room of leaves

The Room of Leaves Mythology

When I filled my bedroom with autumn
Sophia Stopper Aug 01, 2025

Room of Leaves (with tender indifference,) detail, created by Sophia Stopper in Porto, PT at De Liceiras 18, 2016

Soon I packed my suitcase and slung my backpack over my shoulder boarding the plane with Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red in my arms. A queer love story. Mythologically sound. Grounded in Greek heritage. Highlighter in hand. Always ready to capture the extra magical things on the page while floating on the tops of clouds. Those white mountains. It could be raining beneath, we’d never know. Safe up there between clouds and outer space. I always choose a window seat.

The plane landed in a country I had never been to before: Portugal. Fresh new beginnings. My head was buzzed and I was like a baby bird getting to know their feathers. I was in Portugal for an artist residency at De Liceiras 18 in the center of Porto. Stepping out of the taxi, I saw the old historic building for the first time. A new place I would soon call home. There were three other artists in the house and a kitten named Lato. Over time, Lato let me hold him like a baby and I cherished those small miraculous moments.

Babie Lato, the full name of this kitten, I would learn from the Director of the residency, was a Polish (I have Polish heritage on my paternal grandmother’s side, so I identified with this already) season of the spiderwebs. It’s when the fine silky threads of spiders’ weaving enters the air. This idea would become central to my work. I learned of Alina Szapocznikow from this Polish Director, her sculptures and letter writings:

“Life is short, is lovely, as long as it can be sincere, true, and strong, not sugary sentimental. Flowers are a miracle of nature and a joy to humanity. Although of course everything is a miracle of nature. The strongest word in your letter is “damned.” It was only then that I really felt how damned much you love me, and you don’t have to be sorry for that.”

I write to VW with this sentiment in my heart. I am not sorry for the love I have for them. I make art, I write, I send books, what can I say—I’m a sucker for connection. I remember way back when, I said, “I love a slow fall”. Most people have to ask me what I mean by that. But when I said that to VW, they just nodded and said, “me too”.
Photo taken by Pin-hui Chen at Miramar beach in Portugal 2016

I stepped through the threshold and found a mattress on two pallets on the ground, a dresser, and two big open windows leading to a roof. We would spend countless hours sitting on that roof. Talking, Singing, watching the tiny birds in the birds nest across the way try to fly. Not yet. Your wings need more strength, little one. Sea air graced my lungs and the scent sent me swimming. There is something about the ocean that always brings back memories. Maybe it’s being in proximity to a big body of water. Feet in the sand at Miramar. Stepping over the rocks while my friend takes pictures. I am in a high waisted floral print bathing suit wearing my yellow traveling hat I got at a hat shop in Transylvania last year. But now I am in the water on the other side of the ocean from the place I grew up. It’s still the Atlantic Ocean though. That distance that always felt so wide and yet not so far away at all.

Room of Leaves (with tender indifference,) detail, created by Sophia Stopper in Porto, PT at De Liceiras 18, 2016

I began collecting the leaves. Every day, at sunset. Two suitcases full of them. Walked across town in that yellow hat and a floral dress that was a variant of the passing days. It was August, though there was one street in Porto where autumn was happening early. This came as a welcome surprise after having missed the fall last year due to living in the desert. After filling my suitcases with them, I would bring them home and dump the leafy contents onto my bedroom floor. I did this for the first three weeks in August of 2016. Filling my bedroom with them.

Room of Leaves (with tender indifference,), created by Sophia Stopper in Porto, PT at De Liceiras 18, 2016

The leaves overtook my possessions. I began losing things within them. Books, coffee cups, oil pastels, coins, and the like. I think back to the book I was reading at the time–Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. He states with clarity:

“The autumn will take everything, everything I ever thought or dreamed, everything I did or did not do, spent matches scattered at random on the floor, discarded scraps of paper, great empires, all the religions and philosophies that the drowsy children of the abyss played at making. The autumn will take everything, everything, that is, that made up my soul, from my noblest aspirations to the ordinary house in which I live, from the gods I once worshipped to my boss Vasques. The autumn will take everything, will sweep everything up with tender indifference. The autumn will take everything.”

This section of text felt and feels so close to me. I recently mailed my annotated copy of this book I’ve had for almost ten years to someone I trust to keep it safe. Someone I believe will see the wonder in it, like I do.
Room of Leaves (with tender indifference,) detail, created by Sophia Stopper in Porto, PT at De Liceiras 18, 2016

To fall asleep with a rustling sound. The wind, the curtains, the leaves–a perfect combination. There was the glorious smell of decay. That smell that’s so nostalgic, we wait for it every falltime. And it always brings us back. To the past, to memory caves. Spelunking through these stalactites and stalagmites. Going underwater in the process. But there is so much to discover there.

From the journal of Sophia Stopper while creating the Room of Leaves. This text reads: The early whispers of autumn, the flight of the two-headed bird.

From the journal of Sophia Stopper while creating the Room of Leaves. This text reads: I began by collecting the precious things that exist in a world that is other than ours. I store them safely between pages, pieces of petrified earth. I am gentle with your body, though fingers fall clumsily leaving whispers on the surface of your skin. Crawling out of the core of me, we contact each other in a place of repetition. The physicality of fingertips stimulates a ballet of the body, transforms the body into a bouquet of wildflowers found only by walking down the winding pathways of the woods.

I kept a journal during this time. I entitled it with tender indifference, after Pessoa. I imagine signing a letter that way. “With tender indifference, Sophia”. Or perhaps it was a letter sent to me? That’s more likely when I think I made this installation piece for VW. When I say VW, I don’t really mean Virginia Woolf, but it’s the initials I hide you under. I would have never read A Room of One’s Own without you. And you’ll never write back to me, again. Although I know there’s compassion between us. That I’ve never fully doubted.