Foreword
Stateless Mind Pavilion — Foreword
Between memory and migration, I build temporary rooms.
The Pavilion began as a refusal to wait for permission. It is not a building and it has no border. It appears where it is needed: in a corridor of drums, in a line of bandages, in a map that has forgotten its own edges. Sometimes it is only a table, a conversation, a passport page reassembled with masks and altered identities. Sometimes it is a sound you can feel in your chest.
I was told there are conditions for belonging. They were never disclosed. So I wrote my own: softness is resistance; errors are coordinates; every outsider is already inside.
This Reader is a living document—part field report, part diary, part instruction manual that refuses to instruct. Here you’ll find works and interventions (kompangs skinned with x-rays, atlases cut into orbits, boots that bloom), voices from friends and fellow travelers, and small bureaucracies of poetry that smuggle meaning across checkpoints. Pages will be added, redacted, and reassembled over time. Completion would be a failure.
If you entered from Denmark, you are also entering from Malaysia. If you entered from Malaysia, you are also entering from elsewhere. The Pavilion keeps the door slightly open, even when the room is moving.
Welcome. Read slowly. Carry what resonates. Leave the rest for the next person.
— Amir Zainorin