rosen room
my favourite place in that entire city was in the art school, in a dusty grotto we called the rosen room.
the only way in was through a glass door papered in hazard signs. to even set foot in there you needed to wear a filtration mask, gloves, goggles. i would wear my inkstained apron too as a sort of charm. adjacent to the door one side was a window, smeared with powder, looking into the vacant lot. underneath it was a table with a hanging iron mesh, which could be swung over a bunsen.
on the other side, occupying nearly the whole length and height of the room, was a metal box with a crank and a small drawer. it was filled with fine powder that would settle in your lungs and there forever remain, if you breathed it in.
and you had to bang the sides of the box to dislodge the fine powder, then turn the crank to work the bellows that would heave clouds of it into the air. it was in theory confined safely to the insides of the metal box, but when when you opened the drawer to slide the plate in, it would leak out in a pretty orange miasma, and no matter the ventilation fans, the mask, the gloves and goggles, you could never be sure a little bit was not getting in each time.
but of all the carcinogenic substances and rooms in that department, the rosen room was the one for me. working into a metal plate, if you think about it, is far from drawing or painting. you carry it from room to room, sometimes carving into it, sometimes letting this fine powder settle on its surface, before you heat it up, melt it on and dip it in the mordant. other students did not take to the rosen room and its swirling clouds.
if you got it right though, if, with cranking and delicacy and fire and patience you could melt the powder on the plate just so, it was like alchemy. the mordant ate away at the exposed metal and when printed, it produced even expanses of ink that, when you looked closer, revealed themselves to be small mottled universes, minute arrangements of stars and fortuitous galaxies.