about

I am twenty-two, standing in Cajón del Maipo, Chile, in front of a small ocean-blue pond surrounded by snow-covered mountains.

In the vastness, something shifts inside me, silently and permanently.

I am small in it, and part of it.

—

I'm Zaza. Berlin raised me. Switzerland challenges me. Spain is where I am going.

Over the years, travelling has taught me to look differently at the places I enter.

In 2022, my partner and I travelled through seven countries. The Monteverde cloud forest was impossibly full and alive, until I began to understand how much of it was already gone. At Lake Titicaca, the Uru people welcomed us into a life increasingly shaped by the people who come to gaze at it. In Menorca and Portugal, I watched streets and homes reshape themselves around people who stay for a week, while the people who belong there struggle to stay at all.

I have spent sixteen years working in hospitality. I've watched conversations turn into friendships, strangers become regulars, a room become someone's second living room. For two years, my partner and I ran a restaurant in Berlin that felt like home.

A table brings people together and a room can make someone feel at ease. What happens inside it is never simply service.

But every place is part of something larger. A restaurant sits inside a neighbourhood. A neighbourhood inside a system of who can afford to stay and who cannot. A cloud forest inside an economy that extracts from the very ecosystem it depends on.

The systems we build shape how we see and listen — to land, to one another, to ourselves.

This is what I write toward: relearning how to live in the places that ask something of us.

Between Three Minds follows the relationship between place and belonging, hospitality and human behaviour, and the systems that connect them.

If you're curious about the places we inhabit, the lives we build inside them, and everything that happens in between — I hope you'll stay.

— Zaza