The words that make up worlds matter. Maybe no mythic figure understands this better than Cassandra, the prophetess cursed never to be heard. To have absolute knowledge and be helpless to change the course of things. We are inundated today with news of unceasing destruction—whose voices are screaming, mutely?

Nalini Malani's collateral show at the Venice Biennale draws parallels between the present's horrific realities and the undermining of female and other agencies. We can scream and scream, but to not be regarded is the burden those in the margins bear. Art is never

neutral, so why are we appalled if it offers us a mirror of our mutated reality, our review of the Biennale questions? The review of Nat Pyper's 'A Queer Year of Love Letters', a volume of queer typography, perhaps makes the claim of words mattering most tangible. As Pyper notes in the book, the shape words take can become their own form of resistance. It can allow us to forge kinships across time and space. It matters whose voices we listen to. It matters who can shape our shared futures.