Southern Oak City Daily News, 2024

A3 newspaper, black and white. 

As a child of ten years old, I had many dreams. First and foremost I wanted to be a witch, but at the same time a professional skateboarder, minister of education and journalist were also options I considered. With this last ambition in mind, I attempted to make a newspaper on different occasions, though none of them were successful. The main reason for this was a leak of patience, but I found myself not capable of producing enough readable text either.

I look back at these days with envy now. Though I might not have been capable of producing a newspaper, I had made for myself an imaginary world I would never be able to level with again. This world functioned as a way of combining all my dreams and channelling the identity crisis resulting from the unreconcilable image of a robed witch on a skateboard. I might not have realised it at the time, but these were the first signs of growing up.

During my childhood, this imagination felt limitless and unjudged. The creations and play were in function of the dreams and visions I had for this world I had built. Therefore they could not be the subject of criticism or mockery, though they were open and accessible to enter and share with others. From the point of view of an adult, twenty years later, it is difficult not to idealise this time and not to forget the imaginary world was an answer to the incomprehensible reality and overwhelming world surrounding me as a child.

In a search to reconnect to this limitless imagination, I created this newspaper, based on stories and drawings from my childhood, in combination with contemporary drawings and text to bring the world of my childhood to life. Though I might not be able to experience my childhood imagination again, I now have the tools and skills to execute the projects I wasn't able to complete before.

This newspaper is not a collection of individual stories but gives you small amounts of information on what was important to me as a child.

It is an invitation to imagine your own version of the world presented to you while going through the pages. Though it wasn't easy to exclude my framework as an adult, I tried to stray true to the perspective of a ten-year-old me.  

Imaginary Yellow: Retracing Childhood (10/04-20/04/2024)