Howl, Inverted, 2026

Melanie Kitti

Melanie Kitti: My name is Melanie Kitti. I am just as much a writer as I am an artist, and my practice is guided by a form of personal archaeology, where I sift through the residues of my memories and my subconscious.

I paint al fresco, which means that I work in a wet, slaked limestone paste mixed with sand. The pigment is mixed with the water in which the limestone paste is stored.

I am interested in how forms inhabit both our inner selves and history. I work intuitively; the forms come to me during the process.

This is why my motifs are often fragmented. To me, it’s connected to how difficult memories function—they rarely appear as a finished story, but rather as fragments or physical impressions.

I would like to conclude by reading a long poem titled Reverse Cry. I leave it up to you to decide how the painting relates to the poem.

The crocodile lived here first
 
I see my body standing
outside the present
knocking
 
I lived in an earlier era
 
Pour
half a body
and
half a body
into one body
is a recipe
 
I lay next to
the skeleton
moved in
 
I myself
have been looking for my shadow everywhere
 
I lick a woodworm’s belly
 
I am a doorway
and the fly flies there
I am a doorway
and the fly flies through
 
Do I taste sad?
 
I break in
to the current situation
 
I dream that an egg is hatched and out comes
an even bigger egg
 
There’s room for everyone in the egg
 
The news is the poetry of the rich
 
My brain is a hedgehog that nails
my shadow
to the planet
 
The words switched positions and
tumbled out in the wrong order
I found some of them
 
I found a tear that returned
 
I would have swallowed my regret
but I would have spilled
 
I didn’t want to contain the cry I never cried
 
I cried for a mother when I gave birth
to my daughter
 
We are alive now
but we dig a lot of graves
in the wrong direction
 
No one read
the words I wrote
were old and had already been used
 
I fold up
my secrets
 
I unlock
between my legs
there’s shelter
 
the dead chicken’s ruby
the fertilized fist
 
Outside the moon a snail crashes
 
Inside the moon the crumbs rain down
 
my naivist legs
my naivist arms
are attached
to a body
that bulges
 
Forgive me for being so thick
 
My brown fingers
are going to leave stains
if I touch the white children
 
My neighbours protect
my trash
can save lives
 
The sky is a very big apartment
 
The planet is my one pupil
 
I lean against the wall
The wall leans back
 
I am a cage