Letter to Olu

31 Dec, 2025

My friend Olu reached out to me the other day, so I thought for this month's newsletter, I'd write them a letter and publish that 😊

Hi Olu!

Thanks for messaging me the other day, it's really nice to hear from you 😊 And thanks for letting me experiment with this writing-you-a-letter-that's-also-a-newsletter thing 😸

Before I start telling you about everything I've been doing, I wanted to spend some time looking around your website and seeing what you've been up to. It's been so long! I really like how your Projects page reads from the bottom up, from "dead" to "iceboxed" to "fledgling" to "current" (great emojis for these too! 😸). You'll have to tell me more about the Discord community you're building 😊

I like how you've been doing "weeknotes". I use Obsidian as my daily driver for taking notes and managing my work, so I was making daily notes for a long time. I think it was in October, I decided to switch to monthly notes because I wanted to have a better sense of continuity in my notes, and it was easier to scrub back and forth, and use it more like a big roll of paper (although still append-only, for some reason...).

I misread "alphabet superset" as "alphabet soup". It's so beautiful reading "relationships" and "sensual" before hitting "technopaganism", its like tasting the broth once all the flavours had come together and mingled a bit 😌 This metaphor of soup for the creative process is something me and some friends have identified and played with a little in 2025, which is probably why I misread it 😹

There's a Latour quote that's haunting me a bit at the moment: "Technology is society made durable."¹ And as I read your essay I'm also reminded of Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."²

So, I feel like recently my thinking and being has bent around and looped in on itself. After sitting with Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, Haraway, and Ahmed for a while, I've come to know that I have begun a journey of unlearning, and of decolonising and reindigenising myself and my relations. I have visions of sinking my hands into wet soil, and feeling the slow pulse of the mycelial network. We're planning to build a housing co-op, which I want to become a land co-op. I call myself a witch, because I feel a deep connection to land and water and life. Our bodies are the land. So the philosophical re/turn to matter and material is woven in with my senses of the "systemic sublime", and with my embodiment, and with my praxis of mutual aid.

But "technology", as an explicit thing, seems to be absent from all this. And in that there is the implicit refusal or pushing away of especially high technology. Which is definitely something I've been trying to do more recently. I try to work more on/with paper now, and spend less time on screens (unsuccessfully!). I want to take up tapestry weaving. And I've done a lot of artwork this year with stickers in public places, trying to get people to notice tiny beautiful details, like the juxtaposition of a lamppost and a birch tree, or providing different ways to connect with local trans or queer communities. And I've done experiments with "relational zines" and posters, where you add to it and then pass it on to someone else, and I described these sometimes as "analogue social media". At that point, I can feel the flattening of technology and society that Latour talks about: writing and stickers and pieces of paper with rules about how to interact with them, to me it's like Reddit without the glass and magical thinking rocks.

When I think about Empire, I think about extraction, and I think about a machine living at the outlet of a huge material flow. It's something that extended and wrapped its tentacles around people and places and materials so it could feed itself and grow, and reproduce. So the thing that concerns me about high technology is its dependence on deep, extractive flows of material. Like the cobalt, and the water, which you've written about. And so there is a question there of "how do we prefigure high technology?", which I suppose groups like Hundred Rabbits are exploring. But for me right now, it's more about "how do we break our dependence on high technology?" I noted you used the word "salvage" in "relationships", when you talk about changing things. I want to explore salvage as a methodology. I went to Charisse Louw's workshop on "zombie as methodology" as part of the BSA New Materialisms series, earlier this year, which was really interesting. I'm curious how we can achieve more of the affects of the Internet while directly reducing our use of electronics. I made a lot of notes this month trying to imagine a kind of extended answerphone system, an electronic oral archive device and network, which could be built with ESP32's --- still high tech, but using less material than a laptop or phone, and exploring ideas of collective or group computing, like Bret Victor's Dynamicland work.

But that's all a bit beside the point, since what I've actually been working on is totally different, so now I will segue into my own update 😹

PhD is the big one. It's going well but getting pretty crunchy now. I have 11 interviews completed and I need a bunch more before March, and I still have to submit ethics for my second and third studies, and the NHS might just refuse my second ethics so I won't be able to interview staff. So... it's a lot. And I have a lot of writing to do too, but I'm actually kinda excited about that. It's a bit daunting sometimes, but once I started writing, I could feel the pressure venting a little bit, which was good 😌

I published my November Update, which I felt good about, following on from my Orbit Report, which I attach for you in case you want to learn about the rest of my 32nd year ☺️

I finished taking part in the jwllrs NON/PRESENT art night school programme this month, which was amazing. I really can't begin to unpack it all here without going off the rails with this writing even more than I already have! But I learned so much and it gave me a lot more confidence in my work and my processes, and helped me to get my bearings a bit more.

I made a film! It's called "diffraction", and it's kinda diffracting Karen Barad with Anne Charlotte Robertson's filmmaking practice, and the canal near one of my girlfriends' flat. I dunno if I wanna publish it online yet, but I've included a link for you.

Me and my girlfriends are looking for a house to rent for a year or two while we get on our feet again with jobs and try to get a housing co-op set up. That's gonna be on hold a bit until February, but I want that to be the main thing I focus on over the next couple of years besides my PhD.

I've got a few things planned in January. I'm running a workshop on transformative justice, "How Do We Keep Us Safe?" at October Salon. October Salon is an artists co-operative and we have some temporary space in LIT Bar, an old bar in Preston. The rest of the programming for January is so cool and I'm also gonna co-host a workshop on arts funding and evaluation.

I'm not sure what else I've done... with my ADHD I have this duality of feeling like I've done loads, and feeling like I've done nothing. And always struggling to recall either what I've done or what I'm going to do. But it does feel like I'm in some good flows right now.

What have you got planned for 2026? ☺️

Stella ✨