Digital contributions and full-length writings for the ghost capsule, February 2025

Ghost Stories & Other Miracles

by Jacopo Gelli

Jacopo Gelli, alias Horus (@horus_art_), is an artist dedicated to poetry, painting, and creating ambient soundscapes. In his experiments, he tries to combine different forms of artistic expression to enrich the meaning of his work.

In his series “Ghost Stories”, he conceptualised notions of nostalgia, remembrance, forgetfulness, and the erasure of the past. By relating these ideas with one another, he aims at investing “ghosts” with a rich tapestry of meanings, where time can be an erasing tidal wave or an artisan crafting memories.

Mark Fisher defined haunting is a “failed mourning”. Horus expands on this concept by questioning the definite notion of (successful) and (failed) mourning. For the artist, mourning is a cyclical practice, where revival, forgetfulness and nostalgia blur together, thus creating a ghost.

Time is an atomizer,

it grinded up your bones 

past the size of dust grains

so that you are no longer ancestors now. 

I cannot write a song in your name

you are far too gone 

beneath the surface. 

Gone and lost beyond being leftovers,

the Earth has swallowed you and now you are unknowable

forever

even the soil does not remember. 

But the earth has kept the score

an imprecise score:

scattered stones paint familiar faces

gathered up around a fire

tending to their elders,

spanning generations of the tribesman. 

You too must have known warmth

you too must have shivered in cold or terror. 

At night - every night

you too must have had nightmares. 

Amongst all the ruination 

I forage your presence. 

Now, I travel to the past tense

before history

before time became an artisan, 

when time was a goodhearted savage

and wilderness was still wise. 

What were your names? 

Who were your heroes?

Tell me about your sagas of conquests. 

Tell me about the shame of your gravest losses.

Was is a cataclysm or was it abandonment 

to force you out of your homes?

I interrogate your silence

please - do not answer

so that your nothingness may become an absence

so that your absence may host a mystery. 

I summon you with necromancy. 

Come now. 

Come out now from nowhere and hide. 

I shall do the seeking. 

Whisper to me. 

Do not speak clearly. 

I will decipher your Rosetta Stone. 

Manifest yourself without showing. 

Become Ghost. 

Now you visit me with premonitions

never ending haunting

my body a vessel for possession

hollowed echochamber for the poltergeist. 

My ectoplasm is grinding cardamom in Jeddah

is sawing off Maduro from Chavez in Venezuela

is lost in the Andes fending off a ketamine bad dream. 

I carry my ghosts as stars 

they light up my intimate night sky

and guide me through the archipelago of nostalgia. 

Remembrance does not revive.

G-d ran out of prophets far too quickly. 

Endless memory rebirthing my burial sites

endless creation of longing for moon tides of time

wrapped up in a spiral endless growing endless.

There is no end as long as ghosts roam the earth. 

Living ghosts forever. 

Part one of Ghost Stories is viewable in our zine Ghost as well as on Jacopo’s personal website

Ghost, a visual essay by Fernanda Gómez

Originally, this video was meant to "honor" the memory of a long lost lover who haunted me for several years. A dear friend of mine was going to help me musicalize the video and I had the intention of adding text in the form of subtitles throughout it. After much thought and circling around our agendas and free time, I decided to honor something else; my solitude. This year, in September, I traveled for work to New York. Most of my time I spent alone, and as cliche as it sounds, I felt quite invisible.

Casper is a Brussels-based DJ and composer born in the cold northern part of Russia, Karelia. Every Tuesday of the month she has her own show Ghost Club at kioskradio.com. This episode in particular is an ode to the club music that is no longer there.

But I loved it. For in moments when the chest tightens, as if the heart seeks to shift from its place, is that nostalgia takes shape as a childlike yearning. The belief that thoughts can travel and possibly touch another being, spark a distant tremor. At times I felt like a kite in the middle of a hurricane, and others like a storm trapped in a bottle. Sometimes I felt endlessly alone and others I felt so transparent that I might as well have been a ghost. Long dead without even realizing it. This sensation became heightened when I stood before the sun (while crossing a bridge or just pausing in between buildings) and it passed through me as though I were a sheet of paper. 

In cities like New York, the steps of passersby blend with echoes no one recognizes, and the lights cast shadows that belong to no one. Your body can't contain the fear of disappearing, but it is inhabited by the helplessness that comes with being forgotten. The kind that exists in the possibility of being erased from memories that once held existence.

I thought about that past lover and I thought about past selves, and I thought about how the most violent ghosts do not announce themselves with wails. They are born from the yearning left by what will never return. Invisible yet relentless, are the broken promises, the absences that reside in the border between what’s real and what’s dreamed. In that threshold, the imaginary becomes a constant, always on the edge of the tangible.

Ghost Club by Casper @ Kiosk Radio

Going Going Gone by Margerita Ko

Margarita Kosareva is an audiovisual artist with a fine arts degree from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In her artistic practice she concentrates on the human psyche and social codes, depicting identity crises, trans-generational trauma, diasporic life in the form of short films, video installations and animations. Her visuals often embrace humor as a leading element, to create a counterplay with the existentialism exhibited in her work.

Going Going Gone is a visual observation of these absurdities embedded in everyday life, capturing the raw emotions, conflicts, and paradoxes inherent in destructive familial relationships, while mimicking the classical narrative of the haunted house. Within the confined space of a family home, a couple of parents engage in a peculiar exercise known as the “paradox intervention”, which forces them to have scheduled fights. Meanwhile, their daughter seeks solace upstairs until she realizes that she may not be alone in the room...

The ghosts drink them up along the way

a playlist by Brechtje Polman