Travoveda Blog

Essays on cinema, literature, transgressive art, culture and society — on how worth gets assigned, who is allowed to name their own price, and on those polite culture keeps in its peripheral vision: too young, too poor, too exposed, too out of place.

Travoveda Blog

On Cofnas and a Few Other Things

010If differences between people are partly innate, who does that absolve, and of what responsibility? And why do we look to genetics for that answer?October 28, 2026

010 · latest · 14 min

If differences between people are partly innate, who does that absolve, and of what responsibility? And why do we look to genetics for that answer?

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Earlier9 essays

Nobody Did Anything

009A novel about how the internet renders violence as text, as content — and casts the reader as a quiet accomplice, one who assures himself he’s merely a spectator.September 4, 2026

009 · 15 min

A novel about how the internet renders violence as text, as content — and casts the reader as a quiet accomplice, one who assures himself he’s merely a spectator.

What Is an Unhealed Wound Worth?

008Blue Film argues that turning trauma into a commodity does not heal the past, and that real agency begins where the purchased ending gives way to the unbearable demand to reclaim one’s own name.July 11, 2026

008 · 10 min

Blue Film argues that turning trauma into a commodity does not heal the past, and that real agency begins where the purchased ending gives way to the unbearable demand to reclaim one’s own name.

Watching Won’t Wash You Clean

006In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about the distance of the spectator. Today, that distance becomes a Russian question: can one look at Ukrainian pain and still remain a bystander?May 26, 2026

006 · 14 min

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about the distance of the spectator. Today, that distance becomes a Russian question: can one look at Ukrainian pain and still remain a bystander?

Late Youth as a Political Condition

005In Return to Reims, Eribon writes about an adulthood that does not arrive with success. One can acquire language, status, and a name, and still continue assembling oneself out of shame, rupture, and other people’s expectations.May 5, 2026

005 · 14 min

In Return to Reims, Eribon writes about an adulthood that does not arrive with success. One can acquire language, status, and a name, and still continue assembling oneself out of shame, rupture, and other people’s expectations.

Disappear, My Russia

004Russia is once again learning to see itself through someone else’s eyes — through the eyes of Merezhkovsky’s Vasyuta: “some milk, maybe… but I don’t feel like it”. And that “I don’t feel like it” is enough to describe today’s reaction and the war.April 29, 2026

004 · 3 min

Russia is once again learning to see itself through someone else’s eyes — through the eyes of Merezhkovsky’s Vasyuta: “some milk, maybe… but I don’t feel like it”. And that “I don’t feel like it” is enough to describe today’s reaction and the war.

The Privilege of Reversibility

003I now see My Own Private Idaho not as a film about beautiful rootlessness, but as a film about the difference between those who have an “afterwards” and those who don’t.April 26, 2026

003 · 10 min

I now see My Own Private Idaho not as a film about beautiful rootlessness, but as a film about the difference between those who have an “afterwards” and those who don’t.

The Somatics of Queer Flaw

002Why No Skin Off My Ass matters not only as a film, but as a trace of a queer culture that had not yet become polite, institutional, and safe.April 24, 2026

002 · 9 min

Why No Skin Off My Ass matters not only as a film, but as a trace of a queer culture that had not yet become polite, institutional, and safe.

A Manual for Disappearing

001The Masturbator’s Heart speaks of death calmly, almost matter-of-factly, as something simply pencilled into the schedule.April 24, 2026

001 · 7 min

The Masturbator’s Heart speaks of death calmly, almost matter-of-factly, as something simply pencilled into the schedule.