Rosalía's Telepresence

When Rosalía announced “Berghain” on Instagram, she cryptically hinted that “this is what my intrusive thoughts sound like.” With this first single from her forthcoming album Lux being named after a certain club in our hometown, one might have expected blistering beats or a continuation of her last album—anything except an orchestra. But then, Rosalía has always defied expectations and played with perspective. As in this shoot by Petra Collins, which was accompanied by excerpts from Heather McCalden’s The Observable Universe, in our Summer 2024 issue.

Get one of the final copies here and the poster here.

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Rosalia Vila Tobella is known to the world only as Rosalía. The Spanish world star has created a new genre- bending sound that draws on reggaeton, flamenco, rap, and experimental pop and has launched the artist to the highest echelons of the charts. Born and raised on the outskirts of Barcelona, Rosalía has won 12 Latin Grammy Awards and is the first Spanish-singing act in history to be nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys in 2019. Yet the artist’s persona mostly remains a mirage, since she rarely appears in the public press. Petra Collins’ shoot with Rosalía, too, is possessed by a mysterious light in an office from the past. Paired with two short vignettes from Heather McCalden’s new memoir The Observable Universe, which cir- cles around the internet, death, and loss, Rosalía is further transported into the unknowable. McCalden’s (and Collins’) enigmatic reflections and anecdotes are nostalgic for a time that never was.

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JAPANESE PHOTO BOOTH

I heard a story on National Public Radio about a telephone booth in tsuchi, Japan. A man in his seventies built it, painted it white, and placed it on a hill in his garden where it overlooked the sea. The interior of the booth held a black rotary phone, a pad of paper, and a pen.

The man, who had been a gardener, began building the booth after his cousin passed away in 2010. The two had been close, and there were many things left unsaid. In interviews the man explains the idea for the project came to him because his “thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line,” so he created a poetic cord of transmission, a direct connection to the ether, where words and sentences could diffuse into the atmosphere.

The booth was completed shortly after the 2011 tsunami, and then people just started showing up to use it. They used it to call the afterlife. They used it to call their missing parts. They called landlines and mobile phones. They twisted digits into the rotary and then paused, listening to phantom rings before speaking.

The radio segment played recordings of these conversations. The clips ranged from casual updates, grandchildren informing grandparents about math test results, to speechlessness. Some people hurt so much nothing came out, except, somehow, I think I knew what they wanted to say. I could hear it in their breathing, in their tight inhalations, and though the segment didn’t communicate this, I imagined people also called their own old lives, wanting to hear the way the world used to sound when it still made sense. I have the feeling old dorm room numbers were called, and childhood homes, and other numbers that have long since been disconnected but maybe, somewhere, still ring.

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TELEPRESENCE

Strictly speaking, nothing is happening on the internet. It is an arena where people recite, replicate, and broadcast information, but the events themselves happen elsewhere. Maybe you react (viscerally) to a tweet – a thought plucked out of someone’s mind – but the reaction occurs in your own brain, not in a shared, breathable reality. Your reaction is to a screen and it is siphoned through a screen that removes traces of hair, skin, and teeth. Biological debris. Things indicative of a living presence.

Without the touchstones of biofeedback, we become apparitions. When I engage directly with someone, my physicality changes and a chemical adjustment occurs. Online nothing changes or needs to change despite the immediate connectivity, so I can’t quite place or cognitively organize what is happening. This opens up a new category of experience: awash in nebulous clouds of data, I acquire a disembodied orientation, the closest frame of reference for which is that of the spirit world. Ghosts, poltergeists, wraiths, things that haunt – but we don’t yet know the consequences of existing as such for extended periods of time. Top Google results for “long-term haunting” include:

Haunting Is the Newest Dating Trend You’ve Definitely Encountered ...

Three Things You Can Do to Stop Being Haunted by Regret ...

Haunted by Your Own Ghosts: Dealing with the Past and ...

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