, older than language.

The exhibition (find some photos here) doesn't move chronologically. It moves the way longing moves, elliptical, returning, deepening with each pass.

The early collages. Bodies torn from magazines, reassembled according to a grammar I'm still learning to read. Mapplethorpe, before he mastered light, when desire was still something raw, unrefined, showing its teeth.

I step close. Close enough to see where his hands made choices, where scissors met paper, where he decided what stays and what gets cut away. The violence of it. The tenderness.

My pulse slows. The city outside fades. There is only this: standing in front of evidence that someone else felt this, too. This needs to take the world apart and put it back together in the shape of what you want.

RAZPOTJE

 

    ©tedorè

There are days when you stand at the fork, and both paths look like betrayal. Choose one, and you abandon the other self, the one who might have been braver, softer, truer. The hand goes to the throat, a sudden, velvet panic. The breath hitches. This is the moment before. It is not indecision; it is the terrible, crystalline clarity that either way, something dies. And then, somehow, you move. Not through reason, not through certainty, but through instinct, the body choosing before the mind permits it, the way animals know which direction leads to water. You turn toward your life the way a bird turns toward a distant coast it cannot see, but knows is there. 

We are taught to believe that choices are acts of power. That to decide is to control, to master the trajectory of our lives through force of will. But this is a lie we tell ourselves to feel less afraid. The truth is far more unsettling: most choices are losses dressed as gains. Every yes contains within it a thousand nos. Every step forward is also a step away from something that could have been. 

The fork appears without warning. You are walking the ordinary path of your days, coffee made, emails sent, conversations half-listened to, and suddenly there it is. Two directions, both equally possible, both equally terrifying. One might lead to safety, to the known, to the slow death of staying the same. The other might lead to rupture, to transformation, to the quick death of who you have been. Neither promises certainty. Neither offers comfort. 

In that moment, the self splits. You become multiple. There is the version of you who chooses left, and already you can see yourself, what you will wear, how you will move through the world, what you will regret. There is the version that chooses right, and that self is equally vivid, equally real. And then there is you, standing between them, hand at your throat, feeling the terrible weight of being the one who must kill one of these versions to let the other live. 

This is not indecision. Indecision implies uncertainty about what is right. But at the fork, you often know exactly what each path offers. The paralysis comes not from confusion but from clarity. You can see too clearly what each choice costs. You understand, with a precision that feels almost cruel, that either way you will lose something you cannot get back. The person you might have been. The life you might have lived. The softness, the bravery or the truth you might have embodied. 

DREAMFLOWER

 

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TO MY GRANDMOTHER

My Light

In the garden where light falls differently now, there persists a quality of attention, the way her hands understood soil, the way silence between words held more than speech ever could. She knew that survival is breath and the small, radical acts: bread broken, a door left open, the choice to remain soft in a hard world. What endures is the gesture, the unspoken language of care she taught us, how to tend what is fragile, how to honour what passes, how to live as if beauty and sorrow are companions walking the same road. She made of her life a country we still inhabit.

There are people who become your geography. She was mine. The fixed point in a turning world, the ground beneath every flight, every fall. Her strength was the kind that required no announcement, no display. It simply was. Like bedrock, like the pull of gravity, like the fact of morning. I built my life on the certainty of her presence, and she held that weight without complaint, without ever making me feel the burden of being held.

She spoke plainly. There was no decoration in her truth, no softening of edges for comfort's sake. When she said a thing, you could build a house on it. This was its own form of love, the refusal to lie, even kindly. The world offers us endless illusions; she offered clarity. In a life full of shifting ground, she was the place I could return to and find things exactly as they were, exactly as she said they would be. This was not hardness. This was the deep tenderness of someone who respected you enough to tell you the truth.

I think of her hands again. How they worked. How they rested. How they gestured when she spoke, spare and certain. There was economy in everything she did, nothing wasted, nothing excessive. She moved through the world with the precision of someone who understood that resources, time, energy, and love are finite and therefore sacred. She did not scatter herself. She gathered. She focused. She attended.

And in that attention, I learned what it means to be seen. Really seen. Not the performance of yourself you offer the world, but the actual architecture of who you are beneath the presentation. She saw through to the foundation and loved what she found there. This is the gift that steadies you for life: to be known completely and not turned away from.

The strength she gave me was not her own, but the kind she cultivated in me by being unmovable herself. A tree grows strong against the wind. I grew strong against her certainty, her refusal to waver, her absolute commitment to standing exactly where she stood. She taught me that you do not survive by bending to every pressure, but by knowing what you are made of and trusting that structure to hold.

She is gone, and the world feels less stable without her. But she built something in me that remains. A core of clarity. A capacity to stand. The knowledge that love is not always gentle, that sometimes it arrives as truth-telling, as the firm hand that will not let you fall, even when you want to. She made me solid. She made me capable. She made me able to walk through fire and not lose myself in it.

This is what I carry forward: her straightness, her strength, her absolute refusal to perform what she was not. The garden grows differently now, but the soil still holds what she planted. I am what she planted. And I will tend it the way she taught me, with attention, with care, with the radical act of remaining soft in a hard world while standing on ground that will not give way.

She made of her life a country we still inhabit. And I am building my home here, in the land she left behind, with the tools she placed in my hands.

tedorè

BEND BREATHE BUILD

 

    ©tedorè

Some trees grow toward the wind instead of away from it. They lean into the salt air, into the impossible, their roots gripping stone where nothing should survive. This is the first instruction: that resistance shapes us more beautifully than shelter ever could. That we become most ourselves at the edges, where the solid world meets its dissolution. 

The coast teaches a different kind of solitude, the kind that expands rather than isolates. Here, the body becomes an antenna, a receiver, a conductor of all the frequencies the inland world drowns out. I feel the pull of tides I cannot see, the shift of weather systems gathering themselves beyond the horizon. To stand here is to remember that we are porous, permeable, made mostly of the same saltwater that surrounds us. The self we carry so carefully inland dissolves at the edges. What remains is truer. 

NEW STEPS, OLD HABITS

 

    ©tedorè

The body holds its own intelligence, older than thought, wiser than intention. Long before we articulate what we want or need, our muscles have already begun their quiet negotiations with the world. We carry our histories in the way we reach for things, in the angle of our shoulders when we enter a room, in the precise rhythm of our breathing when we face something unfamiliar. This knowing lives beneath language, beneath conscious decision. It is the accumulated wisdom of every gesture we have ever made, every step we have ever taken, stored in sinew and bone and the mysterious architecture of habit. 

Watch anyone move through their morning routine, and you witness this: the body as archive, as living museum of all our previous mornings. The hand finds the light switch in the darkness. The foot knows exactly where the floor begins. We are fluent in the grammar of our own repetition, speaking it without thinking, performing it without rehearsal. 

Transformation, when it comes, arrives wearing the clothes of routine. We wake with new resolve and find ourselves pouring coffee with the same hand, in the same motion, at the same hour. The spoon traces its familiar circle. The cup meets the lips at the practised angle. And yet something has shifted, some interior landscape has rearranged itself while the exterior movements remain unchanged. The gesture contains both the person we were yesterday and the person we are becoming today. They coexist. They blur into one another like ink dropped into water, creating patterns we cannot predict, colours we have never seen before. 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Milk-Light Vigil

Mother, I am apprenticing myself to the liturgy of threshold, how a wreath becomes portal, how conifers bear their resinous devotion toward the longest night. In the frozen world, a man selects his constellation with reverence, this verdant offering that will anchor our solstice vigil.

We domesticate wilderness and name it reprieve. The ornament remembers its cradling, passed palm to palm like an heirloom incantation. The lace remembers hands that tutored other hands, thus we alchemise the ephemeral into a continuum. Somewhere a vessel bears its cartography of feasts, each gathering a small eternity before the greater stillness arrives. The tapers are hours counting down, flames like the primordial syllable we whisper into darkness: soon, soon, soon. I press my palm to gesso, to figures in their plastered eternities keeping watch beside us, and feel the accumulated warmth of all who paused here before me.

What is this eve but sediment of longing made luminous? What is this suspended hour but an extended interval into which we place our most burnished anticipation? The textile genuflects in readiness. The amulet suspends between breath and breath. Even quietude hums with imminence. And there, inscribed in the final light: pause, the most sacred instruction we inherit. Behold: everything arranged for the arrival of nothing but ourselves, present, held by this altar of attention.

NOCTURNO

 

    ©tedorè

There exists a threshold where time bends upon itself, where the architecture of reality grows thin and permeable. It is here, in the blazing heart of afternoon, that she first materialises—unbidden, inevitable, a revenant cloaked in obsidian folds, murmuring incantations only bone-deep knowing can decipher. 

The phenomenon arrives without herald or fanfare. One moment, the world maintains its rigid adherence to the laws of light and shadow; the next, everything tilts into something altogether more perilous and beautiful. I surrender my eyelids to this sweet invasion, and reality shivers like water disturbed by an unseen hand. 

Charcoal fabric becomes mercury shadow, cascading around fevered skin like spilt wine on cathedral stone. The cloth moves with its own volition, mapping territories of longing that daylight dare not illuminate. Each fold carries the weight of unspoken words, each crease holds the echo of touches that exist only in the liminal spaces between sleeping and waking. 

In this hallowed blackout, fingertips inscribe forgotten alphabets across flesh that recalls her caress before breath was drawn, before bone knew the burden of containing such fierce and fragile yearning. The body becomes text, and she, eternal scribe, authors new mythologies upon skin that burns with remembrance of futures that may never unfold. 

The gloom pulsates with its own rhythm, its own secret heartbeat. It carries hints of dusk orchids blooming in impossible gardens, of swallowed confessions that taste of copper and starlight. Here live all the epistles left unwritten, bleeding their ink into darkness; all the thresholds deliberately untraversed, their doors standing eternally ajar to reveal glimpses of what might have been. 

SCARF BAG

 

    ©tedorè

soft enough to forgive, 
structured enough to remember 
not carried, but kept 
the shape of ease 
where form becomes feeling

A Lemaire design that begins with a fold and ends in a habit. Crafted in shiny nappa leather, the Scarf Bag negotiates the tension between gesture and structure: supple where it must yield, defined where it must hold. 

Offered in two sizes, small and regular, the bag contains a main compartment with a zipped closure and a small inside pocket for essentials. The twisted shoulder strap allows multiple carries, on the shoulder or as a sling, and the piece is engineered to rest with the body’s rhythm rather than interrupt it. 

THE RETURN I LOST COUNT OF

 

    ©tedorè

Venice, the second weekend of September 

Returning to Venice is like returning to a lover one cannot keep, yet cannot erase. You arrive knowing it will not last, that it cannot grow into a future, but still, the body remembers, the pulse quickens. A prolonged weekend, no more, yet thick with the same fever as June. I came not seeking answers, only the confirmation that longing is reason enough to return. Palazzo Grimani opened its ribcage of marble to me again. Those rooms are not rooms but organs, resonant cavities where light and shadow perform their duet. Frescoes above me cracked with dignity, fragments of myth staring down in faded triumph. The air carried a mineral chill, laced faintly with the scent of damp plaster and the ghost of citrus left by some long-closed window; the walls seemed to exhale centuries of whispered devotion.

I brushed my hand along the balustrade, cool, veined, strangely human, as if to measure time in temperature. Grimani does not seduce; it absorbs. You leave with less than you entered, as though the walls themselves drink from your veins. 

Then Fortuny. Always Fortuny. To step inside is to inhale another century whole. The fabrics do not hang, they hover, velvet turned into atmosphere, pleats breathing like the lungs of a sleeping deity. Dust gathers there with a kind of grace, golden in the slanting September light, transforming neglect into sacrament. A faint scent of wax and dried roses lingered in the air, mingling with the slow decay of textiles that had belonged to bodies. I stood before a window half-covered by textile, where the outside world dissolved into muted blue; it felt less like a museum than a chapel devoted to the fragility of beauty itself. Every time I go, I leave with the sense that I have been confessed, judged, and forgiven all at once. 

LETTER TO THE END OF SUMMER

 

©tedorè

Dear Summer, 

You have always arrived like an untamed guest, barefoot, salt still clinging to your skin, eyes glittering with the kind of laughter that makes everything around you seem more alive than it really is. You never knock. You simply burst in, fling your arms wide, and suddenly the days are longer, louder, more excessive. 

For a while, I believe you might stay forever. But you never do. And now I see you slipping away, dissolving into the horizon the way a candle melts into its own wax. Your body leans against the sea, and your departure is almost indecent in its beauty. A last flare of orange, a wound of red sinking into the water, a hush that feels like both a goodbye and a dare. 

You have been too much, Summer, and also never enough. You drenched my skin in warmth, yes, but left me thirsty for more than the body can hold. You spoiled me with sunsets so swollen with gold they felt almost arrogant in their perfection, as though beauty had forgotten its duty to be merciful. And yet, you also reminded me that even the longest day dies quietly, that light, however fierce, must bend into dusk. 

PAUSE RESET REBIRTH

 

    ©tedorè

September 2025 

It begins, sometimes, not with a decision but with a slowing. A loosening. The world, so insistent in its demands, suddenly feels as though it can wait. My body drifts, my mind follows, and the horizon stretches wider, softer. There are moments when the very act of floating feels like a rebellion: against velocity, against the cult of productivity, against the illusion that forward is the only direction. 

In water, time forgets me. The minutes dissolve into ripples, the weight of hours thins into translucence. There is no urgency here, only the hush of suspension, the quiet reassurance that something greater is carrying me. Perhaps this is what it means to press pause, not to abandon life, but to return to its undercurrent. Not to disappear, but to remember. The surface trembles around me, yet I feel steadier than on land. To pause is not absence; it is permission. Permission to let the self unclench, to exhale, to resist the endless contortions of performance. Here, I am not asked to prove, to shine, to explain. I am simply permitted. And in that permission, a tenderness awakens, toward myself, toward the world, toward the fragile architecture of existence that we so often trample in our haste. 

Rebirth, I have come to believe, does not always thunder with grand proclamations. More often, it arrives quietly, like the smallest exhale at the edge of day. A face tilted toward the sky, eyelids half-closed, water holding the body in its palms. It is not the spectacular but the subtle that remakes us. The ocean teaches this: that renewal is not about acquiring newness, but about dissolving back into what has always been waiting beneath the surface. When at last I stand again on solid ground, the world resumes its noise, its appetite, its insistence, its thousand little demands. Yet something lingers. A rhythm quieter than clocks, a current steadier than calendars. The knowledge that beginning again is not a feat, not a performance of transformation, but a return. 

To float, to pause, to surrender: these are not escapes, but rehearsals for living. And in them, I find the gentlest form of truth.

interiorem aurum

 

    ©tedorè

Music, that most alchemical of arts, occasionally reveals its deeper purpose, not as soundtrack to our small dramas but as cartographer of territories we forgot we possessed. interiorem aurum begins where Yasmine Hamdan's voice dissolves borders between Damascus and digital futures, where ancient modes flirt with frequencies yet unnamed. 

What follows unfolds like memory itself: FKA twigs ascending through electronic prayers while Nicolas Jaar broadcasts from radio stations that exist only in dream logic. Here, Madonna's forgotten heaven nestles between William Basinski's beautiful decay and Lucrecia Dalt's crystalline meditations. Context becomes curator; proximity, revelation. 

In which colour should I dream about love, in which language should I dream about peace? The playlist whispers such questions through frequencies that transcend borders, each track transforming its neighbours through some mysterious osmosis of attention. 

A NECKLACE OF WHISTLES, A HORIZON OF SALT

 

    ©tedorè

17 August 2025, coast

Afternoons on the coast have a way of undoing me. 

The whistle, small, delicate, absurd, slips between my lips, releasing the cry of a gull. 

And then, as if summoned, a bird carves across the sky, its wings cutting the fragile blue that is already bruising into rose. 

I do not know if it was answering me, or something I had not yet dared to name. 

The sea leaned closer, heavy with a pink shimmer, a tide rehearsing eternity, always returning, never the same. 

And I thought of you. 

ECHOES ON THE SECOND FLOOR

 

2 July 2025, Paris 

Lately, my dates always begin or end with rain. This one arrived dressed in overcast light, the kind that brushes everything with a hush. It was the second of July in Paris, and the sky had just finished raining in the early hours, leaving behind a softness that clung to windows, steps, and thoughts. I wandered into the Centre Pompidou just as the wind lifted slightly, as if something unseen had stirred. 

The old BPI library, once dense with books and whispers, now stood emptied, not abandoned, but expectant. I hadn't planned to feel sentimental about industrial carpet, but there it was: faded marks where shelves once stood, an unintentional grid of ghosts. It suited the occasion. 

Wolfgang Tillmans had taken over the entire second level for his retrospective, "Nothing Could Have Prepared Us, Everything Could Have Prepared Us". It didn’t feel like an exhibition. It felt like someone had broken open their own archive and invited me to walk barefoot through the aftershock. 

There were no clear paths, no forced chronology. Photographs were taped to walls, laid flat on tables, and paused mid-thought on giant prints. Some shimmered with a club's pulse, others with domestic quiet. One moment, I was looking at skin, impossibly close, damp with motion. Next, I was face to face with a storm cloud that looked like it might swallow the entire city of Lagos. These images didn’t explain themselves. They simply were, like light or hunger. 

HOW THE DREAMS COME TO US, SUNDAY NOTES

    ©tedoré
 

They arrive like guests who know the way without ever having walked it. We never see the hour of their departure, yet each night they find us, fumbling, unguarded, stretching their quiet fingers through the slit of sleep. 

Not a knock. Not a name. Just the soft trespass of their presence, as if our souls had always kept a backdoor open for them. Some come draped in familiar faces, carrying the weight of old promises.

Others arrive faceless, faceless yet radiant, speaking in the dialect of winds over black water. There are dreams that feel like rain falling from beneath the earth, and others that feel like smoke climbing into our lungs, velvet, invisible, devastating. 

We think we dream, but it is not we who call them. They find us because we are made porous for them. They find us because the day is too heavy to hold everything we are. At night, the skin grows thin as parchment and the ink seeps through. 

WE ARE FLYING

 

                            ©tedoré

 

It begins, as most good flights do, not with thunder, but with lift.A chord, a beat, a breath, and suddenly, you're airborne.

We Are Flying is not a playlist for running errands or impressing strangers. It is for something subtler: drifting inward, up and away. These are songs that know how to rise, not with drama, but with a kind of elegant ease. Music for when your thoughts don’t quite touch the ground, and you’d rather not explain why.

SERENISSIMA, SUNDAY NOTES

 

Letter left inside a jacket pocket, never mailed

Venice, early days of June 

There are places you visit, and others you haunt. Venice, I fear, has reversed the roles. 

I wandered in wearing silence, left with something less intact. The city is a costume no one dares remove. Even the sky feels baroque, draped in pearl-grey thoughts, every hour a different shade of rehearsal. Theatrical. 

Yes, she is beautiful. But not kindly. She keeps too many mirrors. 

I thought of Marchesa Casati often, how she once walked these stones in peacocks and sleep-laced jewels, shoulders draped in dusk and leopards, gliding through shadows like myth turned flesh, determined to make her life a work of art. She wanted her life to outlive her. Perhaps it has. Now the pigeons circle where her gaze once landed. The ghosts applaud her, still. They remember.