april 20

november 24

2024

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Asset 1

croatian pavilion at the 60TH

international art exhibition

la biennale di venezia

vlatka horvat

by the means at hand

After the Reveille

Season Butler

Latvia, will you have me?

Poland, Finland, I’m like you,

                will you have me?

My eyes are small like yours,

                will you have me?

I’m all fight and no muscle

I’m mouth and no language

All work and all horizon

I have to rest I’m

tired please

               

As though I’ve lived for generations with my eyes closed,

I know there are others like me who lived like this.

When the world lurches, we’ll find each other and cling,

A tribe and then a nation,

One of those nations made eclectic by constant trampling,

A down, brown ethnicity

                of tender skin and small eyes

Small eyes and erratic etiquette,

Cities of only pageantry and slums,

Sacrosanct sabbaticals and razorsharp deadlines

or nothing would ever get done.

Season Butler is a writer, artist, and dramaturg. She thinks a lot about youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK; Tate Exchange in London; the Latvian National Museum in Riga; and Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn, the Netherlands. Her debut novel Cygnet (Harper, 2019) won the 2020 Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel. She lives in Berlin and is currently developing a new piece of fiction with the support of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme (2022-2023).