imantopia is an e-mail magazine, a monthly publication where each issue is built after the architecture of a house. inside the envelope, a little world view room by room.

this is a work in progress rolodex: imantopia’s postcard index. a micro-edition, a seasonal archive and catalog of tear-outs and small files.

welcome!

YOU MUST BELIEVE IN SPRING

“I learned very humbly that there are four seasons to a person’s life and to a day and to a creative cycle and I didn’t understand the importance of winter, and I think living in modern society we don’t like winter because it isn’t as productive and so we tend to - you know - get through winter as if it’s still summer. And that was true for me in terms of the ecosystem of my creativity. (…) I did not winter, let things die, to decompose and to rejuvenate the soil so towards the end whenever there is a seed planted I could like - push so hard and it wouldn’t grow and then it started to feel very unnatural both internally and externally for me and I definitely crashed, because if you don’t winter nature will force you to whether it’s land that is no longer fertile or an inner ecosystem (…).”

7:18 - 8:35 / SBIFF 2026 - Outstanding Director Chloé Zhao Discussion

CHLOE ZHAO

Stockholm is a silent city, the cars move like bugs on the street. Colourful beetles and bikes coming from every corner. My bedroom was covered in wallpaper, birds and flowers on the wall turned every retina frame into a still oil painting. A few times a week I would go to my political science seminars, always taking the long way through the forest. Every time I walked to university through those green quiet hills and tree lines I would come into the woods as one person and come out of the woods as another. The soundless path washed over me like water, I absorbed the smell of moss and listened to the oaks and birches.

Throughout the winter as the snow melted and the grass started to wake up, little by little and for some strange reason I started to watch hours and hours of interviews of directors. Every moment of empty time I listened to the words of filmmakers. I love how there seems to be an archetype. Stutters, very endearingly so. Sometimes a button up or a crewneck of a beautiful pure primary colour. I could sense that there was a message, maybe my algorithm was talking to me like the trees in the forest. In nature and in the internet, I like to listen. I loved their outfits, their philosophizing every single shot. I loved how sometimes their hair was poofy or they looked like they hadn’t slept in a few days, arms crossed on interview chairs and a sarcastic air all over their sentences. Some sounded sweet or scared to be interviewed, as the actors next to them smiled with picture perfect teeth. Some were charming. Anyways, hours and hours passed and then there she was - The Chloe Zhao.

I have a dear blog on Tumblr, a Youtube channel I forgetfully remember to curate (and this newsletter!). I adore the aesthetic look of pure HTML, I created a website for my poetry. Technology of a certain kind is beautiful to me, as is anything that is a rectangle of paper simply existing within the radius centred around my hands. In a new country far away from home, journaling in my ground floor bedroom in Östermalm, I filled pages with coffee shop receipts and lists of things to do. Logs of my afternoons, ruled line after ruled line.

The Swedish winter is very dark. It started in November and turned the sky into one long night. Dreamy architecture. Starry waters. As a person prone to natural nostalgic inclinations, the city air was intoxicatingly beautiful. Something about the musical Swedish language, a peculiar shyness covering every conversation like a lullaby or a song in D minor. Something about the pretty pale orange colour of cloudberry baskets at the neighbourhood grocery store. In between classes I went to see my older sister in Ireland and later visited my hometown in South Tyrol for the New Year. Maybe ever present nostalgic inclinations are a side effect of immigration? The urge to return somewhere that is not a destination but a memory. After my undergrad degree just this past August, I moved to Northern Europe to continue my studies. I like fountain pens, I always ask my classmates for the model name if I spot one in class. The first day of April I was on an airplane, nine hours into a flight stopping by Iceland going to Toronto first and Montreal second.

Have you ever done something that is so small and yet so far from who you are? Something that makes you stop and look at your shoes making sure your laces are well tied, making sure you didn’t also accidentally left the house without pants on. It’s something small, very small and that only you would understand in its depth or history. It’s like finding an early first brown leaf right before fall begins. It’s a message of time passing by, or rather of deep change incoming. It’s a soundtrack changing beat or pace. The colour grading in your life slightly changing. For me - and stay with me, this thought will become a circle - that something was being late to class. Never in my life have I been late to class on purpose or if the circumstance was within my control, never willingly. Even through Canadian snowstorms, I always arrived to class not punctual but a bit early just to sit in the empty lecture hall. I adore an empty classroom. The untouched forest green chalkboards, the scratched beige wooden desks. When I started to show up late to my classes out of sheer laissez-faireness about it that is foreign to the essence of how I walk through life - that is also when I was walking through the forest and listening to director interviews.

That something that is in a small and maybe insignificant way foreign to you, like always wearing black and then one day wearing a colour. I see those somethings as so special and a little frightening, they could be symptomatic signs of incoming change or simply inevitable aging or whatever is the underlying weather behind it. To me this repeated lateness was very interesting, worthy of exploration and research. So small and yet not so, it meant that maybe I was coming out of a chapter or season of my life. Did I not care anymore about my academic education when it was something that has always been a primary filter through which I lived my days ? Before, I would never be late to class. What happened! I put my detective coat on, my dark navy blue long London Fog one, and got to investigating. I love learning and university has always been a space I felt inspired in, it fed me and I was curious. Now, suddenly the one late to class, I felt like the cockroach in Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. Gregor Samsa waking up a bug.

EVERYTHING IS SEASON

The thread connecting my sense of aesthetic curation but also my ethos to life, my core philosophy - is the quilting cotton thread called The Season. Coming up with a seasonal journaling ecosystem, a wardrobe lookbook, a bookshelf edit, a side quest. Seeing everything through the lens of the season gives the thing itself a colour, it’s not a thing anymore but a beautiful chapter part of a storybook. The seasons of nature: spring, summer, fall and winter. A tv-show season. The seasonal runway cataloging of the fashion world. Seasonal produce. Seasons of life - love, grief, family, work, moving. Everything is season. The impermanence that becomes meaning. The circle that was this thought is that like the Swedish winter I was photographing, I was also going into a winter of the self that I did not plan for.

Chloe Zhao especially spoke to me and the way she answers in interviews is so captivating. “If you don’t winter, nature will force you to.” Poetry, and impossible to ignore or forget like a unique and never encountered before scent pervading a room. Nobody can control a nose, and I will never forget this sentence. I am twenty-three now and I know I will be saying this to my grandchildren when I am seventy-three. A true philosophy of the seasonal life escapes time. It’s a greater design, part cosmic and universal and only partly intentionally and individually designed. The seasons are like jazz music. A pure improvisation to listen to intently, everything moves as all the notes meet and dance and yet there is no conductor to be seen on stage. The music that turns anything into cinema. The spring of West Coast blues, a blossoming and discovering in birth and emotion. Snowy winters and winds that talk like cool jazz, bebop style. Summer is for warm temperature bossa nova, samba too. Japanese or Brazilian are my favorites. Life is seasons, it’s all jazz.

Chloe Zhao said that if you don’t winter, nature will force you to. Nature or religion. The Islamic month of Ramadan is when Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, a detachment from the material be it food and water but also an ascetic kind of fasting against distraction or pleasure for a deeper pursuit of connection to the faith and the self. Ramadan is for me always a time of reflection, and this was no exception. By the end of it I decided to move back to Canada following my gut despite the want to rationally calculate the unfolding of time. Winter of rest, winter of purpose. I also think that every winter is followed by the chaos after the storm, the dynamo that is spring concealed with the dreamy haze of a slumber painted in beauty and buds. Play, vice, honesty. Summer I see as a time of freedom, about drawing the architecture of the feelings brought up by spring. My theory is that although we remain the same more or less as time goes on, November me is similar to February me - but August me is a different font. Like in the forest we go into summer as one and come out another. Maybe it’s the empty time, the feverish impulse attracted to seeing and saying everything filterless. Fall is engineering, deep research and the studio chapter of the year. Most beautiful in its fleetingness, fades away into a blank nothing. In Canada the snow just melted a few weeks ago.

WHEN THE SIDE QUEST BECOMES THE MAIN PLOT

Off-line and in the midst of my days, I often think of the seasonal side quest. The side-lying adventure I pick for the season. A team sport, some kind of project, a club. This past fall my side quest was volunteering for the Stockholm Film Festival. I used to see these little bits of living as part of how I meet people in real life since I don’t have social media, it’s also how I navigate being connected to community and a way for me to try different things. Now that it has happened again and again and again I can see something else on the horizon beyond it. The side quest is never just a side quest, as I thought. It’s a small red pin on a large map, and sometimes it becomes the destination rather than a pit stop. Before creating my Youtube channel, a side quest I had during the summer was volunteering to work for a radio in Ottawa. It taught me everything about sound production and editing, scripting, and journalism. Also, the radio once sent me to a Pitbull concert with a review assignment. Epic. Sometime later I started making videos and there I was making use of the skills and lessons I learned during that summer radio-side quest. It was all dormant experience. The film festival was the second episode that removed any chance of coincidence. I think that all side quests intertwine later on in life and that they all simultaneously create a quilt that is the future.

I was absorbing all those director interviews a few months after the film festival came to an end, never having thought of their craft really. Everything felt saturated, almost ripe. During the volunteering I was assigned to basically babysit a documentary director that shall not be named. We walked around Norrmalm, beside the canal in the pretty evening. My volunteering was about making sure we didn’t lose this thirty-something man, that he was at the right place at the right time, but also that he was having a good time entertained by the festival itself. Easy, I was already babysitting a tiny adorable and bossy two-year old Swedish kid - even without professional film school knowledge besides my personal blogging how hard could it be to make small talk with a director. I also have the talent of being able to make conversation even with an orange sitting on the table. I was a cafe barista for years during my undergrad, conversation with strangers is my bread and butter. Long story short, the exposure to the industry from behind the scenes curtain side was so particular. I felt like I used to feel in the classroom, before I went full Oblomov (part of my winter bookshelf) with my tardiness. It was a wonderful feeling of wakeness, being very awake.

MICROBIOME JOURNALING

Sweden, interiors - night time. Cut to: Canada, interiors - morning. In that in-between, I did what I know how to do best. Homework. I felt I was at the cusp of change. Either continue with my grad studies with a paper thin indifference but healthy and good for the calluses kind of pragmatism, or explore a new avenue and follow my gut. To make the decision I spoke with my village. My university mentors, my older friends, my farmer uncle. Endless conversations after, I gathered some of their words but most of all I came back to those of Chloe Zhao. Maybe there was a lesson, every winter is a time for reflection. Answers can only come after a question. The side quest was like a bacteria, it feeds the gut. There is good and bad bacteria. I read about the gut-brain axis and how our digestive system is in deep and direct communication with our brain and our thinking and wonder, does it also influence personality? Maybe my little gut bacteria make me who I am. Bacteria to brain. In terms of analogy, the pipeline is the same - the side quest to main quest trajectory. This is so special for me as a newly added perspective amongst my catalog, because in a productivity-society it makes me feel like no time is wasted and not in a machine-like way in the name of optimization but rather time as not wasted because it’s all part of the adventure of life. It’s all a harmonic circle, there is no end goal to contain in my palm but the vision I am building through exploration.

This is where I talk about journaling, it had to happen sooner or later as intrinsic as it is to my being. I think that the habit of writing on paper is like a probiotic for the gut, it nourishes the inner system. It’s a practice of self-research. The beauty of journaling is that your library of memories is also a map of where you are going. The documentation of even things that are not traditional dear-diary entries, like sketches or to do lists, are field notes that create an archive of the subliminal gut. Intuition and information together. You know about growing pains, or the ache of shoes that are too small? The classic trope of actualizing your self or your path is not linear, it’s like a logic tree or a mind map or a spider web. Redirection and realignment of your compass. In a sense Sartre speaks on this in his book “existentialism is a humanism”. For him we are our actions, I say we are our gut - but the story is the same and the protagonist is free will. Carl Jung also calls it “individuation”. If I were to write a poem about what is life it would be in metaphorical and literal terms of hunger. The bacteria is hungry, the gut is hungry. The heart is hungry, the brain the eyes the ears. Feet looking for uncharted soil. That hunger must be fed, the good bacteria are all the side quests and journal pages and seasonal edits. Journaling can be producing a song, creating a playlist or a dj mix. It’s output for the inner world, to return to self or go somewhere new through discovery and newness.

HOMO FABER

A note on reality. Grocery prices, bus fares, student loans, phone bills, rent invoices, pharmacy prescriptions. Wars and a hundred other things are now parts of conversations more than they ever were. I grew up with my grandpa, he used to drive a wonderful green Renault 5 and smoke blue camels flickering the cigarette ashes out the window as Al Jazeera played on the cube-like tv we had - it’s the main tv news channel in the Arabic speaking world - and I sat little as I was with my mint gunpowder green tea and frizzy braids simultaneously clueless and yet absorbing both on the ground reporting and wildlife documentary segments. Now, more than a decade later it seems that everything is expensive and there are no jobs and maybe no middle class and what will we all do. There is a guy sitting at my table, the cafe I am writing in has a big one for people on their laptop. “There are no jobs that exist anymore”. “Everyone is going to grad school”. I have had and heard conversations like this so many times that I can mime it like a parrot, write subtitles for the scene before it even rolls. But what if this is actually a special time for intentionality, given the automation that is everywhere. Maybe what looks like the calm before the storm is actually the one after. Say there were no jobs anymore or a degree lost its market value - what if one took that background into another field and because of that anomaly created something with greater fulfillment and originality. Vera Wang was a figure skater.

A word in-passing on the job market and artificial intelligence and art, because it is an essential part of the thought-circle. There is almost a new social discourse split, some people are against the shift and some are excited to see its course, and maybe not even a new one but a superversion of ones before that were about technology of communications like the radio or technology of work like farming practices. Now everything is a soup about code, there is the Art Problem, and generation wide anxious-avoidant cynicism which is in a paradox coupled with hopecore memes. Is this issue itself hopecore? Another article on the meaning of hopecore added to my to be written list. Well I am hopeful despite it all - to exist within this time of recalibration is to believe in renaissance.

Scapple is a software program so delicious and sweet I could eat it for breakfast on a porcelain plate. I use it to create big and small maps with its sister Scrivener, which I use for my writing folders and digital ecosystems. I was still in Sweden when I sat down before deciding to move back to Canada and came up with a board - a collage kind of map that was my homework through the transition. I thought of different established public figures of the present and the past that for one reason or another I admire, and maybe I am drawn to their style or it’s their humour or their work. Some ended up being fiction writers and some were mathematicians and some were architects and some were fashion designers and some were professors and some were mayors (handsome handsome Zohran) and some were filmmakers and some were cartoonists. There was no goal of collecting people to look up to in one career field, it was purely an exercise of intuition and direction - some kind of image journaling. After collecting all of these images, I used my favourite website to go further with this homemade assignment. I opened up Wikipedia and got to reading in great detail the fineprint of their biographies. Most if not all of the figures that I collected came to their material craft or scientific discovery or path trajectory either later in life or by coincidence.

I was thinking of this one class I took during my undergrad in philosophy on Hannah Arendt and her whole spiel about work vs labour. According to her man is “homo faber”, the builder or the smith and in Italian “fabbro” is the blacksmith, all of which I think is so beautiful because what is more difficult in thought than to shape carbon steel as if it were raw honey. What Arendt says is longwinded and not entirely the point I want to make but I see in her theory a limelight I am drawn towards like a moth - maybe man is by nature not a labourer but a craftsman. Work is not bad. It’s craft, a social and economically engineered kind of journaling that is in itself part of a self-journey. And this exercise helped me navigate picturing the future not through fear or scarcity or a need to know what to be or should do in uncertain times, but through the lens of someone like a cobbler. Every picture on my board is one of a person that came to create Something - a university lecture, a political campaign, a nature documentary, a leather bag - by moving through fortune and hardship as a work in progress. One of the director interviews I watched featured this sentence I wrote down in my journal - obvious paths to success can lead to failure. Every time I look at my board of role models I feel like time is infinite and no coincidence is a coincidence. The point is the craft, not as a plan or as a goal but as a work in progress. When in doubt, map it out.

CARHARTT WORK IN PROGRESS

Finally, what I wanted to write since the very first word on this page: LIKE CARHARTT LIFE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. I am so serious, no sarcasm and no irony. I thought of this to myself when I was zipping up my beloved Santa Fe jacket almost as a fleeting joke, but then the sentence stayed where it was. It didn’t join the never ending traffic of moving objects - thoughts passing by and going elsewehere. It was just a still thought. Life is a road trip, the landscape changes season to season. Sometimes there are pit stops in a country far far away into the north, it’s important you stop to pick up a postcard.

Sometimes you miss a turn, or run out of fuel, or fall asleep in the backseat. Sometimes the shortcuts makes the trip longer, the destination changes. And on the map every person met or side quest taken is a like a river, a blue line shaping the geography of your life. I was talking to a dear friend on the phone this year and we ended up discussing the idea of “second hometown”. Similar to the concept of second breakfast, about the urge to feed a hunger caught in transition. We all have a hometown, simply the place we were born in. A second hometown is a hometown by choice found through exploration, and sometimes it’s even more important than its predecessor. Each season can have its hometown, its microbiome, its postcard. WIP.

That’s all. I hope this unedited rough copy note arrived in your mail-box, that it was a good read. I am choosing to write it in one go and not read it over so that it remains what I want it to remain - a heartful journaling entry written on the back of a digital postcard. Thank you winter. Thank you internet interviews. Thank you Bill Evans and Chloe Zhao. If you don’t winter, nature will force you to. And, you must believe in spring. I look forward to the next season, to video and letter blogging more!

If you would like to reply to this letter magazine, your digital letter will go directly to my e-mail inbox. No third party system, this is a true correspondence. Feel free to also send me a message on my blog (https://imanbenerrabeh.com). It would be a pleasure to receive your mail.

Talk soon. Thank you for reading!

Sincerely,

Iman :-)

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