When I arrived at the library, I needed to disconnect. I was in desperate need of time and calm. I was coming out of a period of intense and frantic work.
But I was writing. I was writing a text about glaciers and algae, about the opacity of bodies and invisibility. About abandonment as a practice of care.
But I was tired. I was very tired, and my head was full. I thought even that place was too much for me. I thought I wouldn’t be able to put words together anywhere, such was the confusion and the sheer volume of things in my mind.
I spent the first days wandering through the corridors, between shelves stacked to the ceiling with books. But I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t even read the titles. I was searching—searching for bibliographic clues and references for my text. But I couldn’t find anything. I was blind to everything around me.
Until I let it all go.
Even though it was the middle of summer, it rained for several days in a row, and I didn’t go outside for more than three consecutive days. I hated the weather. But the weather gave me the time I needed. It gave me a boundary. And I found the emptiness again.
The emptiness of the rooms I inhabited flooded me. The silence surrounding me seeped into me. The stillness of the landscape allowed the tension—this tension that kept me from staying still in the same place or position for more than a few minutes—to melt away.
And I stopped searching.
Stopped thinking that I had to search, that I had to write.
And I started to breathe.
And to write.
And to encounter books.
Not the ones I had in mind.
Not the ones I was looking for.
No references I could actually use to write the text, even though there were many interesting books on similar topics.
But books that showed me the gaze with which I needed to look at the work I was doing. From what position to observe it. And how much lightness to bring into it.
I began to see again, to look around.
The small shifts in the landscape—a fawn, a hawk, the changing green of the meadow—taught me the importance of paying attention, in stillness, to small things in my work. The changing sky taught me to pause, and to give value to the nuances of my making.
*****
On Invisibility is a text that originates from a reflection on the slow and progressive disappearance of glaciers which, melting day after day, year after year, create a void in the landscape—a void that is mirrored in the collective identity of the communities inhabiting the same territory. It begins by attempting to think, together with Astrida Neimanis, of glaciers as bodies of water—vast aquatic bodies that, as part of a system of planetary connections and interconnections, interact with, contaminate, and are shaped by the living and non-living beings they come into contact with.
Starting from the observation of the spaces left behind by the retreat of glaciers and the consequences this movement has on the countless relationships of which the glacier is a part, the gaze progressively shifts toward much smaller bodies of water, whose emergence results from the same series of factors that are leading to the disappearance of the ice giants.
Following the narrative that describes a progressive re-greening of the Alps and mountain areas in general, the text attempts to question what it truly means to “become forest,” and what ethical implications this perspective on the landscape entails. It asks what it means—both practically and ethically—to move from perceiving a landscape as a barren, unusable desert to seeing it as something that can be exploited.
The second half of the text focuses on algae from the Hydrurus foetidus family, recently discovered and now subject of growing scientific interest and study.
Starting from the right to opacity theorized by Édouard Glissant as a fundamental precondition for entering into relation with the Other, and passing through the history of marginalized communities that have made invisibility a practice of resistance, the text attempts to theorize a right to invisibility for non-human beings— one that protects them from extractivist and capitalizing gazes.
Through the act of abandonment as a practice of com-pensation and respons-ability, the text seeks to imagine, alongside a group of transfeminist scholars, a positioning that emphasizes the with in relationships —a being-with the world in order to be in the world.
August 2025
Text + Fotos: Caterina Giansiracusa