August 2025

In those early moments

There’s a strangeness to the first few days after landing in another country, even one that you are familiar with and that you consider home. It’s perhaps best described as a form of defamilarization, of the type Russian Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky write about. In everyday life, through habituation, what we see and our interpretation of it are run together, so that we instantly and unknowingly no longer see