DUV [Dúw] 

Work in progress 

Vienna 2025 

This work engages in speculative storytelling, weaving ghost stories from the threads of my Roma heritage. I tell them deliberately in a genderless form, in defiance of the norms that shaped my childhood. This dreamy speculation becomes an urgent call to unmake and transform the construc­ted narratives that have always felt foreign to me. I realised, we have no queer ghosts or fairy tale beings in our culture, so it seems very urgent to me to integrate new fictional narratives and bring these beings to life. Perhaps they already exist within the margins of our collective imagination – unseen, unacknowledged, yet waiting to be encountered. We endlessly revisit our history, digging through our archives, and we retell them tirelessly – so that those who have not yet spoken may awaken and share theirs with us.

Poppy symbolizes my childhood memory in a field full of blood-red flowers. As a child, I heard many ghost stories. They say that if I run into the fields, the poppies could become a threat to me. They warned me: If you smear your eyes with them, you go blind forever, and I believed it. I ask myself whether this act, blinding my eyes, was a way of fading out fear. Today I know. The wind that carried me away from my grief became a force that I wanted to reshape into a new speculative fic­tion – an element working against that fear. I picked up the flowers and threw them into the air. They shimmered above me, tasting of bitterness, and I knew: Duv was here with me.

Duv is a ghost that sleeps and dreams in the spine of our neck. When we yawn or sneeze, our heads tilt back toward the sky. Duv wakes up. This moment – this small, suspended breath – is the exact place where Duv resides. We have carried Duv for generations in our memory: light as absence, invisible, but always there. Duv appears when we grieve, in those involuntary, reflexive movements we cannot control – a sneeze, a shiver, a tremble that slips through us before we can catch it. And if, in that instant, we do not close our eyes, but we look up to the sky, that’s when we see Duv. In this very moment I whisper:

“Poppy flowers bleed, their stitches dripping red, embroidered deep within the body, wounds softened by the breeze. Folded, fragmented, organs woven from salty tears. This is Duv – a ghost story, hazy wind in the shallow breaths.”

Duv 1 - 6, 102x72cm, drawing, colored pencils, poppies, red stiches, on paper, Vienna 2025

Duv 7 - 14, 41x29cm, drawing, fineliner 0,2mm and colored pencils, poppies, red stiches, on paper, Vienna 2025