In April, we’re standing in the small, square gallery on Vaasankatu, our thick woolen socks slipping around on the black and white tiles. The lights are bouncing brightly off the walls & the room is filling up from the glass doorway, people spilling into the room in a huddle around us. Everything smells of weed, the alcohol-free beers that Remi and Maikki picked up from the store unleashing a heady scent when they’re opened en masse. We’re holding the two microphones and singing the words on the video screen, words that we know already, that we’ve been singing every Friday through the end of winter, the slow creep of spring, one beer each and a chocolate mousse alongside, whipped up into a small crystal glass and drizzled with pomegranate syrup. We sing all the words. Five songs. The lyrics hope for a revolution and are pinned to the wall. 

Later that same month, we sing one of the songs again, the final one, in the theatre in the old mine. The stage is rough black, and the columns are tall and grey, and we have a metal ladder on stage and a screen pulled down from the rafters, whirring noisily as it comes down, like a decrepit machine, or a stair-lift hauling itself down and into view. We sing about our anger. What to do with it. We hold a pathetic paper sign each and look out to the eyes sitting there, looking back at us. Afterwards, we go to the huge hall which is freezing and there’s weird, awkward music playing. Kaisa tells us she had wanted to join in with the song when we sang. Can we make it more open next time? She returns in May, and we sing at my birthday, just one karaoke song in the language, but we get to do it together. 

In the early summer, we’re laying out pages on the computer, black then white, night then day, and at the same time you are translating all 800 lines into Damiá for a parallel edition. We print the English and the Damiá goes up online as a PDF link. Only Zavea tries to read that edition, as far as we know. They can’t get very far, yet. Nobody was able to proof-read, as no-one else is fluent, so Zavea stumbles across some mistakes as they try to back-translate, asking you questions on Telegram as they go. We make the corrections, now we’re on Edition 3, but I think that perhaps Zavea gave up somewhere in the first quarter.

In September, we’re back in the old city and I’m standing in the side stage, watching you sing. You’re singing an Alison Moyet melody, but all the words are in our language. You’re singing about a killer whale and the sea and escape. I know that. You’re wearing a long patchwork skirt, standing in a grid of ribbons, which rumple across the shining wooden floor. I have put my long skirt on too, and I wait in the shadows, able to see you, keeping myself out of view.

Back in the snow of February, we recorded all the names of the plants you’ve translated, 168 in total, and we sent these files to Joni, also living in an old house in the snow, in Joutsa. Later, Coco, asks to record some of the plant names too, and they do, sending their files back from the warmth of Brazil. Joni records his own voice, four of us in total. By November, we’re listening to the names floating across an 18-minute track in another small, white gallery, just a couple of buildings down from where we sang in April. You can’t ever hear well at an opening, and some drunk collars us, her coat pockets full of cans, not making any sense, but declaring herself funny. She seems like a witch, without her powers. They play four minutes of the track on BBC Radio late on a Friday night. We can’t hear it here in Finland, but my sister records it for me as a voice-note on WhatsApp, so we can hear the presenter mispronounce Dam-Yaa. Sorry if the kids are talking in the background, she types.

On the final days of December we are back in a different gallery in Turku, by the river. I’m in the front space, and you’re huddled up in the colder rear gallery, less radiators and no windows, with a great zip-up jumper that we found in the kirrpis. I’m holding a zine we made, 28 pages, yellow cover, and that we buried in the garden until about 10 days ago. It froze one day, and we had to wait for the thaw to peel it from the soil and bring it inside to dry. All the words in the zine are our words. I wear white cotton gloves and pretend to be a gallery attendant for each visitor, one at a time. I turn the pages carefully, and I look down at the word-lists from above, everything inverted. Lotta sends us a voice note later on Instagram, maybe a week has gone by, it’s late and we are back home and sitting on all the blankets on the couch. She tells us that the hardest thing in the film was being asked to give up words. She could do all of the physical things, but the idea of giving up the words got to her, somehow.  

In early December, your letters are peeled onto a window in Vallila. We see the photos online. They look beautiful and mysterious. We went to look at the window one month ago with Marloes, so we can imagine the street surrounding the two pictures we see. The text is a spell. It will hang there on the pane of glass until the end of January, taking us across the boundary between the years. It’s a small side street, and I wonder how many people walk that route, if anyone stops in the cold.

(dogai bor / chris gylee, dec, 2025)
