Editorial, February 2026

Who Is That? On Self-Portraiture and the Making of the Self

A woman enters an empty church with store-bought coffee. She tries on metaphors: mountain, bird, river, wind. None fit. God laughs and points to the glass door, and in the reflection she sees what she already knew: grass-stained sneakers, a pimple near the nose, the irreducible fact of herself. Neither fish nor meat, neither mountain nor bird. Just this. "You are", God says, and his laughter spins like the sun on its axis.

Anna Zhuk's poem does not resolve the self; it accumulates it. Sour cranberry, broken faucet, crooked bangs, foolish longing, the twelve-year-old smell of the stove. The list refuses both hierarchy and metaphor. What remains is not essence but inventory, the patient labor of naming what appears once you stop pretending you already know what you are.

This is the premise of the issue you hold. Self-portraiture does not promise discovery; it permits rehearsal. The self is not waiting to be found. It comes into being through the act of appearing, through the risk of staying visible long enough for something uncertain to emerge.

Across the history of art and thought, the self-portrait has stood at a threshold: between seeing and being seen, between intention and exposure, between the one who composes and the one who is composed. The genre has never been simple resemblance. It is performance and translation, a way of thinking with the body, a test of how much of the self survives the pressure of being looked at.

January's issue recognized the self as plural, inherited, multiply inhabited. It traced identity as a genealogy of doubles and echoes, internal figures who refuse to collapse into a single voice; it understood the self as archive. February shifts the question. If January asked who inhabits me, February asks how I become at all. Here the self is not confession but method, not archive but event.

Alyssa Monks sets the tone with a body that insists and resists at once. Working in oil, water, and glass, she returns the figure through layers of mediation. Faces press against shower doors. Mouths open into steam. The virtuosity is exacting, yet what holds is residue: the body present and withheld, visible and obstructed, grief hardened into gesture. The self persists not as essence but as what remains after something has been taken away.

From that pressure, Laura Zalenga moves in another direction. Unable to summon mental images, she builds her self-portraits from concepts that must pass through the body before they can appear, so the self arrives as invention rather than memory. Figures curl among bare branches, dissolve into water, kneel against desert horizons. Blood appears without spectacle. The body becomes porous and atmospheric, something enacted through exposure, constraint, and contact with the elements.

Elina Brotherus situates the body within systems that precede it: architecture, landscape, institutions of care. Sanatoriums, modernist houses, a rowboat near a sinking ship. Often the figure turns away from us, so that posture replaces expression and the self thinks through placement rather than confession. Identity emerges as relation, to space, to structure, to what exceeds the body's control.

If Brotherus frames the self through space, Brenda Zlamany extends it through time. Her serial self-portraits span decades, making duration itself a method. From early woodcuts to recent paintings, from pregnancy to age, from performance to quiet persistence, the work refuses closure. The roles accumulate, the face changes, the question stays open. To see what is really on the end of the fork takes endurance. Becoming is not an episode but a sustained practice.

Around these core practices gather other modes of inquiry. Chantal Convertini works through contingency, using analog film, mirrors, and the slow chemistry of light to court accident rather than control. Her self-portraits move through bathrooms, beaches, and domestic interiors, where reflection multiplies the body into frames within frames, and where grain, delay, and imperfect exposure let meaning arrive after the fact. Aneta Grzeszykowska multiplies and negates the self until identity survives only as variation. Alena Solomonova treats the photograph as material to be cut, stitched, and damaged, the self rendered as artifact. Jenny Woods anchors identity in care and labor, the body divided and redistributed through youth, motherhood, and what is still to come. Mela Kalf approaches self-portraiture as an experiment in what a self is. Beginning from illness, when pain and weakness destabilized the body, her work tests what survives under conditions of fragility. The forest enters these images not as symbol or refuge but as a second consciousness, a site where the body negotiates its own finitude. Her self-portraits hold the figure at the threshold between persistence and disappearance, asking whether the self, pressed hard enough, can imagine transformation rather than collapse.

Clementine Hanbury draws the self at the edge of articulation. Trained in classical ateliers, she uses charcoal to hold the face in suspension and let likeness become inquiry. Each mark commits; each erasure leaves a trace. Her portraits do not perform emotion, they wait, and what appears is attention itself, the self overheard rather than declared.

Christine Buchmann closes the visual sequence by observing the moment when privacy thins into attention and the self hesitates under the weight of being seen. Nothing is asserted, nothing resolved. The body remains present, alert to the risk of appearing.

The literary works return the question to language. Anna Zhuk's poetry inventories the self without hierarchy, letting accumulation replace metaphor. Marty Newman fractures the first person through surreal displacement, staging the "I" as something provisional, unstable, and oddly tender. In both, the self is rehearsed rather than revealed.

What binds these practices is not autobiography or confession or the demand for revelation. It is a shared insistence that the self must be enacted. These works let identity appear, alter, withdraw, and return without claiming finality. They understand that to ask "Who is that?" is to begin a gesture without knowing how it will end: to enter the frame, and to accept that the image or the word may resist completion.

Anna's sparrow beats against glass, then rests on a beam, too exhausted to fly even when the doors open. "How easy it is to miss open doors", she writes. "How hard it is to fly where strong wings are required / when the only strong thing is the heart. / Can the heart lift a body into flight?"

Each work in this issue leaves that question unanswered, not as failure but as fidelity to the way the self actually comes into being: through attempts, through repetition, through return, through the sustained attention that lets something appear without demanding that it remain.

"Fall in love with me", Anna writes. "Will you?" The question hangs, and the image holds it open.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume
Editor-in-Chief