There are places we leave behind that continue to live without us.
Perhaps this is the first form of distance: discovering that the world does not stop when we move away from it.

I was young when I left my homeland to pursue a dream.
A new city, a big city, on the other side of the country. I can remember the journey. The land slowly moving away from the window, the landscape changing, the sea left behind.
I watched what I knew become smaller and smaller, while ahead of me something opened up that I did not know how to give shape to.

I believed that distance was that. That which is measured in kilometres. Then I arrived. The city was enormous. Thousands of people, streets, illuminated windows, bodies constantly moving in different directions. And yet, within that multitude, there was something I could not reach. It was not a place. And it was not someone. Perhaps it was the feeling of having arrived without having truly arrived yet. I could be surrounded by people and feel elsewhere.

It is a feeling that returns, in different forms, throughout the whole life.
Perhaps because there is a separation that does not belong to space, a distance that remains even when there is nothing left to cross.

It is within this landscape, human before it is geographical, that Artificial Poetry, the theme of this issue of LYF, takes shape.

Artificial Poetry is a reflection on our difficulty in fully belonging to the world and, even more so, in truly reaching the other.
People brush against one another, share the same places and the same gestures, and yet often fail to truly meet. We live in continuous connection and, at the same time, in a growing inability to communicate. We are increasingly
reachable, but not necessarily more present.

We move alongside one another, until we risk losing, in the automatism of our gestures, precisely what makes us human: the possibility of recognising the other.

Perhaps this is where poetry takes on its deepest meaning: not as an answer, but as a possibility, as an act of resistance. It is not only in words, in writing, in art. It is in that part of life that still escapes control, that preserves something irreducibly human.
It can be an image, a voice, a gesture, a light that suddenly changes the face of a room. An unexpected encounter, a caress, a sentence spoken badly, something that arrives out of time.
Perhaps its strength lies precisely in its ability to create a rupture. To open a crack where everything seems already written, already said, already consumed. An instant that interrupts the automatism and forces us to look again, to rediscover a human connection.

The photographs in our shooting do not seek drama, but the normality of isolation. Each image is an apparently ordinary scene, in which the absence of communication becomes the true subject.

In the work of Gregory Crewdson, Oona Ode and Daniel B. Dias, distance takes different forms: it is found in bodies that share a space without meeting, in memories that remain suspended, in relationships that seem to exist without ever declaring themselves.
Alongside them, this issue brings together other creatives and designers, each with their own way of moving through the present and giving shape to their vision. Perhaps this is what interests us: what happens when something manages
to break the flow, to stop distance for a moment, to bring us back towards the other.

It does not always happen, but when it does, something changes.
And perhaps it is precisely there that poetry begins.