writer
poet
About
Nina Hanz is a Berlin-based writer exploring the unexpected iterations of the ground, from the grit of a clam shell to the residues of the earth.
A German-American graduate of the Royal College of Art's MA Writing programme, Nina Hanz has cultivated a practice centered on the intersections of geology, ecology, and place. She is the author of the poetry pamphlets Placeholders (Bottlecap Press) and Mycoglossia (Haverthorn Press), and the editor of the anthology My Daughter Terra.
Her prose, poetry, and art criticism have been featured in publications such as Vogue, Daisy World, and Ache Magazine, with recent readings at the National Poetry Library and Floating University Berlin. Beyond her editorial work, Nina serves as the Press and Communications Director at the ChertLüdde gallery in Berlin.
Selected Essays & Reviews8
'What transports us: Visual Riffing in the Paintings of Gabriela Těthalov', 2024, Artist Portfolio
To approach Gabriela Těthalov’s painterly practice through the concept of visual riffing is to treat each work less as a static image and more as an unfolding phrase: a statement that immediately questions itself, digresses, and returns altered. Her paintings do not simply depict; they talk back to their own decisions. Brushstrokes, smears, veils, and accretions of pigment behave like clauses in a sentence that keeps revising itself mid‑utterance. Visual riffing: departure, wandering, return “Riffing” implies a structure that is never fully abandoned, only stretched. In Těthalov’s work, this structure is the initial compositional logic: a chromatic hierarchy, a directional sweep of marks, a provisional division of the surface. The painting begins with a legible order—perhaps a field of muted ground, a cluster of saturated colour, a rhythm of vertical strokes. This is the theme. The riff begins when the painting departs from its own premise. A colour that was meant to be subordinate suddenly thickens, asserting itself as a block. A line that once anchored the composition is partially erased, leaving a ghost that redirects the eye. These moves are not corrections in the sense of erasing mistakes; they are counter‑statements, improvisational replies to what the painting has already said. The wandering phase is where Těthalov’s surfaces become most discursive. Layers accumulate not as mere texture but as argumentative pressure. Each new layer both covers and cites what came before. Scraped passages reveal earlier chromatic decisions like footnotes; thin washes allow underlayers to show through as if the painting were remembering its own earlier thoughts. The work drifts away from its initial logic, testing how far it can go without losing coherence. The return is never a simple restoration. When the painting gathers itself again—through a stabilizing band of colour, a reasserted axis, or a final veil that re‑unifies disparate zones—it comes back changed by its detours. The original structure is still legible, but it has been bent, contradicted, and re‑phrased. The painting ends not where it began, but in a state of altered recognition: we see the initial idea and its revisions at once. Material accumulation as argument Těthalov’s surfaces are built through a logic of accumulation as thinking. Paint is not simply applied; it is layered, suspended, scraped, and re‑applied in ways that register as a sequence of decisions. Each layer is a proposition about what the painting might be; each partial erasure is a critique of that proposition. This process gives the work a distinctly discursive quality. Thickened passages of paint read as emphatic clauses, places where the painting insists on a point. Thin glazes and translucent veils function as hesitations or qualifications—“yes, but also this.” Areas where the surface has been repeatedly worked, sanded, or overpainted become sites of argumentative density, where multiple, incompatible solutions coexist in compressed form. Crucially, this accumulation does not resolve into a single, authoritative statement. Instead, the painting preserves its own history of disagreement. Earlier chromatic structures remain visible at the edges of newer ones; ghosted lines and residual stains testify to paths not taken. The result is a surface that behaves like a palimpsest of decisions, where meaning emerges not from a final image but from the tension between successive states. In this sense, Těthalov’s practice resists the fantasy of the decisive gesture. The painting is not the record of a singular, heroic act but of ongoing negotiation—between colours, between densities, between competing compositional logics. Material accumulation becomes a way of thinking in public, an argument conducted in pigment and pressure rather than in words. Colour as speech, not representation Within this improvisational grammar, colour functions less as representation than as speech. Těthalov’s chromatic decisions rarely point outward to recognizable objects; instead, they operate as utterances within the painting’s internal conversation. A sudden incursion of saturated colour—an acidic green, a dense red, a bruised violet—reads as an interruption, a raised voice cutting across a more measured tonal field. Muted or desaturated zones behave like pauses or ellipses, moments where the painting lowers its volume to reconsider. Contrasts of warm and cool, opaque and translucent, bright and dull are not descriptive but rhetorical: they emphasize, contradict, or undercut what neighbouring colours assert. Because colour is not tasked with depicting external reality, it is free to operate as syntax. A band of colour can connect distant parts of the canvas like a conjunction; a cluster of related hues can form a paragraph‑like block of thought. Repetitions of a particular colour across the surface act as refrains, returning motifs that anchor the viewer’s experience even as the painting’s structure shifts. This linguistic analogy is not metaphorical in a loose sense; it is embedded in how the paintings are built. Těthalov’s chromatic choices unfold sequentially, each new colour responding to the conditions established by the previous ones. The painting thus becomes a dialogue of colours, where meaning is produced relationally—through adjacency, overlap, and contrast—rather than through reference to an external scene. Improvisational grammar of the surface Taken together, these dynamics constitute what we might call Těthalov’s improvisational grammar. Like a musician working within and against a key, she operates inside a set of self‑imposed constraints—limited palettes, recurring compositional motifs, characteristic gestures—only to test their elasticity. Motivic marks (recurring strokes, smears, or directional sweeps) function as grammatical particles, small units that can be recombined into different syntactic roles. Interruptive gestures—a dragged line that cuts across a field, a poured stain that ignores prior boundaries—act as disjunctive conjunctions, equivalent to a sudden “however” or “nevertheless.” Zones of overworking become dense clauses, where the painting’s syntax knots itself, revising and re‑qualifying earlier statements. Improvisation here is not the absence of structure but its continuous re‑negotiation. The painting’s grammar is learned in the act of looking: the viewer traces how one decision leads to another, how a colour introduced in one corner finds an echo elsewhere, how a buried layer reappears at the edge of a scrape. To read these works closely is to follow the logic of their departures and returns, to attend to how each riff both destabilizes and re‑grounds the painting’s evolving order. Conclusion: painting as altered return Through the lens of visual riffing, Těthalov’s practice emerges as a sustained inquiry into how a painting can think itself otherwise. Her works begin with a premise only to wander away from it, accumulating material as they go, and then return in a state of transformed coherence. The surface records this journey: every layer, scrape, and chromatic shift is a trace of the painting’s own self‑argument. In this process, colour ceases to be a vehicle for representation and becomes a mode of speech—a way for the painting to articulate, contest, and revise its own terms. Material accumulation, far from being a purely formal concern, becomes a form of reasoning, a visible logic of trial, error, and re‑articulation. To read Těthalov’s paintings, then, is to listen to them: to hear how they depart from themselves, how they wander through their own possibilities, and how they return—never unchanged, always bearing the marks of their improvisational thinking.
To approach Gabriela Těthalov’s painterly practice through the concept of visual riffing is to treat each work less as a static image and more as an unfolding phrase: a statement that immediately questions itself, digresses, and returns altered. Her paintings do not simply depict; they talk back to their own decisions. Brushstrokes, smears, veils, and accretions of pigment behave like clauses in a sentence that keeps revising itself mid‑utterance. Visual riffing: departure, wandering, return “Riffing” implies a structure that is never fully abandoned, only stretched. In Těthalov’s work, this structure is the initial compositional logic: a chromatic hierarchy, a directional sweep of marks, a provisional division of the surface. The painting begins with a legible order—perhaps a field of muted ground, a cluster of saturated colour, a rhythm of vertical strokes. This is the theme. The riff begins when the painting departs from its own premise. A colour that was meant to be subordinate suddenly thickens, asserting itself as a block. A line that once anchored the composition is partially erased, leaving a ghost that redirects the eye. These moves are not corrections in the sense of erasing mistakes; they are counter‑statements, improvisational replies to what the painting has already said. The wandering phase is where Těthalov’s surfaces become most discursive. Layers accumulate not as mere texture but as argumentative pressure. Each new layer both covers and cites what came before. Scraped passages reveal earlier chromatic decisions like footnotes; thin washes allow underlayers to show through as if the painting were remembering its own earlier thoughts. The work drifts away from its initial logic, testing how far it can go without losing coherence. The return is never a simple restoration. When the painting gathers itself again—through a stabilizing band of colour, a reasserted axis, or a final veil that re‑unifies disparate zones—it comes back changed by its detours. The original structure is still legible, but it has been bent, contradicted, and re‑phrased. The painting ends not where it began, but in a state of altered recognition: we see the initial idea and its revisions at once. Material accumulation as argument Těthalov’s surfaces are built through a logic of accumulation as thinking. Paint is not simply applied; it is layered, suspended, scraped, and re‑applied in ways that register as a sequence of decisions. Each layer is a proposition about what the painting might be; each partial erasure is a critique of that proposition. This process gives the work a distinctly discursive quality. Thickened passages of paint read as emphatic clauses, places where the painting insists on a point. Thin glazes and translucent veils function as hesitations or qualifications—“yes, but also this.” Areas where the surface has been repeatedly worked, sanded, or overpainted become sites of argumentative density, where multiple, incompatible solutions coexist in compressed form. Crucially, this accumulation does not resolve into a single, authoritative statement. Instead, the painting preserves its own history of disagreement. Earlier chromatic structures remain visible at the edges of newer ones; ghosted lines and residual stains testify to paths not taken. The result is a surface that behaves like a palimpsest of decisions, where meaning emerges not from a final image but from the tension between successive states. In this sense, Těthalov’s practice resists the fantasy of the decisive gesture. The painting is not the record of a singular, heroic act but of ongoing negotiation—between colours, between densities, between competing compositional logics. Material accumulation becomes a way of thinking in public, an argument conducted in pigment and pressure rather than in words. Colour as speech, not representation Within this improvisational grammar, colour functions less as representation than as speech. Těthalov’s chromatic decisions rarely point outward to recognizable objects; instead, they operate as utterances within the painting’s internal conversation. A sudden incursion of saturated colour—an acidic green, a dense red, a bruised violet—reads as an interruption, a raised voice cutting across a more measured tonal field. Muted or desaturated zones behave like pauses or ellipses, moments where the painting lowers its volume to reconsider. Contrasts of warm and cool, opaque and translucent, bright and dull are not descriptive but rhetorical: they emphasize, contradict, or undercut what neighbouring colours assert. Because colour is not tasked with depicting external reality, it is free to operate as syntax. A band of colour can connect distant parts of the canvas like a conjunction; a cluster of related hues can form a paragraph‑like block of thought. Repetitions of a particular colour across the surface act as refrains, returning motifs that anchor the viewer’s experience even as the painting’s structure shifts. This linguistic analogy is not metaphorical in a loose sense; it is embedded in how the paintings are built. Těthalov’s chromatic choices unfold sequentially, each new colour responding to the conditions established by the previous ones. The painting thus becomes a dialogue of colours, where meaning is produced relationally—through adjacency, overlap, and contrast—rather than through reference to an external scene. Improvisational grammar of the surface Taken together, these dynamics constitute what we might call Těthalov’s improvisational grammar. Like a musician working within and against a key, she operates inside a set of self‑imposed constraints—limited palettes, recurring compositional motifs, characteristic gestures—only to test their elasticity. Motivic marks (recurring strokes, smears, or directional sweeps) function as grammatical particles, small units that can be recombined into different syntactic roles. Interruptive gestures—a dragged line that cuts across a field, a poured stain that ignores prior boundaries—act as disjunctive conjunctions, equivalent to a sudden “however” or “nevertheless.” Zones of overworking become dense clauses, where the painting’s syntax knots itself, revising and re‑qualifying earlier statements. Improvisation here is not the absence of structure but its continuous re‑negotiation. The painting’s grammar is learned in the act of looking: the viewer traces how one decision leads to another, how a colour introduced in one corner finds an echo elsewhere, how a buried layer reappears at the edge of a scrape. To read these works closely is to follow the logic of their departures and returns, to attend to how each riff both destabilizes and re‑grounds the painting’s evolving order. Conclusion: painting as altered return Through the lens of visual riffing, Těthalov’s practice emerges as a sustained inquiry into how a painting can think itself otherwise. Her works begin with a premise only to wander away from it, accumulating material as they go, and then return in a state of transformed coherence. The surface records this journey: every layer, scrape, and chromatic shift is a trace of the painting’s own self‑argument. In this process, colour ceases to be a vehicle for representation and becomes a mode of speech—a way for the painting to articulate, contest, and revise its own terms. Material accumulation, far from being a purely formal concern, becomes a form of reasoning, a visible logic of trial, error, and re‑articulation. To read Těthalov’s paintings, then, is to listen to them: to hear how they depart from themselves, how they wander through their own possibilities, and how they return—never unchanged, always bearing the marks of their improvisational thinking.
'Exit Elsewhere: Beyond the Body, Beyond Place', 2024, ChertLüdde
Written for Heike Kabisch’s second monograph, this essay traces the body as a site of perpetual departure—never arriving, always suspended in the interval between one threshold and another. Taking Kabisch’s sculptures as its point of departure, the text develops a philosophy of displacement that refuses the consolation of arrival, insisting instead on the generative friction of not-quite-belonging. In this account, the space between body and place is neither a gap to be closed nor a lack to be overcome, but an active, unresolved tension in which identities, orientations, and attachments are continuously reconfigured. Attending closely to the material and affective logics of Kabisch’s work, the essay reads her sculptural figures as bodies caught mid-transition: leaning, folding, stretching, or slipping away from the sites that seem to hold them. These bodies do not settle into stable positions; they hover, tilt, and hesitate, occupying thresholds—between interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, object and environment. Rather than narrating a journey toward coherence or homecoming, the text foregrounds the unfinished, the provisional, and the contingent as the very conditions under which subjectivity takes shape. Refusing the fantasy of a final resting place, the essay proposes displacement as a method: a way of thinking and feeling that stays with dislocation instead of resolving it. Kabisch’s sculptures become occasions to explore how bodies are routed and rerouted through architectures, institutions, and imaginaries that never fully accommodate them. In this sense, the work does not simply illustrate estrangement; it stages the body as a moving threshold, a site where belonging is continually deferred and renegotiated. By holding open the distance between body and place, the essay argues, Kabisch’s practice makes perceptible the politics of orientation—who is allowed to arrive, who remains perpetually in transit, and whose movements are rendered illegible. Yet rather than closing this inquiry with answers, the text lingers in the unresolved. It treats the in-between not as a temporary passage but as a durable condition, a space of potential in which new forms of relation, habitation, and embodiment can be imagined without the guarantee of arrival.
Written for Heike Kabisch’s second monograph, this essay traces the body as a site of perpetual departure—never arriving, always suspended in the interval between one threshold and another. Taking Kabisch’s sculptures as its point of departure, the text develops a philosophy of displacement that refuses the consolation of arrival, insisting instead on the generative friction of not-quite-belonging. In this account, the space between body and place is neither a gap to be closed nor a lack to be overcome, but an active, unresolved tension in which identities, orientations, and attachments are continuously reconfigured. Attending closely to the material and affective logics of Kabisch’s work, the essay reads her sculptural figures as bodies caught mid-transition: leaning, folding, stretching, or slipping away from the sites that seem to hold them. These bodies do not settle into stable positions; they hover, tilt, and hesitate, occupying thresholds—between interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, object and environment. Rather than narrating a journey toward coherence or homecoming, the text foregrounds the unfinished, the provisional, and the contingent as the very conditions under which subjectivity takes shape. Refusing the fantasy of a final resting place, the essay proposes displacement as a method: a way of thinking and feeling that stays with dislocation instead of resolving it. Kabisch’s sculptures become occasions to explore how bodies are routed and rerouted through architectures, institutions, and imaginaries that never fully accommodate them. In this sense, the work does not simply illustrate estrangement; it stages the body as a moving threshold, a site where belonging is continually deferred and renegotiated. By holding open the distance between body and place, the essay argues, Kabisch’s practice makes perceptible the politics of orientation—who is allowed to arrive, who remains perpetually in transit, and whose movements are rendered illegible. Yet rather than closing this inquiry with answers, the text lingers in the unresolved. It treats the in-between not as a temporary passage but as a durable condition, a space of potential in which new forms of relation, habitation, and embodiment can be imagined without the guarantee of arrival.
'Resurrected in Times of Need', 2024, Passe-Avant
An essay on revival as form, tracing how artworks, ideas, and bodies return from disuse. Published in Passe-Avant, it moves between botanical dormancy, archival practice, and contemporary art to ask what conditions make resurrection possible, and what is altered, lost, or left behind in the process. Refusing easy optimism, it insists that every revival bears a remainder of what could not come back, revealing return as a complex, partial, and often haunted form rather than a simple restoration.
An essay on revival as form, tracing how artworks, ideas, and bodies return from disuse. Published in Passe-Avant, it moves between botanical dormancy, archival practice, and contemporary art to ask what conditions make resurrection possible, and what is altered, lost, or left behind in the process. Refusing easy optimism, it insists that every revival bears a remainder of what could not come back, revealing return as a complex, partial, and often haunted form rather than a simple restoration.
'The Flesh, The Mesh, The Mushroom', 2023, Map Magazine
Co-written with Fiona Glen, this essay follows the fungal as a model for thinking about entanglement, decomposition, and the distributed self. Moving between mycology, feminist theory, and close readings of contemporary art, the text proposes the mushroom not as metaphor but as method — a way of attending to the slow, underground work of relation that exceeds individual bodies and disciplines.
Co-written with Fiona Glen, this essay follows the fungal as a model for thinking about entanglement, decomposition, and the distributed self. Moving between mycology, feminist theory, and close readings of contemporary art, the text proposes the mushroom not as metaphor but as method — a way of attending to the slow, underground work of relation that exceeds individual bodies and disciplines.
'Tender Cannibalism: Diffracting Eva Fàbregas's Devouring Lovers through Daisy Lafarge's Lovebug', 2023, Arts of the Working Class
This essay examines Eva Fàbregas's installation Devouring Lovers alongside Daisy Lafarge's novel Lovebug through the figure of the parasite—an organism that consumes what it loves. Using diffraction as a feminist methodology, it argues that acts of consumption in these works are neither purely violent nor purely innocent, but instead constitute a radical mode of entanglement that resists any clean separation between self and other.
This essay examines Eva Fàbregas's installation Devouring Lovers alongside Daisy Lafarge's novel Lovebug through the figure of the parasite—an organism that consumes what it loves. Using diffraction as a feminist methodology, it argues that acts of consumption in these works are neither purely violent nor purely innocent, but instead constitute a radical mode of entanglement that resists any clean separation between self and other.
'Second Skin', 2022, VOGUE
To wear the world is to recognize that our skin is not a sealed edge but a living membrane: porous, receptive, and marked by every contact. Clothing becomes an extension of this membrane, a second skin that registers the pressures of ecology, labor, and culture. Fashion is no longer just adornment but a record of entanglement — with soils and supply chains, with toxins and textures, with the atmospheres we move through. In this view, the body is not a self-contained interior protected from an outside world; it is a site where the world passes through. Fabrics off-gas, dyes leach, microplastics flake, pollen and pollution settle, sweat and oils seep out. To dress is to participate in exchanges of matter and meaning: we take in fibers, chemicals, and climates; we shed residues, threads, and dead cells. What we wear literally gets under our skin, and what our skin releases returns to the environment. The essay’s movement between fashion, ecology, and phenomenology suggests that sensation is never purely personal. The feel of a garment is also the feel of distant landscapes and invisible infrastructures: cotton fields and oil refineries, shipping routes and factory floors. To ask what gets under us is to ask how histories of extraction, exploitation, and environmental damage become intimate, tactile experiences. To ask what we shed is to consider how our bodies and clothes contribute to ongoing ecological traces — from discarded garments to microscopic debris. To wear the world, then, is to inhabit this mutual permeability consciously: to sense that every outfit is an interface with planetary systems, every touch leaves a mark, and every surface — including our own skin — is already crowded with the world’s impressions.
To wear the world is to recognize that our skin is not a sealed edge but a living membrane: porous, receptive, and marked by every contact. Clothing becomes an extension of this membrane, a second skin that registers the pressures of ecology, labor, and culture. Fashion is no longer just adornment but a record of entanglement — with soils and supply chains, with toxins and textures, with the atmospheres we move through. In this view, the body is not a self-contained interior protected from an outside world; it is a site where the world passes through. Fabrics off-gas, dyes leach, microplastics flake, pollen and pollution settle, sweat and oils seep out. To dress is to participate in exchanges of matter and meaning: we take in fibers, chemicals, and climates; we shed residues, threads, and dead cells. What we wear literally gets under our skin, and what our skin releases returns to the environment. The essay’s movement between fashion, ecology, and phenomenology suggests that sensation is never purely personal. The feel of a garment is also the feel of distant landscapes and invisible infrastructures: cotton fields and oil refineries, shipping routes and factory floors. To ask what gets under us is to ask how histories of extraction, exploitation, and environmental damage become intimate, tactile experiences. To ask what we shed is to consider how our bodies and clothes contribute to ongoing ecological traces — from discarded garments to microscopic debris. To wear the world, then, is to inhabit this mutual permeability consciously: to sense that every outfit is an interface with planetary systems, every touch leaves a mark, and every surface — including our own skin — is already crowded with the world’s impressions.
'Part of the Landscape: Interview with Miek Zwamborn', 2022, JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students
This conversation with Dutch writer and artist Miek Zwamborn explores how walking, foraging, and prose interweave into a practice of deep, situated attention. Published in the Journal of Arts Writing by Students, the interview follows Zwamborn’s method of becoming part of a place—allowing the landscape to think through her rather than imposing fixed interpretations upon it. What emerges is a dialogue about slowness, careful observation, and the ethics of staying: remaining long enough with a terrain, its ecologies and histories, for reciprocal forms of understanding and responsibility to take root.
This conversation with Dutch writer and artist Miek Zwamborn explores how walking, foraging, and prose interweave into a practice of deep, situated attention. Published in the Journal of Arts Writing by Students, the interview follows Zwamborn’s method of becoming part of a place—allowing the landscape to think through her rather than imposing fixed interpretations upon it. What emerges is a dialogue about slowness, careful observation, and the ethics of staying: remaining long enough with a terrain, its ecologies and histories, for reciprocal forms of understanding and responsibility to take root.
'Minerva in Seven Pieces: Review of Johanna Hedva's nonfiction book', 2020, Map Magazine
Case File: Threshold Johanna Hedva’s nonfiction arrives already cracked. It does not so much invite reading as demand a recalibration of how reading happens: horizontal, from bed; in pain; in a state of partial attention that is not a failure but a method. To write about this work is to enter a field of interference where argument, anecdote, spell, and scream overlap. Any review that pretends to stand outside this field, cool and intact, would betray the texts themselves. What follows, then, is not a verdict but a dossier: seven shards, each a partial approach, circling Hedva’s deployment of myth, illness, and rage. The aim is not to resolve but to inhabit the book’s insistence that form must break in order to tell the truth about brokenness. Myth as Contagion Hedva’s nonfiction treats myth not as distant ornament but as a live pathogen in the present. Greek tragedy, Korean shamanism, astrology, and internet lore are folded into accounts of chronic illness and psychiatric crisis. Myth here is neither allegory nor metaphor; it is a medium through which pain becomes legible, if never fully translatable. The gods are not characters but forces that warp time and causality: Saturn as the slow grind of disability bureaucracy, the Furies as the low-grade hum of misogynist threat. This is not a return to myth as a stable, universal language. Hedva’s myths are already contaminated—by capitalism, by whiteness, by the medical-industrial complex. The essays stage myth as something that gets into the body, that rewires perception. To read them is to feel how narrative templates—tragedy, martyrdom, cure—colonise our sense of what a life is allowed to be. Hedva does not simply critique these templates; they scramble them, misread them, let them glitch. Myth becomes a way of thinking with distortion, of accepting that clarity may be the most pernicious fantasy of all. Illness as Method Illness, in Hedva’s work, is not content but structure. The essays move in flare-ups and crashes, in digressions that feel less like stylistic flourish than like the cognitive aftershocks of pain and medication. Paragraphs stall, double back, refuse to transition smoothly. The body’s interruptions become the essay’s architecture. This is not the familiar narrative of suffering redeemed by insight. Hedva is suspicious of the demand that illness produce meaning, that pain justify itself by yielding wisdom or inspiration. Instead, the writing lingers in the non-productive, the unheroic: days lost to bed, bureaucratic loops, the humiliations of care. The text performs fatigue—sentences that trail, arguments that never quite resolve—without aestheticising it into a tidy poetics of fragility. To read this work is to be asked to tolerate a different tempo of thought, one that refuses the able-bodied fantasy of continuous, linear progress. The essay becomes a record of what thinking looks like when it must constantly negotiate with pain, with sedation, with the threat of collapse. Illness is not a subject to be mastered; it is the condition under which mastery itself disintegrates. Rage as Atmosphere If illness structures the work, rage saturates it. Not the cathartic outburst that clears the air, but a chronic, low-frequency fury that never finds a proper object. Hedva’s rage is directed everywhere and nowhere: at doctors, at institutions, at the state, at the smug optimism of wellness culture, at the demand to be coherent, grateful, cured. This rage is not simply described; it is enacted at the level of form. The essays veer from analytic precision to invective, from close reading to curse. Footnotes swell into parallel essays, as if the text itself cannot contain what it has to say. The tone shifts abruptly, refusing the critic’s usual performance of composure. Hedva allows the essay to be possessed by anger, to become erratic, excessive, even unfair. Yet this derangement is not a failure of critical distance; it is a critique of distance as such. The fantasy of the dispassionate critic is revealed as a luxury afforded by those whose bodies and lives are not constantly under threat. Hedva’s rage insists that criticism, if it is to be honest, must register the affective costs of its own insights. To understand is to be implicated, and implication is rarely calm. Broken Form, Working Theory The book performs its arguments about brokenness by refusing to present a unified self or a seamless line of thought. Instead, it offers fragments, dossiers, transcripts, spells, lists. The pieces do not add up to a whole; they orbit each other, generating a field of resonances rather than a single thesis. This is not fragmentation as chic postmodern gesture, but as a structural necessity when the subject is a life lived under conditions of chronic precarity. Hedva’s formal experiments are not merely expressive; they are theoretical. The broken essay becomes a model for thinking about how power fractures experience: how racism, ableism, and capitalism splinter time, attention, and agency. The text’s discontinuities mirror the discontinuities imposed on disabled and marginalised lives—gaps in care, ruptures in employment, sudden losses of housing or insurance. At the same time, the fragments communicate with each other in oblique ways. A myth invoked in one piece reappears, distorted, in another; an image of a hospital corridor echoes in a later description of a gallery space. The dossier format allows for a kind of lateral thinking, where meaning emerges not from linear development but from the accumulation of cross-contaminations. The book does not argue for brokenness; it demonstrates how brokenness works. Sympathetic Derangement To write criticism of Hedva’s nonfiction is to risk either sanitising its force or mimicking its style as mere pastiche. The alternative, proposed here, is a mode of reading that might be called sympathetic derangement. Sympathy, not as sentimental identification, but as a willingness to let one’s own habits of thought be disordered by the work. Derangement, not as pathology, but as a deliberate loosening of critical protocols: allowing analysis to be interrupted by affect, by confusion, by the reader’s own bodily responses. In this sense, criticism becomes less a practice of judgment than of attunement. The task is not to stabilise Hedva’s texts into clear arguments, but to stay with their oscillations: between myth and diagnosis, between theory and spell, between despair and a furious, improbable hope. To read sympathetically is to accept that one’s own reading practices are not neutral, that they are shaped by access, by health, by institutional position. Derangement, then, is an ethical stance: a refusal to let those privileges remain invisible. This does not mean abandoning rigor. On the contrary, it demands a more exacting attention to how form and content co-construct each other, to how rage and illness inflect syntax and structure. Sympathetic derangement asks the critic to risk being changed by what they read, to admit that the text might unsettle their own investments in clarity, productivity, and control. Non-Conclusion: Circling the Wound A dossier is never finished; it is only ever updated, supplemented, redacted. To write about Hedva’s nonfiction in this mode is to acknowledge that any account will be partial, provisional, haunted by what it cannot include. The seven shards here do not resolve into a stable picture of the work. They circle it, like satellites around a planet whose atmosphere is thick with myth, illness, and rage. What the book offers, finally, is not consolation but companionship in derangement. It refuses to tidy the wound into metaphor, to convert pain into a lesson. Instead, it insists that brokenness is not a deviation from the norm but the ground on which we already stand—some of us more precariously than others. In responding to it, criticism can either shore up the fantasy of intactness or allow itself to crack. This essay chooses the crack. It remains a dossier: incomplete, inconsistent, pulled between analysis and spell. In that tension lies its wager—that criticism, when it lets itself be sympathetically deranged, might come closer to the unruly realities it seeks to think with, rather than about.
Case File: Threshold Johanna Hedva’s nonfiction arrives already cracked. It does not so much invite reading as demand a recalibration of how reading happens: horizontal, from bed; in pain; in a state of partial attention that is not a failure but a method. To write about this work is to enter a field of interference where argument, anecdote, spell, and scream overlap. Any review that pretends to stand outside this field, cool and intact, would betray the texts themselves. What follows, then, is not a verdict but a dossier: seven shards, each a partial approach, circling Hedva’s deployment of myth, illness, and rage. The aim is not to resolve but to inhabit the book’s insistence that form must break in order to tell the truth about brokenness. Myth as Contagion Hedva’s nonfiction treats myth not as distant ornament but as a live pathogen in the present. Greek tragedy, Korean shamanism, astrology, and internet lore are folded into accounts of chronic illness and psychiatric crisis. Myth here is neither allegory nor metaphor; it is a medium through which pain becomes legible, if never fully translatable. The gods are not characters but forces that warp time and causality: Saturn as the slow grind of disability bureaucracy, the Furies as the low-grade hum of misogynist threat. This is not a return to myth as a stable, universal language. Hedva’s myths are already contaminated—by capitalism, by whiteness, by the medical-industrial complex. The essays stage myth as something that gets into the body, that rewires perception. To read them is to feel how narrative templates—tragedy, martyrdom, cure—colonise our sense of what a life is allowed to be. Hedva does not simply critique these templates; they scramble them, misread them, let them glitch. Myth becomes a way of thinking with distortion, of accepting that clarity may be the most pernicious fantasy of all. Illness as Method Illness, in Hedva’s work, is not content but structure. The essays move in flare-ups and crashes, in digressions that feel less like stylistic flourish than like the cognitive aftershocks of pain and medication. Paragraphs stall, double back, refuse to transition smoothly. The body’s interruptions become the essay’s architecture. This is not the familiar narrative of suffering redeemed by insight. Hedva is suspicious of the demand that illness produce meaning, that pain justify itself by yielding wisdom or inspiration. Instead, the writing lingers in the non-productive, the unheroic: days lost to bed, bureaucratic loops, the humiliations of care. The text performs fatigue—sentences that trail, arguments that never quite resolve—without aestheticising it into a tidy poetics of fragility. To read this work is to be asked to tolerate a different tempo of thought, one that refuses the able-bodied fantasy of continuous, linear progress. The essay becomes a record of what thinking looks like when it must constantly negotiate with pain, with sedation, with the threat of collapse. Illness is not a subject to be mastered; it is the condition under which mastery itself disintegrates. Rage as Atmosphere If illness structures the work, rage saturates it. Not the cathartic outburst that clears the air, but a chronic, low-frequency fury that never finds a proper object. Hedva’s rage is directed everywhere and nowhere: at doctors, at institutions, at the state, at the smug optimism of wellness culture, at the demand to be coherent, grateful, cured. This rage is not simply described; it is enacted at the level of form. The essays veer from analytic precision to invective, from close reading to curse. Footnotes swell into parallel essays, as if the text itself cannot contain what it has to say. The tone shifts abruptly, refusing the critic’s usual performance of composure. Hedva allows the essay to be possessed by anger, to become erratic, excessive, even unfair. Yet this derangement is not a failure of critical distance; it is a critique of distance as such. The fantasy of the dispassionate critic is revealed as a luxury afforded by those whose bodies and lives are not constantly under threat. Hedva’s rage insists that criticism, if it is to be honest, must register the affective costs of its own insights. To understand is to be implicated, and implication is rarely calm. Broken Form, Working Theory The book performs its arguments about brokenness by refusing to present a unified self or a seamless line of thought. Instead, it offers fragments, dossiers, transcripts, spells, lists. The pieces do not add up to a whole; they orbit each other, generating a field of resonances rather than a single thesis. This is not fragmentation as chic postmodern gesture, but as a structural necessity when the subject is a life lived under conditions of chronic precarity. Hedva’s formal experiments are not merely expressive; they are theoretical. The broken essay becomes a model for thinking about how power fractures experience: how racism, ableism, and capitalism splinter time, attention, and agency. The text’s discontinuities mirror the discontinuities imposed on disabled and marginalised lives—gaps in care, ruptures in employment, sudden losses of housing or insurance. At the same time, the fragments communicate with each other in oblique ways. A myth invoked in one piece reappears, distorted, in another; an image of a hospital corridor echoes in a later description of a gallery space. The dossier format allows for a kind of lateral thinking, where meaning emerges not from linear development but from the accumulation of cross-contaminations. The book does not argue for brokenness; it demonstrates how brokenness works. Sympathetic Derangement To write criticism of Hedva’s nonfiction is to risk either sanitising its force or mimicking its style as mere pastiche. The alternative, proposed here, is a mode of reading that might be called sympathetic derangement. Sympathy, not as sentimental identification, but as a willingness to let one’s own habits of thought be disordered by the work. Derangement, not as pathology, but as a deliberate loosening of critical protocols: allowing analysis to be interrupted by affect, by confusion, by the reader’s own bodily responses. In this sense, criticism becomes less a practice of judgment than of attunement. The task is not to stabilise Hedva’s texts into clear arguments, but to stay with their oscillations: between myth and diagnosis, between theory and spell, between despair and a furious, improbable hope. To read sympathetically is to accept that one’s own reading practices are not neutral, that they are shaped by access, by health, by institutional position. Derangement, then, is an ethical stance: a refusal to let those privileges remain invisible. This does not mean abandoning rigor. On the contrary, it demands a more exacting attention to how form and content co-construct each other, to how rage and illness inflect syntax and structure. Sympathetic derangement asks the critic to risk being changed by what they read, to admit that the text might unsettle their own investments in clarity, productivity, and control. Non-Conclusion: Circling the Wound A dossier is never finished; it is only ever updated, supplemented, redacted. To write about Hedva’s nonfiction in this mode is to acknowledge that any account will be partial, provisional, haunted by what it cannot include. The seven shards here do not resolve into a stable picture of the work. They circle it, like satellites around a planet whose atmosphere is thick with myth, illness, and rage. What the book offers, finally, is not consolation but companionship in derangement. It refuses to tidy the wound into metaphor, to convert pain into a lesson. Instead, it insists that brokenness is not a deviation from the norm but the ground on which we already stand—some of us more precariously than others. In responding to it, criticism can either shore up the fantasy of intactness or allow itself to crack. This essay chooses the crack. It remains a dossier: incomplete, inconsistent, pulled between analysis and spell. In that tension lies its wager—that criticism, when it lets itself be sympathetically deranged, might come closer to the unruly realities it seeks to think with, rather than about.
Paintings and other media4
