Gear of Life: Lost Stories

Gear of Life. No one knows when it began — some say a cook used it centuries ago, others claim the gear was the cook. It bears nicks and scratches from forgotten ideas, rituals, and names. Now it whispers… don’t reject fact or fiction — both are fuel for new stories. A mother’s everyday tools are held like relics of care in “Minha mãe e suas ferramentas” by Eduardo Montelli, while a love letter woven from CCTV — where the watcher is finally seen — unfurls in “Dear David: Blindspots” by OONA. “Dear Sistem” by Alejandra Montoya petitions the construct that studies our desires and spends them, and “Lost in Rotation” by Alexandra Mitlyanskaya traces an elder’s loop of tenderness and solitude — a toy’s small orbit in a long corridor. A QR sigil is raised to sculpture in “Transmission” by Nezaket Ekici, the virtual briefly made touchable before it returns to light. Beneath pixel news, carnivalesque tunnels murmur in “The Last Subway” by Ziyang Wu. Breath and circuit trade places inside a transparent head-house in “Am I the Machine? Am I the Home?” by Carla Gannis, while “Eternal Revolutions of Techne” by Wendi Yan sends three hares leaping from cave painting to mechanism, symbol to engine. Wires and flesh rehearse endurance until it becomes intimacy in “The Soft Machinery of Wants” by Suzana Phialas (@dancevatar), and yearning finds a drive-train in “Wheels of Desire” by Gabrielle le Bayon. Memory then fractures and multiplies in “Far & a few, Far & a few” by Ameena Aljerman Alali — a departure with a fragmented return, where singularity is no option and multiplicity is already in motion; unfamiliarity, fragility, the void; arrivals and departures; the closed and the conditioned force. And in “Keep My Image Forever” by Cheng Xinhao, an iconic white elephant — once a lens for collective imagination on Wuhan’s East Lake — stands white against time, reconstructed by AI from decades of photographs, a landmark rebuilt from memory’s grain. Some voices were crushed by its turning; others turned into a delicious brew of history.