Julia Nascimento

The pandemic was supposed to have a deadline, most of us agreed on a year. CBA deadlines are like the pandemic:we’re still open for submissions for the theme PLACEHOLDER. The world is paused for an indefinite time. What does this do to our experience of our existence? How do we replace our routines? We’re waiting, and in our wait, we imitate the “real” we hope will soon return. Like placeholders in our own lives.

New issue of the international comics anthology: From hospital staff to comic creators to basically any job in the gig economy. Anyone who doesn’t have a steady income, or who is expected to do more work in less time than is reasonable, can feel it. This volume of CBA explores BURNOUT. Not so much stories of depressing social realism, but rather artistic expressions of that feeling, suggestions for solutions, wishful thinking and visual abreactions. Expressions of rage rather than apathy, insurrection rather than complicity. Something to read for strength in times of austerity.

A Perfect Place to Call Home is Julia Nascimento’s first collection of visual narratives about her experiences and reflections of life in different places as a foreigner. Stories about living everywhere and living nowhere. Julia Nascimento is a Brazilian illustrator and cartoonist. While living in Japan she pursued postgraduate studies in fashion and worked in different sectors of the fashion industry. In 2017, she launched her career in illustration and comics, which solidified after her relocation to Sweden. Julia Nascimento’s work has been published in books and periodicals in Japan, Sweden, USA, and in the UK.

Latest issue of the international comics anthology series: Step into the world of KOLAZ, where images are discovered, altered, and transformed — merged with sketches, digital twists, and layered reconfigurations. It’s a creative process of cutting, rearranging, and reimagining, where fragments are pulled apart and pieced back together. Story themselves are patchworks of moments stitched into something new, where unexpected contrasts may emerge and magic happens when each reader brings their own meanings, their own interpretations, their own fragments to the pasteboard. Comics by: Pavol Bratský, Mattias Elftorp, Tom Mortimer, Damir Stojnic von Ktonsky, Susanne Johansson, Markus Samnell, Julia Nascimento, Adam Boman, Mette Norrie, Helena Menanda, Aiden Kvarnström, Mileta Mijatovic, Mårten Edman, Miku Maria Gustavsson. Cover & main editor: Kinga Dukaj.

In a world where everyone seems to be moving into the forced crowd that is the City (more than 50% of the entire population of earth live on the 2% surface that is urbanized, in Sweden the rate is 85%). The epidemic of loneliness is skyrocketing alongside the skyscrapers, we sit inside our empty little apartments with our empty little hearts. The mortality rate of being lonely rivaling those of smoking too much. We are but morals and the City is our graveyard it seems. And one bad thing isn’t enough, because at the same time a new phenomenon is being researched. Aloneliness is the negative feelings that arise from NOT spending enough time alone. In a city, in a crowd there is never time to slow down, to contemplate, to ponder and to recover. Stress and its manufactured hellhole well-being-spa-solutions is in itself another epidemic. SO this issue of CBA invites you to explore this longing to be more alone. These comics want to take you to your favourite place of solitude, show you moments of solitary relaxation, tell you the tale of nostalgia-ridden woodlands, a sunlit forest glade, the forgotten refuge on a rooftop in a crowded city. Where do you go to, my lovely When you’re alone in your bed?

What do we find in the depths? What lies in the depths in the oceans? What hides in the deep darkness of the corner of your room when you’re about to fall asleep? What thoughts trickle through your mind when looking deeply inwards, what do we find when we look where we can’t see?