Pink Pills

September, back to school season in 2024 has been a wild,wild month. October promised to slow down, but it only continued to be just as busy. 

However many things and people may have crossed my path in the last couple of months, there was a celebration right in the middle. This event we organized for Aids Archives and Arts Assemblies in Belgium at Viernulvier in Gent at the end of September was one to remember. =)

We invited aAliy and Nino_uncut to perform poetry and songs, there was a commissioned song dedicated to the project, it’s end, and after. The song was the perfect mix of camp, cheesy romantic breakup, and diva pop joy that we all love. 

After we had lunch together and this moment was very intimate, it was the reception to the anti wedding event that happened all day. I made napkins for the reception, they are in the shape of pills. Only when people unfolded their napkins did they realize they were pills. 

They were made from the same fabric I used for the larger circular pill I had made for the assembly back in July. The larger pill served as an area rug, a place where we sat and met and exchanged and laid and wrote, and listened and chilled. 

The pills that people used as napkins were theirs to keep. As a souvenir, a memory, a useful item that they now could use in their home. In private. Some people were able to take multiple napkins. I saved some for the rest of the participants of the July assembly, those who couldn’t be there in Gent in September.

I will send their napkins in the mail soon. 

The pills were two toned, pink, in reference to the pills I take which are a dark pink, almost brown, similar to the darker raspberry pink of the washed linen I used. Fancy fabric, for cleaning our dirty mouths. Mouths we use to eat pills of all kinds. Ecstasy, Tylenol, Biktarvy, Daysee, Daphalgan, etc.


For now, this is the last physical object I will be making for the Aids Archives and Arts Assemblies in Belgium project. There’s a short form play in the making for our final event. I will be doing a cold reading at Kaaistudios in December, a fresh outcome of the Write It Out! program that American playwright Donja R. Love organizes, now in its 4th edition I believe!

More on that soon!

For now here are some images of the sewing of the pills project. 

Bye for now.


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Emmanuel Cortes October 17, 2024
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a poem I wrote about 2 decades ago