For me, a vessel is anything that can hold, carry, store, transmit, or transform something else. I keep coming back to this word. Vessel.

Through my research on vessels I fell in love with this Black-owned vessel, the Black Star Line. I loved the idea of a vessel not referencing trauma and bondage but vision and ownership.

What I fell in love with most was the idea that a vessel could hold a vision and a failure at the same time. Ambition and exhaustion. Possibility and limitation. Success and collapse. That felt human. It felt alive. That's what I wanted to investigate.

Around late 2025, my own vessel was breaking down. My immune system was failing me. I was exhausted, burnt out, in the middle of a major transformation.

I later shared all of this with my friend Darol Olu Kae, and he referenced Christina Sharpe's speech, What could a vessel be? I played this nonstop. And that shit hit me like lightning.

This work didn't start here. It started with Handle With Care (2024), a room full of postcards people left for each other, and it never stopped. I'm still carrying those voices. I scanned every postcard from that mailroom into what comes next, because that's what a vessel does. It holds what you give it and keeps passing it on.

Energy Reserve Systems unfolds through a series of Vessel Studies, looking at what vessels hold, what they carry, and what survives because of them. In Vessel Study 001 the voicemail is one vessel among many. Alongside the hotline, the mixtape, the quilt, the archive, and this publication itself.