Third week here and it has started to feel like home. I have settled in new habits, newer ways of being. I have now cleaned thoroughly, I have a favorite broom, a favorite side of bed. I have arranged the kitchen my way. It is odd how newer sides of us emerge when we begin anew, almost dormant, almost non-existent, almost unbearable at first, and then all at once.

Who is the person that lives in my body now? I observe her from the balcony in my hair. What is she upto? How is she responding to a new kind of solitude? How is she responding to the time and space afforded to her?

I met the Pro Helvetia team in Zurich that opened up to me a world full of artists, thinkers, practices and a whole map of art in the country. For somebody who spent the last five months locked in their room perfecting the doctoral document, it was kind of a shock. Go, meet the world, it’s been waiting. I was gently nudged. And so I got out of my cocoon, for the world that had been waiting.

I went to Kunsthaus Zurich and found myself the Hulda Zwingli, a radical feminist protest art group, emailed her my salutations and talked about the upcoming Protest art discussion in Zurich. I took a reading/writing workshop at Cabaret Voltaire, hidden in the lanes, also the birthplace of Dada. There I met a selection of women through the text they had been reading and writing, as a practice of being. I went to a tufting artist’s studio who tufted brave and bold feminist slogans and I saw how she gave a mouthpiece too wool and threads. How she reclaimed the subtle art of making rugs and carpets to speak of her feminist politics. I met the curator of the leading museum and discussed with her our parallel cultural politics. I met the another celebrated artist in resident and learned about her art practice. When I met the curator, she told me she had been expecting to see me. The world was indeed waiting.