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A list of my friends with websites. Some are not here yet. Some don't have websites. Most of them are here, though.
Pascale Swoboda makes mysterious and nostalgic art. He's wonderful. I'm very fond of his Yu-Gi-Oh card frame (also because I gave him the card) and he paints buddha's face like no other. His pixel art is also spectacularly early Playstation-coded; this one is a complete vibe.
I'm trying to convince my brother, Francesco aka Fred, to also make a website. He makes comics that makes me cry. He also made the tiny knife for my Ethnofoor piece and we have plans to make a few zines/booklets together soon when he'll start answering my calls. He's one fourth of ohissa, a hip hop-inspired political art and comic project. We wrote an introduction to their 3rd issue together (in Italian). ohissa has an open call under the name of WE THE PEOPLE for zines acting as little snippets of a wall where everyone can write or draw something.
Fedra Faust is a colorful and kinky visual artist with a lovely sense of playfulness and sexyness. I love them very much and this year, after a collaboration last January that didn't see the light of day, we are working on a couple projects on our own. They are belligerently dedicated to their art and that's been really inspiring for me to witness. I'm waiting to finally see their Melancholia project fully come alive - here you can see a snippet of how cool it'll be in the form of an animatic.
Simba is the Karlsson's family quasi-house cat. He's probably thirteen years old, though nobody knows for sure. We only met once but we keep up through Konrad's mother, and he's been a great friend since. Being a cat, I had to make a page for him.
Chris Gylee and Aslan do amazing perfomance/multimedia art under the name of ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, whose current project, With Forests In Our Mouths, does incredible queer world-making work. Both of their websites are archives, parallel worlds and treasure troves to lose yourself into. I'm excited and feel called back by everything that they do. In fall 2024 I was extremely lucky to see Palace of Ash and Rain in Berlin, which helped redefine the meaning of queerness for me. I'm currently working on a text based off it. You can see/read one of my favourite works of them, THICK TIME, here. Chris is a wonderfully evocative poet and Aslan is the inventor, propagator and teacher of a queer constructed language called Damiá; you can read more about it and listen to songs in it on GREATEST HITS (my favourite: Siart Cessoi sung by Elie Gregory). They're currently hosting weekly classe for the chapter SPEECH COMMUNITY - see you there!
Kelly Solesby is a cool kid, thought she would never describe herself as such. She's many things: a visual artist, a zinester and the reason I'm getting into zine-making, a designer, a very good friend, a bulwark of creativity and resilience, a great inspiration for everyone who knows her, friend of Beetle the dog and all beetles alike. She has a fundamentally community-oriented mindset and she's my go-to for anything Appalachian (alongside Rhapsody), and I'm really looking forward to the series of zines on Appalachian culture she's working on. Last year she sent me one of her Bigfoot shirs and a zine package for my birthday!