OBTUSE ARCHIVE

From Rimbaud's grey acropolis to a mukbang livestream in the next room, what does it mean to be entertained by the circus when you are already inside it? Lydia Grace (@rottenangelpoetess ) moves through Paris, London, Ghent, and the wreckage of her own identity: asking who the jester really is, and who is being entertained. Photography: Elizabeth Watson (@peachy_watson ) Live performances: @poorspigga @bananasplittil @david_varhegyi @operformancef @nicoletticontemporary @adultsentertained Read in full at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

WHY DON'T YOU KEEP IT TO YOURSELF? A visual essay by Diogo Gama (@diogogama__ ) arrives as a collage: messages, snapshots of nightclubs, public houses, the interior of cars. Communal spaces, but observed from within a particular solitude. Threaded through the images are transcriptions from books and personal writings, returning again and again to the textures of heightened feeling and love that has moved on. Nothing is over-explained. The mystery is the point. Explore the full visual essay at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

THE BODY AS EVIDENCE Photographer Juan Chen (@ju4nchen ) and curator and co-founder of the platform Moco Chen (@creepymoco ) begin from a tension between the body, the image, and the act of being seen. John Berger suggested that seeing is never a neutral act. The way we perceive the world is shaped by culture, power, desire, and the media through which images circulate. In contemporary visual culture, seeing is no longer simply an act of looking. It has become a mechanism through which reality is reconstructed. Spiritual alienation has never looked so familiar. When a person is continuously subjected to the gaze, aesthetic judgment, and commodification, their inner self begins to be recoded by an external image system. The viewer believes they are looking at a person. What they are actually seeing is a post-human surface; shaped collectively by media, desire, fashion, and us. A photography project about the cost of being looked at, and what survives the image. CO-CREATIVE DIRECTOR & PHOTOGRAPHER: @ju4nchen CO-CREATIVE DIRECTOR & MODEL: @creepymoco FASHION: @iris.yang329 @_nocturnekey_ @aiko_moemoe MAKEUP ARTIST: @jenniferk_make_up HAIR STYLIST: @mika__hair_stylist @mika___hair See the full photography project at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

SCARY UNDERNEATH: MIRANDA MONROE ON BEAUTY, LONGING, AND LOS ANGELES Miranda Monroe (@mirandamonroe.xo ) builds entire worlds from the inside out: hyper-saturated, theatrically staged, emotionally exposed. Families, rituals, fantasies that feel lived-in and slightly wrong. The work came from boredom, loneliness, and longing, and has never pretended otherwise. Los Angeles gives her the duality. Euphoria and emptiness on the same street corner. The glamour is real, and so is what hides beneath it. That tension is the point. A conversation on world-building as survival, the alchemy of Hollywood, and why the subject is always a little scary underneath. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

FOOD AS A MEDIUM OF SUBVERSION: IN CONVERSATION WITH BARNEY PAU Barney Pau (@barneypau ) does not cook to nourish. He cooks to argue. Working across food, writing, and art, his practice locates the meal as a site of cultural critique; where foraging, fermentation, and the act of eating become tools for questioning what we consume, and why. His entry point is queerness: the deviance of rye that refuses monoculture, the sourdough placed in a bedroom, the weed pulled from a pavement and placed on a plate. For Pau, food’s ubiquity is precisely what makes it charged. It transcends language because it predates it. And so it can carry what language, tidied into argument, tends to lose. A conversation on subversion, hunger, and what it means to feed someone an idea. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

ON THE VERGE OF DISINTEGRATION: IN CONVERSATION WITH HELENA MINGINOWICZ Based in Poznań, Helena Minginowicz (@santa___helena ) builds paintings of near-seamless surface, borrowing the compositional weight of Renaissance iconography and redirecting it toward a fist inside a plastic bag, a sheet mask, a paper towel. The hierarchy does not collapse so much as hesitate. Her practice operates at a threshold: objects designed for use and disappearance are suspended long enough to become images. Then the image, too, begins to slip. Working across canvas, paper towel, and sheet mask, Minginowicz asks what it means to confer the language of devotional painting onto materials that were never meant to last. A conversation on surface and control, fragmentation and authorship, and the symbolic weight of the disposable. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

THE MAKING OF THE FOOL: IN CONVERSATION WITH PYTKO The Fool is out now. PYTKO's (@juliapytko ) debut single arrives as the opening move of an EP built entirely around the Tarot deck, not as theme or aesthetic, but as working method. A set of coordinates followed without knowing where they would lead. The track sits somewhere between contradiction and conviction. Not innocence, but the tension of moving forward without proof. Of staying true to something when nothing around you confirms it. Stream it, and you'll understand immediately why it had to be the first card turned. The full conversation on the EP, the process, and the world being built around it is on obtusearchive.com. #obtusearchive

WHEN SPACE STARTS CONTROLLING THE BODY: REVIEW ON CARE ( ) — STUDY 00 AND STUDY 01 What happens when space is no longer a backdrop, but a method? Founded and directed by LINX (@linx.cw ), CARE (@care_______e ) operates as a spatial methodology studio, constructing perceptual frameworks rather than singular works. Through the orchestration of light, sound, material, and bodies, space becomes an active condition, one that calibrates how we sense, move, and orient ourselves within it. In Study 00 and Study 01, perception is not guided but unsettled. Repetition, pause, and transition replace narrative, allowing ambiguity to emerge not as absence, but as structure. The body, no longer stable or autonomous, becomes something continuously read, modulated, and reconfigured by its environment. Moving between discipline and openness, CARE asks: when ambiguity is sustained as a method, does it sharpen perception, or risk dissolving into atmosphere? A review on structure, attention, and the quiet force of space acting on the body. Read the full review at obtusearchive.com Text by Carolyn Chang (@carolynnotcarolineee ) #obtusearchive

FLOWERS, INTUITION, AND THE STORIES THEY CARRY: IN CONVERSATION WITH CROCO What does it mean to arrange flowers not as decoration, but as memory? For Giulia Rinaldi, also known as Croco (@croco_floral ), flower arranging begins where language ends. Working through seasonality, intuition, and material chance, she builds compositions that carry the weight of stories, borrowed from neighbours’ gardens, forgotten charity shops, and childhood bamboo groves. Her practice resists the sentimental. Flowers here are ritualistic, symbolic, and quietly dramatic. A camellia falls whole at its most perfect moment. A napkin from a forgotten wedding becomes a form inside an arrangement. A conversation on storytelling, seasonality, and the intelligence that works through the hands. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

FABLES WITHOUT ORIGIN: IN CONVERSATION WITH KARAN DHANKANI Working through collage, Karan Dhankani (@karanjdhankani ) assembles fragments that feel both ancient and immediate: animals, gestures, symbols that don’t resolve, but linger. Rather than pointing toward a single interpretation, the images remain open, shifting between instinct, memory, and construction. Drawing from literature, cinema, and myth, his practice resists clarity in favour of atmosphere, where meaning is not delivered, but suspended. Forms repeat, distort, and reappear, less as symbols to decode and more as structures that quietly organise the image from within. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

RESTING INSIDE THE EXTREME PRESENT: IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTIANE PESCHEK In an overstimulated world, what does it mean to remain present? Across installations, writing, and sensory environments, Peschek (@christiane_peschek ) constructs spaces that slow perception where breath, sound, scent, and time recalibrate attention. Moving between human and machine, authorship becomes distributed, and experience takes shape without prescription. A conversation on presence, ritual, authorship, and the architectures of inner states. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive

THE ANGEL DUST: IN CONVERSATION WITH KACIE Wings, metal, and silence. In series 'The Angel Dust', photographer Kacie (@colourless_sea ) builds a restrained visual universe where bodies become symbols and recurring objects form an evolving language. Desaturated tones strip colour away, leaving light, texture, and atmosphere to carry the narrative. A conversation on symbolism, image construction, and the blurred boundary between documentation and fabrication. Read the full conversation at obtusearchive.com #obtusearchive