Join us for an evening of readings to celebrate the release of the second edition of our annual Reader.
Serpentine is pleased to launch the second annual issue of Serpentine Reader, Issue 02: I Hope This Finds You Well, a collection of essays, fiction, poetry and experimental writing that rethinks self-help for an era of systemic instability.
Following Issue 01: Circulation, which examined the movement of water, bodies, images and power, this new edition turns to a phrase so familiar it often goes unnoticed: I hope this finds you well. What does “wellness” mean now, in a world that increasingly is not?
As contemporary wellness culture promises optimisation, resilience and personal transformation, the texts in Issue 02 probe its contradictions. Is self-help a route to liberation, or another marketable illusion? When care is automated, commodified and reduced to email sign-offs, corporate mindfulness sessions and chatbot companions, what forms of care still feel real?
Across the issue, contributors explore how wellness is performed, managed and sold, even as collective conditions deteriorate. Here, self-help becomes something more unstable and more collective: a set of stories we tell ourselves, and each other, about survival, value and possibility.
Contributors: Asa Seresin, David Lisbon, Eliot Haworth, Stephanie Wambugu, Alex Quicho, Anahid Nersessian, Ebun Sodipo and Joycelyn Longdon.
Each copy of Serpentine Reader: Issue 02 includes one unique sticker from a limited set of five designs by Alake Shilling, featuring her iconic characters paired with original words of affirmation. Reprints of Serpentine Reader: Issue 01 will also be available at the launch.
The launch event will feature readings from contributors and marks the first public presentation of Serpentine Reader: Issue 02.
Contributor Bios
Asa Seresin is a writer and researcher based in London. His first book, Conflict of Interest, is forthcoming in 2027 from Hutchinson Heinemann/Liveright. His writing has appeared in Cabinet, Spike, Tank, and The New Inquiry. He is a final-year PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania.
David Lisbon currently works at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before becoming a curator, he studied and practiced architecture in New York City. In graduate school, Lisbon wrote about surveillance in art institutions and advocated for a more transparent and democratic use of institutional data. He believes unleashing this data as art can help educate the public about how their personal information is used by third parties. After graduating from the RCA in 2021, he worked in the private sector, developing websites, digital experiences, and consulting on the production of NFTs.
Eliot Haworth is a writer, editor, and researcher based in London. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, MacGuffin, Flash Art, i-D, Capsule, Real Review, and the Design Museum’s Future Observatory Journal. He holds positions as architecture editor at MACK Books, editorial director of Fantastic Man, and associate lecturer on the MArch at Central Saint Martins. His upcoming book, Things Get In: On Architecture and Animals, will be published by MACK in early 2027.
Stephanie Wambugu is the author of the novel Lonely Crowds (Canongate, 2026). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, frieze, The Nation, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.
Alex Quicho is a theorist based in London. Her practice develops novel ways of understanding life within technological systems, unfolding in multi-year cycles through critical writing, performative lectures, and moving image. Past major projects include Girlstack (2023–25), an investigation into the planetary impact of inhuman “girl” intelligence; Alley to Heaven (2021–23), a trilogy of videos and performances on data annotators and edge computing in the contested South China Sea; and Small Gods (2017–20), a book of departures in drone narratives.
Her work has been featured in Wired, Frieze, Dazed, Vogue, Spike, The Face, MIT Journal, and others. She has collaborated with institutions including Serpentine Galleries, the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Tate Britain, Somerset House Studios, Singapore Art Museum, Power Station of Art Shanghai, Julia Stoschek Collection, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Fondation Pernod-Ricard, and Rennie Museum. In 2025, she was a mentor at Medialab Matadero, a research fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, and an advisor for Prix Ars Electronica. She teaches theory on the MA Narrative Environments programme at Central Saint Martins and studied Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art.
Anahid Nersessian is a writer and Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, London Review of Books, Mousse, and Bidoun, among others. Her most recent book is Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2021).
Ebun Sodipo makes work for Black trans people of the future. Guided by Black feminist study and a methodology of collage and fabulation, her practice locates and produces real and imagined narratives of Black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across past, present, and future. In doing so, she fills historical gaps to create moments of archival pleasure for Black trans people. Her work spans multiple spaces—galleries, festivals, theatre, digital, and print—and takes varied forms, including sound, performance, text, installation, video, and sculpture.
Her work has been shown, read, watched, and performed at Frieze London, Cubitt, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, SHOWstudio, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s How to Sleep Faster, Auto Italia, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, Tate Britain, Text zur Kunst, Bergen Kunsthall, Wasafiri, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, and Camden Arts Centre.
Joycelyn Longdon is an award-winning researcher, technologist and storyteller bridging the worlds of ecology, technology and environmental justice. Her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge centres on the design of justice-led conservation technologies for monitoring biodiversity with local forest communities in Ghana. As a leading storyteller, adviser and communicator, Joycelyn weaves complex concepts and diverse voices across ecology, culture and technology into nuanced and personal narratives to inspire healing, connection, and collective change. She was 2022’s winner of the Emerging Designer London Design Medal, and was featured in British Vogue’s December 2023 ‘Forces for Change’ Issue. Most recently, she has been listed as one of Pique Action and Harvard Chan C-CHANGE’s 2024 Climate Creators to Watch and as one of Country and Town House’s Future Icons Power People 2024 and is a TEDx Alumni. Her debut book, Natural Connection: What Indigenous Wisdom and Marginalised People Teach Us About Environmental Action, was published by Penguin Vintage in April 2025 and will be published in the US by Princeton University Press in April 2026.
Serpentine Reader is organised and edited by Hanna Girma, Senior Editor and Curator of Editorial Projects and designed by Louise Camu.
