About ten years ago I awoke from the dream of mainstream culture and started down the path upon which I continue to walk. During this transformation I was lucky enough to have a paid internship at a community farm where I learned so much about growing food and be part of a community.
I also met a very interesting character, the manager of the community farm, name John. One day he confided in me a very interesting discovery. He had found a box of cassette tapes from an alternative past. **The tapes consisted of news reports from an alternative past, a past that no one else remembered.
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The idea intrigued me. *Could there really be alternative versions of history? *And from this intrigue was born a series of zines that I titled "History Changed"
Today I would like to share a couple of collage-poems from one of the early zines that I cobbled together while I was living & woofing in Mexico in a coastal community in Oaxaca. I am proud of how this short clip turned out (though sad I cannot share it via 3speak, I wonder when that will be back online?). So, here it is thanks to YouTube shorts:
These poems are strange looks into the jumble up thoughts of someone coming to terms with this world and also searching for a new reality. I collected, then collaged together, found words and phrases from books and newspapers. Sometimes I pieced together words from single letters clipped here and there. The combination of all these influences, along with the new life I was embarking on as a traveler, collated into an artistic mess that I look back on fondly.
Somehow I was able to express exactly what I needed to in that moment, to make sense of the deeply confusing world of being a 20-something girl, living outside her home country for the first time, traversing my first big heart break, and the immense task of deprogramming everything I had learned. History Changed was, in a way, more a metaphor for my own personal journey than revelations about the reality of our past.
Or, is it?