Greetings.
Here’s an overdue update, after a strange and eventful year:
For the last eight months I have been a resident of no country. For five months of that I was homeless too – and if it hadn’t been for the kindness of friends, I really don’t know what that would have looked like.
I can now quote passages of EU human rights law from memory.
This is why I haven’t written very much this year – here, on social media, or anywhere else. Essentially, I got Brexited out of the EU, by the country I had been living and paying taxes in for the past 12 years. I’ve spent the last eight months dealing with lawyers (and working extra jobs to pay them), while battling bad-tempered bureaucrats in migration offices.
And I sort of won in the end... my latest legal appeal was successful and I have just been granted residency again. A week after I had already been forced to evacuate all my belongings by van from one end of Europe to the other.
If you’d told me in February that by the end of 2023 I would be living in Southwest England, I’d have thought you were mad. But here we are.
On the plus side, it’s not that bad here.
The storm has passed, the dust is settling, and I actually have quite a good place here to sit and write. So that’s what I’ll be doing this winter. Today is the first newsletter of the rest of my life.
Contents
New Writing
The Tower
Ukrainian Aid
2024 Tours
Next Month
New Writing
I haven’t written as much as I wanted to lately, but I still have a few things to share. For example, earlier this year I began writing a series of short architectural guides (also featuring my photographs) for the website Travel Mag. Two of these are online already, and linked below. Various others are coming too – and covering styles that range from Brutalism, to Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and more.
Modernist Architecture in Sofia / Travel Mag
Modernist Architecture in Kyiv / Travel Mag
Virtual Dystopias, the Post-Apocalypse, and the Post-Post-Apocalypse / [lock-on] Vol. 006
An exploration of video game worlds – from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to Zelda – comparing how developers from different cultures visualise the end of the world and what comes next. This is my second feature for gaming publishers Lost in Cult, and it was an incredibly fun piece to work on. [lock-on] Vol. 006 is a physical journal which is currently being crowdfunded, and can be pre-ordered here.
The Nightmare World of AI Book Generators / Khans & Cosmonauts
New AI software exists that will allow the user to generate a full-length book in just a few clicks. There are already authors on marketplaces like Amazon who have used AI to self-publish hundreds of books this way. I ventured down the AI book rabbit hole in August, and wrote this article about my findings.
What is a Monument? / Khans & Cosmonauts
This abstract little essay contains more questions than answers. It’s something I wrote at an ungodly hour, while sat in an airport departure lounge. But I think these are very important questions. And they’re questions that underpin a lot of my tours and academic work these days. Speaking of which…
The Tower
Academic work is taking up more and more of my time lately. In 2023 I have written three book chapters, presented a conference paper, and I recently gave a university lecture on the topic of “virtual architecture.”
Traditionally, I have kept my academic work separate from my online place-writing and photography. But I want this Substack, Khans & Cosmonauts, to be a place where I can share absolutely everything that I’m doing.
So – over the summer I created a new channel on here, called The Tower. This will be where I share academic papers and conference presentations, interviews, and various works-in-progress.
I have set The Tower to restricted access, at least partly because it’ll be full of things I might not want popping up in internet searches (yet?). If you like Khans & Cosmonauts enough to support it, then you’re welcome to read along. So far these posts include a summary of my PhD thesis and an interview with Bulgarian sculptor Valentin Starchev. I will keep adding more.
Ukrainian Aid
A while back I posted a Ukraine Trip Report, talking about some of the causes I was able to support through my fundraising efforts in July.
The organisation Zgraya, who provide aid, supplies and evacuation for people in conflict zones, have since shared some photographs with me. The below images show exactly what those donations were able to achieve – medical supplies being delivered to hospitals in some of the hardest-hit areas of Ukraine.
Numbers on paper can sometimes feel a bit immaterial. And especially when you go over to Ukraine now, and you see the scale of devastation, all numbers start to seem somewhat inadequate in the face of such dire need. But for me, these photos made the work suddenly feel more tangible. I am glad I was able to do that, and I’m hugely grateful to everyone who helped to make it possible.
2024 Tours
Recently I completed my last tour for 2023 – a two-week Yugoslav heritage tour, through Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia & Herzegovina. We had a lovely group of travellers, almost a dozen local guest speakers, and this year I partnered with two separate national parks in Bosnia, to raise funds for their monument conservation activities. (I want to talk more about that work in a future post.)
I now have dates for three tours in 2024, which I will be leading for Atlas Obscura:
Balkans Road Trip
27 May–4 June
9–17 September
7–15 October
You can read the full details for these trips on the Atlas Obscura website.
I have other tours planned for next year too. Some entirely new things. Some weird things. As soon as I can, I’ll announce more details.
Next Month
For most of 2023 I have simply wanted to be left alone to write. After eight months of Kafkaesque ordeals, it looks as though I finally got my wish. I am in the middle of some quite exciting projects at the moment. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll tell you more about them.
All the best,
Darmon.
Glad to see you back!
Hoping this is the end of chaos and the start of better things!