Blooming is what happened when i stopped trying to disappear, 2025,
by Laramzp
Lara Peters (*2001), a.k.a laramzp, is a German-Brazilian artist whose work explores digital memory, self-fragmentation, and the poetics of glitches. Through video, sound, text, and web-based forms, she engages with spectral archives and cyclical embodiment. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts & Multimedia and will begin her MFA in Fine Arts: Art:ificial Studies at ZHdK in autumn 2025.
February 28
—————
i’m standing in the kitchen,
barefoot on tile,
and i feel the tide shift.
how lucky i feel to be in my body again
(like it’s a place you could return to // a threshold you step over)
///————
there are mornings you wake in a body that doesn’t belong to you.
you cup your chest in the shower and it feels ornamental.
trying to locate the moon inside of me,
I had not been alive within myself.
I had been alive against myself.
Dragging this body through routines
like a manager scolding an intern,
I treated my organs like liabilities,
punished softness,
tried to glitch my way out of embodiment.
Girlboss - disappearance.
I was at my best when i was dry.
————///
When my period came back
She arrived with rust.
Between the thighs.
like mold returning to bread.
Something inside refused to stay folded.
I held my lower belly like a returning artifact.
a palm to my stomach, the quiet garden inside.
blood and disbelief and the faintest sense of rhythm returning.
the first bloom is soft and unseen.
the petals return
even after frost.
///——————————
I wasn’t trying to disappear.
I just wanted to be easier to carry.
Mistaking the absence of rhythm for precision,
I remember being so pretty in that muted, elegant way that suffering often is.
they say stress does strange things to flowers.
leave a lily in a dark room, it folds into itself.
forget to water violets, and they’ll grow brittle at the edges.
too much light, and even the strongest stems snap.
i didn’t believe in it
until the rot touched root.
And the earth caught me like it knew.
——————— ///
Now I know that blooming is real
because it disgusts me a little.
the mirror is a stranger who remembers me.
my thighs aren’t mine
my voice sounds like it’s coming from the sink.
See, blooming is not becoming beautiful.
It is becoming available
—to sensation, to loss, to staying.
It is sitting with the mess and the heat.
With the grief of changing shape.
it takes all the dirt.
all the parts i tried to scrub away.
that’s the soil.
that’s the start.
///————————
How lovely I feel / not to have to pretend
there’s a violet part of me
that still grows in the dark,
a lily part that still droops on bad weeks,
a rose that opens too quickly and gets burned.
——————————————-///
i’m alive in spite of me
not afraid of being too much anymore.
roses take space.
roses bleed.
roses rot and come back.
i want that kind of permanence.
to make room for withering
and still believe in blooming again.
And I won’t be better.
I’ll be true.
Even if that means I leak.
Even if that means I’m hard to hold.
Because the trail back to self
is paved in everything I was told to wash off
///———————————
Archiving imperfection, the body stays
Blooming as location
Standing there
To See what it means
To become multiple, split a little
To show up in pieces, keeping the abject
————///
watch me while i bloom