Collaboration in its purest sense is the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and perspectives in the aim to create something even more valuable and impactful as a group. As The Gen grows, we’ve been exploring different opportunities to collaborate with all kinds of founders to learn and bring in new perspectives.
So we’re super excited to announce that…
we’ll be launching a collaboration with an exciting newsletter “Place” (@placenewsletter) that explores places, in the broadest sense of the term, for the month of March (some may say this is the most exciting collaboration since Supreme x Louis Vuitton)!!
Quick backstory, Hansen had met Place’s co-founder Kylee (@kyleejpedersen) through mutual friends and after a meeting together with fellow Place co-founder Karis (@karishustad), we discovered that we shared a mutual fascination with the deep meaning that the different places in our lives hold.
We all have a place in mind that anchors us to a feeling of home and can carry a rich, cultural and personal history. On the surface it can be a very simple thing. For Teo, it’s her grandma’s tiny kitchen in Romania that reminds her of delicious cozonac cake and stories of food scarcity during communism. For Hansen, it’s the concrete stairs leading up to his grandpa’s apartment in Taipei, a reminder of his first taste of internal cultural struggles via the tension between his Chinese and Taiwanese identities.
The collaboration will consist of writers and artists from both Place and The Gen’s communities, and we can’t wait to share it all with you in the upcoming few weeks. Please do take a second to check them out on Instagram and subscribe to their newsletter in the meantime.
(Aside: Our regular Sunday Spotlights may take a break during the this time in an effort to not bombard you. Though we are still consistently looking for cross cultural individuals to contribute and share their stories for Sunday Spotlights, as usual, let us know if you’re interested! )
To tide you over until the collaboration begins, we’ve put together a few of The Gen’s best picks across Place’s articles with the shared theme of cross-cultural identity and the idea of ‘home’ for your reading pleasure. Check them out below by clicking on the article titles and let us know what you think in the comment section!
“From Congo to Cuba” by Gloria (this is a MUST read)
“Have you ever travelled somewhere for the first time and immediately felt like a part of you belonged there? The language, food and movements of a new place can energize a part of you never perceived, framing your heart in fullness. Gloria Kimbulu had long pined for a homeland she never knew, having been born in Spain to Congolese parents and moving to the United States at a young age. However, a trip to Cuba opened up her eyes to a hidden history and helped her find a way home.”
“Happy Places” by Nina
“...where we’re walking the margins of Denmark, a country with one of the most comprehensive social welfare systems in the world. It is a place that takes care of its own. This story about the city of Aarhus is folded in with nostalgia, as it was the city that brought the Place editorial team together. Coming from all over, we carried different worldviews. In this piece, Nina writes about the Danish culture of trust and happiness as an outsider struggling to participate.”
“To Walk and Not Run” by Wentao
“...we meet at an old wooden house in Hamburg, Germany. Inside, two of its inhabitants, Wentao and Tomris share overlapping identities, but very different lived experiences. Brought together by Germany’s first lockdown, the two begin to converse, and as they grow closer, start to unravel deeply winded threads of judgement, homelands, and what it means to truly be free – in society, and, to yourself.”
Can’t wait to share what we’ve got coming up.
More about Place:
Place is a weekly newsletter that publishes original essays, reportage, poetry, illustration and photography from contributors all over the world. Place explores where we go, where we stay, make lives and leave them. Each week the aim is to transport you, the reader, somewhere new or just make you think about how you exist where you are. You can subscribe to Place newsletter here, and follow them on instagram here. Place is also now accepting pitches! You can read their pitch guide here.