⌂ Home / Last Night / What If?
Last Night / What If?
Curator and writer Jonni Korhonen’s two-part artwork contains stories, poems and a comic about the digital and the present, about distance, queerness, being trans & nonbinary, and above everything else about finding comfort in the time of corona.
Text: Jonni Korhonen
Artwork: Jonni Korhonen
April 10, 2021
Part I: Last Night
Last night
time became a position, a stretch of hands below a ceiling sky
wind machines and dusk atop the outside-less contours of a mind
in revolution
distance fills with sentiment, from movement denouncing movement
heavy from all this time being held on to
and last night,
with that time, imagine this outline becoming spent
becoming a surface, a texture of paint laying on top of itself
decomposeur
or re-composer, heartbeats hammering the dais for playing
this solitary performance of you
and last night
a dream took to the stage,
and catwalked every corner
and halted every passerby to say
“you call this the end,”
“when there is no ending this?”
yada
What is coming to know but sensuality,
the self showing off to itself
themselves?
and last night
the closing tunes of a dream
turned into the notes of something
beginning again
and you turned to you, but a you that you kept turning to like a lover
in revolution
scenes becoming scenes becoming scenes
where the actor steps on to the stage wearing but themselves, burning
with glory
bows unguarded
and stays
Part II: What If?
What if this was a story about time becoming so much?
What if time didn’t stop but kept on going?
What if this ’so much’ was like shallow water to stand in, shallow enough to see the time bending up against your body?
What if your body didn’t stop but kept on going?
What if you kept on going?
What if the show kept going on?
What if the world kept going on on a screen?
What if you kept playing your loves and likes from the distance?
What if distance was a release from two-dimensionality?
What if the world became high-definition and glowed in the dark?
What if your body glowed in the dark?
What if this were a story about you?
What if this was a story about the story about you?
What if with distance you became the performer and the performed for?
What if the show was good, so fresh, seeing your body bending to its own shape?
What if your body became a home?
What if your body became who it is?
What if?
What if, what if, what if, what if?
It’s all about the ‘what ifs’ right now, isn’t it?
Jonni Korhonen (they/them) is a queer, Helsinki-based curator and writer. They are interested in how stories form, stories about the body and the histories it carries within. Often this means following dream-logic.
Read More
Neicia Marsh’s essay about the Black experience online.
Leonardo Custódio, PhD reflects in his essay on whiteness, Black masculinity and his own racism against Black women.
Veganism has exploited people of color and continues to do so,
but we should still all be vegans.