Voice Notes From The Vortex — Julia July Design

Voice Notes From The Vortex

Zine Publicatie en illustratie, 2023.
In samenwerking met Sam Wilson Fletcher (text)
In opdracht van Leiden International Film Festival 2023 en ROEM Leiden. Limited Edition bij vertoning van The Sweet East. (oplage 100 st.)

Voice Notes from the Vortex is a voyage narrated by an inner monologue that veers and crashes: dream logic collisions that threaten sternum-splitting impact, but just pass by in that gossamer way words will. Even hard words. Into more veering, and takedowns of limestone for being ideologically pliable. The hyperbolic staging of the ‘vortex’ is deliberate. Here evil Cornwall is rendered in textures oozing with sadistic relish. (And isn’t Cornwall all quasi-primitive nooks, accessed via looping exit roads, from a spine of bland retail parks and hushed sapling screens, with no mediation?) And there are anchorites mentioned, come to think of it. What does it all mean, I ask myself? A hint of trauma, which then quickly opens into a violet mystery flower, a spewing Cthulu goitre, with little fragments of social realism worked into its vile tendrils. Grazed plastics as scrying, scratches indicating a possible language. The strategy employed, of piling up and piling up, of exacerbation and superfluity, inundates the hushed container theory of the ‘poem’ (with a nice lid and a clasp and secret things inside) that is implicit in the gorm-decorum of upstanding poetic types.

— Kim Charnley, author of Sociopolitical Aesthetics: Art and the Crisis of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury)