Sofie Hecht

So exciting to see this work in print! Enormous gratitude to @bearguerra and the @highcountrynews team for such a fun and thoughtful collaboration. Please go get yourself a copy of the full May issue or better yet subscribe for a year, it’s so worth it. This issue also features a beautiful cover image and photo story by @ninareeg Good journalism does exist yall! This story is only one example of the toxic legacies of nuclear colonialism all across the world. As nuclear production ramps up in the southwest, it’s an especially good time to get involved with local campaigns like @haul_no and @nofalsesolutions Keep the pressure upppp 🙏🏻💪🏼✨💓

✨✨✨happy hannukah from gorgeous stunning sunkissed tt ✨✨✨

Lil again and forever my muse ✨ look how happi !

This past weekend, I got to spend time in Tularosa with Doris, Nora, and many others who have lost family members to cancer that they attribute to radiation exposure from Trinity. I’m so grateful to be welcomed into this community to work through the intensity of this communal loss and find new ways of storytelling with this grief (and maybe somehow in this process be useful to them??). During the workshop, we listened to our family photos and made work responding to the messages we heard from each photo. I’m mostly at a loss for words for how this made me feel, but so grateful to have been able to witness these outpourings of love and emotion into art. Thanks to every1 who made this possible, (especially doris xoxo) and those working within genres of speculation and creativity who always ask me to expand, breathe into the discomfort, trust my imagination, and lean into RELATIONSHIPS above all else… thanks to this group of wonderful ppl who trusted me to hold this space as they opened up with such vulnerability…. More photos 2 come ….

a backyard nico under the rain! 🍃✨ ((hbd sweeet friend))

🌲under the trees at @bluemountaincenter 🌿

This year marks the 46th anniversary of the Church Rock uranium mill spill. The Church Rock mine on the Navajo Nation was once the largest underground uranium mine in the US. On July 16, 1979, the dam containing waste from the mining process burst, releasing more than 1100 tons of uranium waste and 94 million gallons of acidic, radioactive water into the Rio Puerco. Residents of the Red Water Pond Road community have organized for decades to push the government to clean up the contaminated area, including the large piles of waste sitting in the center of their community that leak contaminants into the groundwater. In the meantime, many residents are unable to drink their water, have been forced to relocate for the safety of their families, and report high levels of cancer from the contamination. Each year, Red Water Pond Road commemorates the event, asking outside communities to pay attention and increase pressure for government accountability to the damage from the mines on their communities and land. For more info: /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/16-RWPCA-factsheet.pdf and @antiuraniummappingproject

((a v belated post with images from the April 2023 Trinity site open house at the White Sands Missile Range)) As we are one month away from the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test in Southern New Mexico, I thought I would share images from the site. The spectacle of this open house event has always stuck with me. It’s a festival that promotes “safety” through nuclear deterrence, scientific “accomplishments” through the glorification of Trinity bomb technology, and “truth-telling” through a rewriting of historical legacies in this area that claim nobody lived nearby. Nostalgically rewriting imperial desire as “progress,” this event is so classically American. They sell shirts with pictures of the bomb, everyone is taking selfies, people travel from across the world for the event, and armed federal guards patrol the area. It’s fascinatinggggggg

Some updates ✨✨— I am part of the show Nuclear Legacy at @centersantafe until July 11 (grateful to be sharing space with @willraywilsonstudio and others !), have a few prints up at UNM Zimmerman Library til July 30 (also go check out @antiuraniummappingproject accompanying exhibit and her call for speculative writing about an anti-nuclear future!!!), just finished up my third semester at UNM’s Master’s in Comm, made many draft book mock-ups of this project, and am heading out to Blue Mountain Center for a residency for the next month. … “Now is the time to dream as big as our problems are” - @tourmaliiine on @lasculturistas 🦋🌊 … While this project is not explicitly about dreams, it began within dreams and is enriched, propelled, and encircled by them. It began in collaboration with the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in their advocacy for inclusion in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, and continues in the visions for an anti-nuclear, sustainable future for all. I am excited, challenged, hesitant, but mostly grateful when these images move outward from my own bubble, when they morph beyond what I originally imagined, when they interact with others. This storytelling work began in conversations with the Downwinders, as mind maps and mood boards, as notes in approximately 5 different notebooks, within many puzzling debates around the labs and nuclear energy in the Southwest…It began in the car on long drives blasting The Chicks on full volume to stay awake, within classrooms at UNM and ICP, and through close relationships. I see this work as situated within a legacy of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial imaginings for different futures, especially one free of the harmful effects of nuclear contamination. ((cont’d in comments)) ✨✨✨

love szn!! 💞 old town lovers 💞 @eileeninbetween @alana___bee

outtakes and photos for @guardian of the lovely @l.nuzzles Thanks for braving the cold (world) for these pics💞 check out article online: ‘My scars aren’t a finish line’: three trans and non-binary people on how top surgery changed their lives

ANOTHER thing that leaves me speechless almost every day is this love + community even when things are VeRy veRY NOT good !!! Thank u for teaching me unconditional love and boundless compassion. Ur all gorgeous, stunning, adventurous, sexy, kind, intelligent, keep my delulu brain validated (and in check duh) and more words that I will express with a squeal of gratitude and a hug next time I see you 💐💞✨👠 xoxoXoxO and obvi thx to everyone u know who u are even if u aren’t pictured these are just my most recent pics ok!!!!!🌛🌛 . . . [[alt: sometimes a post is just an archive of a moment. a bookmark so I can remember having felt this way. I play tag with time. a photo, feeling, memory, place, smell, different with each remembering. gotcha! ]]