Tomatoes

By Vasilii Kolobkov

Vasilii reached out to me, as a response to the call for entries. When he did so, he had a rough idea what he would like to write about.

Hi Adrian! I’ve seen your call for works for the Fallow zine and am curious if an essay I had been hatching for some time would be a good fit. I’ve been using the web in utmost sparring manner for a good while (bare-bones HTML, no CSS, JS, et al.) and am pondering on the results this practice has on emotional state, changes to how I perceive information, influence ops and marketing.

I like the approach a lot and we started to send each other mails, back and forth. At first we were talking about his contribution, but we let go of that rather sooner then later. Instead, we focus on, well, everyting else.

Amongst the many threads woven into our mails we’ve sent every few weeks was the Curonian Spit ¹. I’ve been there in 2018, and Vasilii just recently. He sent me the following photo of tomato plants, which bust out of the windows of an upper story.

I found this photo equaly fitting and beautiful for this zine’s focus. What’s there not to love about weathered technologies, in this case homesteading and shelter, clashing and weaving into each other.

CC0 by Vasilii Kolobkov