The Self as a Product - Spatula technique using acrylic on cardboard, Elvin Karda, 2025. // “What is this surging feeling? Why won’t it just let me be?” I asked myself, and at that very moment I heard the voices telling me that I was, after all, much more reserved and calm than others from “my cultural circle”, and I wondered: Could it be that I was simply better at hiding the storms and outbursts? Was I perhaps just a hypocrite with well-mannered manners? Did I want to fit in, or am I actually a person of calm? At the age of twenty-four, I questioned my entire life for the first time and I wanted to know who I would have become without my parents’ expectations, without the circumstances of the zeitgeist, and I ask myself whether this ‘I’ even exists, so clear and unformed, so free of ideas and desires, and I come to the realisation: The self is a product, and geography its destiny. [excerpt taken from the novel: Local Stranger (orig. "Hiesige Fremde") by Elvin Karda]