Where’s Waldo
written by: Leticia Knoop
Suddenly surrounded by 250,000 cigarette butts and the flighty laughter of 20 independent artists, I remind myself this was supposed to be my little slice of heaven. The pickle at the bottom of a shit sandwich.
My sister stopped talking to me approximately 96 days, 22 hours, and 45 minutes ago. She said I was an empty body with a brain in overdrive. I’ve dissected every organ I hold to find truth, but stopped before I could prove her wrong.
My empty body is connected to an empty mouth, which fails at the looming question, “And what do you do? Are you also an artist exhibiting at the Biennale?”
Drop-dead-squeamish-pinky-toes-Bambi-in-headlights- GIRL vs. Lisbon-based-conceptual-mapper-of-sand-lines- MAN
It’s like being picked last on the kickball team- they don’t trust you to be able to run.
“Oh, haha, no, no, just helping out, just trying to learn more.”
I feel my one solace, my curating mentor, look over with a kind-eyed forbearance at the exact moment the artist brave enough to ask the only person under 35 if they were significant enough to be there, slowly let his eyes glaze over and shift anywhere else. With a chagrined smile, I watch as he finds a polite way to excuse himself, and I contemplate finding a corner to quietly go fuck myself.
My mentor brushes past, holding my shoulder for a moment. I am here. Yesterday was the last day of winter, and I stayed inside. I feel the smell change, and I know the snow is gone for good, the soft chatter proliferates, and I stow myself to the sidelines. There with a glass of wine that I filled in the bathroom stall with the bottle I am hiding in my bag, I realize there are languages that you can’t really learn externally, like a machine getting an update, you must try to string together words so many times until something holds.
Marlena wouldn’t get this space; she would think it’s pretentious. She finds me pretentious, and she’s on the nose there. I’m hardened because my corporeality begs for it. She finds this weak, but sometimes you have to do weak things to survive. She once asked me, “Don’t you feel things? I don’t need a sister that badly, so if you don’t feel things, tell me so we can make this easier.”
On the 100th day of the Cold War I will call and tell her that I can feel things, and it was the most beautiful experience of my life and that I wish she could have seen me, and that I was so happy, and that I finally felt seen, and that I think the art world could really be for me, and people here really think and are articulate and how are you actually? And how is it to live with mom and dad? And is it all right that I called? And do you miss me? And are you still my sister somewhere in there? And am I still something if I’m only a brain and not a body that feels? And would you hug me next time we are in front of each other again, not like last time? And do you feel things?
She won’t pick up.
- Where’s Waldo - July 19, 2026
