On 2 August 2012, I came to live in London with one bag and £40 in my pocket..
On 2 August 2012, I came to live in London with one bag and £40 in my pocket. Another festival of changing direction in my artistic life. A spontaneous leap, a risky venture, blind fate—or perhaps amor fati.
I had lived many lives and in many places before, always imagining that one day London might become my destination. I first fell in love with the city through Freddie Mercury’s extravagant mythology. As a teenager, after his death, I was so upset that I almost burned down my room—burning the diary with my christening candle, and later spraying “Satan” in navy blue along my grandmother’s block of flats as an act of mourning for my beloved idol. I loved London through Freddie’s eyes.
I came here looking for love and freedom. I found love. My beloved Aeon Rose.
Freedom, however, arrived wounded.
I discovered a society deeply shaped by consumerism and conformity: ‘”Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete.” (Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life).
I felt increasingly alienated from it and lost the desire for deeper assimilation. Instead, I turned inward, toward art, imagination, and my own forms of escape.
But perhaps none of this is a tragedy. Perhaps it was material.
As I enter my fifteenth year in London, I am making three feature films about different states of this post-Protestant, high-consumerist world: Sick Bacchus, The First Hour After Violent Death, and The Day of Losing One’s Name.
My London Trilogy.
Fourteen years after arriving with one bag and £40, I may finally understand what London gave me.
Not the freedom I came looking for.
But the freedom to make art from everything I found.
— Monika K. Adler, London, 2026.
