Term: 2023
Explore all pages categorised under the heading 2023 below.
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A recipe for cupcakes to heal your inner child
For a dozen tasty cupcakes, you will need: 2 eggs, and if those were the last ones in your fridge, I’d suggest you make an...
Marrakech in Summer
Marrakech in summer: unchanging yet fleeting. It sounds red like warmth and sings melodies like a home, built around an old town and growing around...
Solace
Throughout my practice, I explore relationships, loneliness, longing, intimacy and the human urge for physical proximity. Intimacy between people (in friendship, family relationships as well...
Tender Headed
One afternoon in late June, month two of my artist’s residency, I discover a new way into our corner of Fès el-Bali, the ancient city....
Twenty Dollars Fake American, A Foreign Drama
We’re in the back office of a Peruvian lockup, two miles from the border of Ecuador, and I’m pleading with the sergeant in his pressed...
The Trip to Manaoag
When my father was still alive, he would often call me to visit him at our old family home. He was a 75-year-old widower, a...
Embracing Life After Colonial Catastrophe
This composition blends historical events, personal reflections, and critical analysis to underscore the importance of both writing about and decolonising the discourse surrounding the Rif...
Finding a Home Salon
My abuela’s hands were the only ones I trusted with my hair. Growing up in a Dominican hair salon, I was particular about who could...
I Crave New York City
I crave not necessarily the New York City most New Yorkers love. When I am gone, I do not miss the bars, clubs, or crowds....
Bodytalk
I draw patterns with my toes against your blushing feet, I prod your deadened heel and hope you feel the heat, I meet your stodgy...
Sylvie’s Big Bush
When I was in my early 20s, a year or two before I signed my recording deal with Hollywood Records, I found that the best...
Frankly, I’m Yours: Or, Hot Dogs, an International Review
I trudge behind my husband through Rio de Janeiro’s eerily quiet downtown. Leblon, Ipanema, and Copacabana, where we’ve spent the week, has been heaving with...
Idle Pleasures of Zoning Out
Remember James Thurber’s Walter Mitty? That timorous, awkward geezer who slips into a fantasyland, courts danger, and performs a series of heroic feats, while actually...
Down the Road
Welcome to Manchester! You! Yes, you! Alright? We’re starting in town and then heading south. The city centre has always been “town” to us. Here...
Sitka Abecedarian
This lyric essay and prose abecedarian invites you to navigate the tensions between a writer’s impulse to know and to name a place and its...
Cradle Dreaming
There wasn’t much sunlight filtering in but the place still felt like the inside of a cathedral—not only the soaring ceilings and brilliant colours like...
Meeting the Mistress
“Who is she?” I ask in a hesitant whisper, simultaneously dreading the answer and needing to know. Our bedroom is dark, though it’s only 7PM. The...
Watershed
A few years ago, during the Trump administration, I took a job as the doctor at a country music festival. It wasn’t the cast of...
Unlearning the Dead
I tossed in bed, my physical discomfort compounded by the humid heat. My skin was covered in swollen mosquito bites like an unusual form of...
The Surface of a Storm
It is ten days until the Performance Arcade in Wellington, the capital of Aotearoa New Zealand, a hilly, seismic city, wet and grungy and graffiti...
Gezuar
“Gezuar!” my newfound companion says, as he raises his glass toward me, “Cheers!” We clink our tumblers in unison to celebrate the day. Not many...
Footwork
At the end of the Mass, Francis greeted each refugee, one by one, posing for selfies and accepting notes as he moved down the rows...
Contemporary Film Directors: Kore-eda Hirokazu
This book provides an intervention in the English-language criticism on one of the most acclaimed international auteurs working today, Kore-eda Hirokazu (b. 1962). During his...
The Automata Chronicles: The Age of Ghostwriters
MacDonaldStrand’s latest project – a self-published photobook ‘The Automata Chronicles: The Age of Ghostwriters’ – is a contemporary AI-generated fable telling the rise of artificially...
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine
Leaving the polychromatic Southbank and entering through the doors of the Hayward Gallery I was gently propelled into Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine. This retrospective exhibition...
Morocco: An Expression of Enchantment
While delving into my archives recently for a series of photomontages entitled A Sense of Place, I discovered a great many pictures I’d taken in...
who's to say my body is not all the world
is there a wetland inside me – an ecosystem all its own, so many species of chlorophyll-filled flora and doe-like fauna living symbiotically within some...
Sleep/Keep
I love that moment between space & time — we float in our own cocoon.
Red Desert (წითელი უდაბნო)
The gift of wings – is it a blessing, or a punishment to become the butt of slaves? Saint-Exupéry will tell me and so will...
Petaluma River
Muzzy overcast day haze on the hills like a hangover fresh green meadows burn tired eyes ahead a string of barges.
Panagrolaimus kolymaenis
For forty-thousand years and more this roundworm had to stay as celibate as monks of yore or nuns of yesterday.
On The Padlock Bridge
My hair is grey but at 5;30pm, it becomes gold. This is city where I watch the parting sun give the lizards the golden colour...
Gustavus Flats
Tide has gone out leaving the Salmon River but a muddy trough. Where river mud meets beach sand at Icy Strait the ground is white...
Gares Poétiques/Estaciones Poéticas/Poetic Stations
Farther down the platform a woman stands shrouded within a black burqua, a thin gold watch shimmering on her wrist.
Estrangement
April 30, 2020, Kilauea erupts. The earth revolts. Naturally, we shudder at the gurney, the frothy volcano and the ice cream truck that stores black...
Deadnettle
Purple towers sprout from the ground. You kept calling them thistle, ushered the boys outside to release some of the stress. Last year, we cleaned...
Breaches
Whenever I see sunlight freckling off the Pacific, I look for waterboys breaching the waves. You may have seen them, skinny, pale, and shy, off the coast on sunny...
Anthony
It is in a place of light and sun that we sit, in a garden of blue skies and pastel flowers. The garden is splashed...
Agape
“Because the whole world before you is like a speck that tips the scales, and like a drop of morning dew that falls on the...
The Souvenir
The rain pelted the window of our Frankfurt hotel room. Late January, dark before dinner. My son, wobbling more than walking at 15 months, discovered...
6 a.m. in California
My husband comes in soaking wet and shivering. I drop the spatula, and shut off the stove, let breakfast burn if it wants to. “What...
Love in an RV
My husband understands an RV will allow us the getaways he needs without sacrificing my presence, a person who wants to be with him but...
Cheating Myself
Italy was supposed to solve everything. When it didn’t, we visited Alaska. Nothing worked, not the best food in the world nor the fear of...
The Flood
It was just another Friday evening. The sky clear, the street bustling with people. I walked into a new pizzeria and ordered my usual: a...
Water Hyacinth
Amir stops saying hello in a while. The last time we spoke, he was complaining. The little shack where he lives has a leaky roof;...
The Ride of a Lifetime
I do not remember getting on the train. Its constant vibration and occasional bumps are as normal to me as anything can be. Truthfully, I...
The Perfect Guide
To escape depression and Christmas jollity at home, a middle-aged English secretary called Agatha books a package holiday in Agadir, Morocco, because of its name....
Steven in Love
He began typing. Sloppily at first, the words advancing in broad choppy strokes across the blank page. Relax. Just let it happen. And Steven allowed...
Savage Noble
This coroneted town is like a queen, who, being always with child, has desires of irresistible fury […] She cleaves the world, illuminates it through...
Escape from the Taliban
I was woken by a desperate hammering on the door of our hotel room. I checked my watch. It was a little after ten, the...
Doll's Eye
Wet dawn. The wind moaned. White lightning hooked itself violently into the land. Overnight, the sky had cracked open entirely, rain spilling like grey ink...
Black Ghosts
The three of us were gathered around a counter, eyeing pornographic imagery. A Chinese vendor, a veiled-up Muslim lady from Niger, and me. We were...
From the Edge
‘Die with your boots on, if you’re gonna die.’ Eddie, an old friend of mine, taught me that. He was an ex-marine with three tours...
An Iteration of Reckoning
In this interview, Alton asked Lavinia about The Best Women’s Travel Writing anthology, the nebulous speculated futures of travel literature – in particular, travel writing...
My Brother's War
My Brother’s War tells the story of a soldier, Gary Hines, and his younger sister’s search to understand the circumstances surrounding his life with Post...
Issue 10: Intimacy
Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s 10th edition. This issue focuses on INTIMACY in all its forms from a closeness and...
Dōzo go-buji de (Have a Safe Trip)
On a rainy night at a hot spring in in Shizuoka, I look out through a yukimi-shoji. This shoji is a paper sliding screen door...
THE EAST: A Couple of Clactons
On the train to Essex, I realise I know little about Essex. And that little is scrappy and second-hand. Growing up in the 1990s, I...
Maps of the Mind
My studio in Osaka is in an area which has been undergoing rapid transformation. Invitations to local events or exhibitions often take the form of postcards...
A Review of Praisesong for the Widow
For Avey Johnson, the protagonist in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, typical travel advisories are ill-equipped to outline the anguish and awakening she encounters...
The Long Journey
I was accustomed to the intense heat, but that morning it seemed to me unbearable. Perhaps because I was looking forward to completing my goal....
Elsewhere: A Reminder to Write Down Our Stories
I know I’m about to read a good travel story when it starts out with the unearthing of old, dusty journals. I know this because...
Six Saturdays of Beyblade
It was raining hard that night and the howls of stray dogs echoed across the village. What I remember from those scenes come as passing...
Searching for Bánh Mì in East Berlin
We said that we went to Dong Xuan in Berlin in search of bánh mì. But, what we were really curious about were the market...
In Guatemala
In Guatemala cannas grew wild, sloping up the twisted path to the hilltop where men slit roosters on altars. One flapped headless in a man’s...
Subtle Entanglements
October — Willapa Bay, WA: The morning I arrived at a monthlong artist residency, I read from Patricia Highsmith’s journal: What to say about Yaddo?...
Decolonising the Border
It’s hard to imagine a more evocative (or more urgent) travel theme than BORDERS. The pieces featured in this issue of Decolonising Travel all engage...
The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity
We estimate there to be some 8.7 million species globally. For plants, we believe around 2 in 5 species are at risk of extinction –...
Painting on Printed Matter
Russell has long painted on printed matter. Here follows a selection of works—made between 2002 and 2023—that use postcards, maps, and various flight and travel...
The Boundary
I am teaching Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Boundary” to a class of undergraduate engineering students. For many of them, English is a language they are made...
Three Steps Away
You cannot recline on that bench. A gently arching backrest would have been nice but the bench is attached to a wall. Its legs, made...
The Neapolitan Atavism
28 February 2028. In a world parallel to ours, and not much unlike it, the Centro Direzionale di Napoli is abandoned. Everyone has relocated to...
The Littoral Truth: The Granite Kingdom and Coast of Teeth
Where we live helps to frame our identity – it is not the only factor, but it is a significant influence on our language, our...
Design for Migration
Design for Migration is a platform that highlights design projects that deal with migrant issues. Here we speak with the organiser — Matteo Moretti.
A Heart of Summer
I once lived in a three-bedroom unit in an elegant condominium in Simei, in Singapore. My two flatmates were fellow Filipinos: Antonio was an engineer,...
Things that went with the water
In these images I focus on climate change, displacement, identity, women, and culture through a series of portraits made with a shallow depth of field...
Creating space for histories
Amsterdam’s Museum Van Loon, a mansion built in 1672 and previously inhabited by descendants of one of the Dutch East India Tea Company founders, was...
Mr Tashi
In June 2015, Thida Nathalie visited Ladakh, ’The Land of High Passes,’ in northern India. The first interview with Mr Tashi was accidental, spurred by...
Tribe
Longwa sits on the ridge of an east Indian hill bordering Myanmar. The path is trailed with potholes and unreliable rides. Without strong conviction, constitution...
The Box with the Sunflower Clasp
To my great sadness, I have no memory at all of my mother’s voice. By the time I was three months old, Ilse had taken...
Book Review: Ingrid Rojas Contreras's The Man Who Could Move Clouds
The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir (Doubleday 2022) by Ingrid Rojas Contreras charts new territory in its genre by allowing for profound uncertainties...
Prague Spring
“Only those who struggle for their freedom are worthy of it….”-Plaque in Bratislava commemorating the Velvet Revolution. How can the patterns go on and on?...
Great Grandmother
My Great-grandmother was the first woman in Nebraska to file for divorce—it wasn’t granted. No one will ever believe her. The wood stove hummed with...
Airspace in Wartime
Amid clouds claimed by no king, my boy sketches the sky. Below, Sweden slouches southward. To the east, artillery barks at the wind. In national...
Boundaries
The soldiers dig new boundaries around us. We crouch in our basement, clutching at candles. Our whispered prayers make the flames dance. In morning rubble,...
In Praise of Birds
I wrote a poem once, aged sixteen, all about a bird. Red kite screeching, dancing in the air. I see her again now, distant cousin,...
Letter to East Lothian
You’ve put the hills to my back. A changing skyline of colour, Purpling in summer when the heather blooms. And winding roads to nowhere. The...
Cyborgs on the Seme Border
Their ribs stood out, with prongs of bird-like feet and insular palms. We made ourselves a glass of violin so we could see what the...
Crossing the Hinterlands
Memories come to mind like excavated statues. But this in particular is peculiar to the smallest fibre, grain of sand, drop of water & landscape...
That There is Life after this Body/Border
there is __a__ black sky hovering over my polity [another] [our] & that is why i burn our hearts and count [we] [mop] our brother’s...
Primal Sound
Is metaphor for silence beyond our recollection. We are unable to translate boundaries – the pale land of distant stars we arrived from. Our bodies...
Years after Rilke's Death
What served for a young woman’s days? A life in silence? This house was built with its own vow, a wife in silence. His quiet—a...
The Man, the Kid, and the Holy Ghost
The train whistle blew. A body plopped onto the bench across from Bart just as the train lurched forward. The grizzled man cracked open his...
The Confluence
“Potverdomme!” Marty pounded his fist on the antique table, knocking books to the floor. Used to the interjection, I murmured, “What happened this time?” I...
The Bookshop (Once in Pisa)
When I read the anonymous email I knew immediately that it was you. The urgency in your voice sounded loud in my ears like Sunday...
Forgetting as an Act of Remembering
I do not have the luxury of forgetting who I am because I was not given the privilege of knowing who I was to be...
World on Fire
Looking back at this Comix now, almost a year and four months after the invasion first started, two things come to mind. First, humans are...
Night Farmers
The grand old train station, Hua Lamphong, in central Bangkok, has no cafe per se. Instead there is a food court. The food court offers...
What Did You Expect
You check out at midnight, from a palm-shaped lobby necklaced by lights. The air has a tang of diesel and sweat. You walk toward the...
Breaching the Invisible Border
The playground is a frenetic menagerie. Small, high-pitched voices pierce the air like the static of a TV channel that has signed off. Running feet...
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