Melassa is a series of four zines, one per season, narrating the legends and paradoxical realities of the margins. The province is a specific ecosystem full of contradictions and unexpected anachronisms. In the province—as in all border lands—time functions differently than it does in the centers of civilization. Melassa lives in a dilated, thicker, and murkier time zone, performing a bygone spiritual connection to nature while desperately grasping the accelerated time of modernity and contemporaneity. In this confused mass, past and future merge in a disorienting chaos.
With an aesthetic inspired by popular almanacs, Melassa becomes an anthology of personal stories and local legends, highlighting self-colonial narratives. Every issue of Melassa focuses on a specific aspect of the life in the province, recounting them with playful skepticism.
Melassa is...
a product of the last two centuries, but it acts like it is timeless. Melassa is a place that feels like home and the most remote location at the same time. It’s an impenetrable fluid wall that keeps you warm and comfortable enough for you not to question your forced presence in it. Its thickness makes your every movement painfully slow. Immersed in it, you run like in your dreams. A different temporality reigns in Melassa: everything around you seems to have always been there, lacking any preserved origin.
Melassa takes....
place, Melassa takes time. It takes the time. It dilates it and makes it into a miniature railway where both the departure station and the arrival station can be seen at once. It becomes easy, then, to travel back and forth in the blink of an eye. You will be confused: what seems new, recent here, the fruits of “progress”, are outdated for the rest of the world. What is deemed invariable and ancient is a novelty out there. Learning lessons is futile, the railway bends on itself and takes you back to when you lacked knowledge and when you were vulnerable to the cunning words of fanatics. Melassa disjoints time. And warps it. It also takes place.