I only discovered Cem Hasimi
@cemhah a few days ago, when his work appeared on my feed. But there was something about this collection that felt strangely familiar. Not familiar like I’d seen it before. Familiar like I’d experienced it before.
It took me a while to understand why.
On my 30th birthday in Santa Cruz, I tried LSD for the first time. My “trip guide” told me that if I wanted the full experience, I needed two hits. So I took two.
About an hour later, we were at the Forest of Nisene Marks when I went from feeling completely normal to seeing life in a resolution I didn’t know existed. It started with the tree I was touching. Suddenly, I could see a glowing heart inside it.
I turned around to announce this discovery to my friends, only to realize it wasn’t just the tree. The entire forest was alive. Every tree, every branch, everything around me was breathing simultaneously, together, as one enormous living organism.
Women’s hair stretched all the way to the ground and took root in the earth, as if they weren’t standing on the forest floor but growing out of it.
Not long after that, language basically disappeared. I could only stand there and observe. Everything around me felt impossibly profound, down to the atoms that made up the simplest objects. I wanted to describe what I was seeing and feeling, but language suddenly seemed useless. I couldn't even write. It was as if all the words, categories, and definitions humans had invented to make sense of existence had been stripped away, and I was seeing life underneath them, before we had given any of it a name.
But the part that came back to me when I saw this piece happened toward the end of the night. I looked down at my arms and my skin was no longer just skin. I could see what looked like millions of tiny cells moving across my body. They moved in streams, almost like microscopic ants, endlessly flowing, reorganizing, disappearing and reappearing. It felt like I was seeing the machinery underneath myself, all the tiny living pieces that somehow came together to make “me.” The enormity of it overwhelmed me. I started crying and couldn’t stop, not because I was sad or afraid, but because what I was seeing felt too profound to contain.
Almost a decade later, Cem’s piece appeared on my screen, and something in me recognized it before I consciously understood what I was recognizing.
But I still couldn’t explain why I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen it before.
Eventually it clicked.
I hadn’t seen this artwork before.
I had been there.