collecting:dreams Festival 2026

I walked into my grandparents’ empty apartment.

 The mirrors were covered in white cloths to protect visitors from encountering the reflection of death, that still, at least up until nine days after the fact, lingered in the mirrors.

 I entered the room, walked towards my grandfather’s desk. I opened a drawer and found a photographic film that had sat there, undeveloped, for the last 20 years.

 I developed and printed it. As the image appeared on the photographic paper, pure time flew into my eyes. This devastating confrontation with time, encapsulated in the film, was the starting point for this project. 

 The owner of that desk – my grandfather – changed one letter in his surname to make it sound less Jewish, since it wasn’t safe to have a Jewish name in the Soviet Union. This is the earliest act of breaking connections with ancestors in my family that I’m aware of. On a personal level, this photographic project became an act of repairing what was destroyed; in a broader sense, it became a reflection on imperial temporality – a temporality which is created and upheld by imperial rule. It hijacks our identities, discards our pasts and destroys connections with our ancestors. It plunges us into oblivion to make uprooting, displacing, land grabbing and genocide possible.

 By reclaiming our pasts, reconnecting with our ancestors, and actively looking back, we can unlearn the imperial idea of progress and modernity, as an act of resistance against imperial rule.

 The original name of my grandfather is Zarzhevskiy.

Today is July 13th, 2026, and I refuse to write about myself in the third person. My name is Anton Vasilyev-Zarzhevskiy. I’m a composer, field recordist, analog photographer, and sound engineer working predominantly in the contemporary music and sound art scene. I search for ways of making sounds and images – music, photography, and video – that oppose the imperial logic of alienation, constant expansion, and unlimited growth. I graduated from the Moscow Technical University Bauman (Radio-Electronic Systems) and the University of the Arts Bremen (Composition).

Floodlines was named one of the best books of 2026 by New York Magazine.

In Floodlines, Saleem Haddad tells the story of an Iraqi-British family torn apart by war, exile, and the passage of time. When the lost paintings of their late father resurface, not only do old family conflicts come to light, but so does the question of how history is inscribed across generations in people, relationships, and memories. With great narrative power, Haddad weaves together art and politics, personal grief and collective history into a polyphonic family saga about belonging, loss, and the difficult longing to return.

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City in 1983 to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father. He has worked for Doctors Without Borders in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, among other places, and is considered one of the leading literary voices addressing exile, queerness, and the aftermath of war. His debut novel, Guapa, has won international awards, and Floodlines was named one of The New Yorker’s notable books of the year.

The German translation will be published by Albino Verlag in August 2026.

Is self-publishing our last printed weapon for justice? When the power decides whose voice gets heard, the answer is to route around them with pens, paper, a stapler, kollage, and your own hands.

This workshop is an invitation: to translate your thoughts into words on a page, to explore what’s actually happening in your head without waiting for permission, and to publish it yourself as a zine. Copy it, and copy it again, share it with your neighbors, friends, and comrades.

No experience needed. Just bring your openness and political consciousness. Let’s transform them into a zine, together. Workshop will be held in English.