Squalloscope / Anna Kohlweis

"Dog Door" is a poem that was published in Volume I of "The Stars", a poetry zine created by my dear friend Harrison Wayne, typeset on his mother's typewriter and printed at Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is also where we first met as artists in residence in 2024. When Harrison and I both briefly returned to Stove Works a few weeks ago, I took the opportunity to film this one-take video on my last day in the empty building. "Dog Door" was never meant to be a song, but I had caught myself chanting the poem all autumn long, mentally shifting the line breaks, realizing that the seemingly non-rhyming poem was a song with almost-rhymes after all.

I noticed recently that several of your songs are no longer available on Soundcloud, including acoustic versions of Disneyland and Rifle Scissor Stone which I absolutely adored. Can they be found anywhere else, or were you planning to reupload them at any point? Hope this is okay to ask - the acoustic versions of your works have always been quite touching, and those two in particular meant a lot when I first heard them.

hi! i am not planning on re-uploading them and honestly can't remember if the versions on soundcloud were the same as one the albums or not.

they're extremely old songs and i don't like keeping them around on platforms i don't have time to maintain, sorry.

My new record "Thaw" is out now!

In January of this year, I spent 31 days without wifi at an artist residency in the Finnish countryside. In the long Finnish winter nights, often before and after hours-long visits to the sauna out back in the yard with fellow residents, I made an eight-track record called "Thaw", based on field recordings from the residency buildings, as well as the surrounding landscape. In addition to the myriad of recorded noises, used the instruments available to me in the recording space (a guitar, a stage piano) and my voice, and wrote lyrics that seem to be mostly about what you cannot see in the pitch black dark of the forest behind the house, as well as what you see very clearly in the company of people who you just met, but quickly consider friends. I won't lie, I made this record mostly for them, but I am lucky enough to be able to share it with you as well. Enjoy. Let something thaw.

I am delighted to announce that my solo exhibition "Bottomless Home" opens on Monday, May 6th, at VU Gallery (5th floor of the VU building on the WWU Campus) in Bellingham, Washington. It will be on display until June 7th.

I will be present for the opening.

In addition, I am playing an acoustic show in the gallery space in conversation with my visual art on May 8th.

This show will combine paintings, notes, textile sculptures, artist books, poetry, and objects from three different locations. I am merging pieces I made during my 2022 residency in Paris, 2023 work from my studio in Vienna, and work I that was created just this spring during my residency in Chattanooga, Tennessee. To interweave these three bodies of work feels like an intimate act, and we'll all watch it happen.

What I do at the moment started to take shape back in Paris, and gained so much focus in the last two months in Chattanooga in conversations with curators and artists that my head is still spinning. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this kind of feedback and inspiration.

I also feel very lucky that all my work made it safely to the Pacific Northwest. Thanks, Österreichische Post and USPS. Don't lose it on the way back.

Please come if you are in the area, or tell your friends who might be near.

"Householding Haushalten"

Paper bag book, chinese ink, acrylic paint, sound. 2024 (headphones recommended!)

One of the things I have been doing here as an artist in residence at Stove Works in Chattanooga is making books out of paper bags the other residents and I bring back from our grocery shopping trips. Without following any obvious concept, I fill them with quick ink paintings, let them sit for a few days, and then add typography. The written content does not exist beforehand. Pages are filled one by one, purely from the gut, hand lettered directly onto the paper. Sometimes it ends up forming a clear narrative, sometimes it does not. This video adds a dimension by having me read it out loud, accompanied by noises and sounds from the residency building and Stove Work's house guitar.

i love love and i love the idea of letting go of a hierarchy of care in which monogamous romantic love is put above everything else. living in systems which so aggressively want to make us believe that individualism and exclusivity stand above community makes us so vulnerable and prone to shame and loneliness, and so much less likely to stand up against oppression, violence, and a system that wants to bleed us dry from our first to last breath. my neurodivergent brain has never made it easy for me to navigate friend groups, social events, or to build any kind of sustainable community. it is no coincidence that the people in my paintings exist mostly in a state of disconnect, often barely tethered to the earth. but once in a while i am among friends, deep in conversation, in tears over the state of the world, with an arm around a shoulder in a moment of crisis, or belly laughing into the air between us, and i take a breather to think: to share space and time with people who care so deeply for each other and me, and i for them, and to acknowledge how special and deeply good and deeply neccessary and human this is, always, and especially now, makes me feel stunned how anybody could think this is worth less than what we branded as "romance". there are very good people out there. some i see almost every day, some i see every other week, some i see every four months, some i don't see in person for years. some i meet in forests, some in cafés, some in their houses, some i send postcards to, some i talk to on the phone. they all have a profound impact on who i am, how i move through this world, and how my work impacts others. occasionally, i cannot bear the thought that they will not live forever. within this thought, i know we all live forever through each other. i love them all very much.

Thank you so much to those who support my work.