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The edition of riso prints I made almost as a joke, sitting at the print table during a residency, outsells everything I've put actual weeks into. Etchings that took me months to pull. Nobody buys them. The 60 cent machine-made copies sell out in two days. I keep telling myself it's because they're cheap, people can afford them, they don't need a frame and a wall. But the real reason is probably that they photograph flat and fast and that's what the feed wants. The etching doesn't read on a phone. The riso does. So the market rewards the thing that reproduces well, and I'm a printmaker, I should find that funny. It is funny. It's also a little humiliating that I'm fifty euros away from just making risos full time and telling myself it's a conceptual choice. I'm not complaining about the money. I'm complaining that I can't tell anymore if I'm following the work or the algorithm disguised as the work.

There's something deeply satisfying about the Riso's mechanical pulse. It's a steady drone that pulls me into the work. Today I'm running a new test run for that series on urban decay – just two colors, a deep cyan and a kind of muted ochre. I love how the layering creates these unexpected muddy greens. It feels like finding something in the dirt. Sometimes I think the machine has more agency than I do in the final image.

Just finished pricing a risograph edition, 12 prints, two colors, and I landed on €45 each. The math is fine if you count paper, ink, the masters, the studio time. But I didn't count my time in it at all. I never do. I put "artist labor" in the spreadsheet as if it's a line item I can just leave blank and come back to later, and I never come back to it. It's a weird thing with editioned work specifically. With a single painting I can at least pretend the hours are the point. With a run of 12 copies the whole logic is that it's reproducible, and somehow that makes me feel like I'm not allowed to charge for the making of it. Like the edition is supposed to be cheap because it's a multiple, and that's the entire trap, because the original is dead expensive and the edition should be the accessible gateway, except then I've made something that costs me 12 hours and pays me zero per hour. A friend put it well once: you're not selling the object, you're selling the permission to own a thing that came out of your head. The paper is nearly free. I should try actually believing that before the next one.

Found out last week that the gallery I show with in Berlin takes 50% on editions. Not prints sold through them, editions. I knew the percentage when I signed, I just never did the math on what it meant for the small riso multiples that sell for €80. So the collector pays €80, I get €40, and after paper, ink, the screen, the riso drum wear if I bother to count it, packing, and the trip to drop them off, I'm maybe at €25 a piece. Four hours of editioning to sell four of them and I've made what I'd get for one hour of teaching. The stupid part is I keep pricing as if the gallery cut doesn't exist. I know I should raise the retail price but I'm scared the small multiples stop selling because they're my only "affordable" entry point. So instead I just quietly resent it every time I drop off a batch. I think I need to actually sit down and decide: do I raise the editions to €100 and lose some buyers, or do I stop pretending the gallery is worth it for the small stuff and keep selling those direct? The gallery does bring me the serious collectors, the ones who buy the big etchings. But I can't keep eating the cost on the entry-level work just to feel like I have a foot in the door. Has anyone else had the moment where they did the real math on a gallery split and realized the "foot in the door" was basically them paying for the privilege?

A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save. You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it. I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics. Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.

Third time this week my Riso has eaten a master and crumpled it into a little accordion. I know it's probably the paper moisture or the master tension or whatever, but I've cleaned the drum twice, adjusted the feed, and it still decides to destroy every tenth print like it's personal. The worst part is the sound. That high-pitched mechanical scream when it jams. My studio mate in the next room doesn't even ask anymore, she just hears the noise and goes "again?" through the wall. I know this machine is supposed to be this beautiful imperfect tool and the flaws are part of the charm. I don't want charm. I want fifty zines by Friday and this thing is testing my commitment to the multiple as a concept.

I spent yesterday afternoon reorganizing the flat files, moving the drying rack, finally putting the riso where I can actually reach it without climbing over a chair. Everything has a place now. It's beautiful. I walked in this morning and sat down and couldn't do a thing. It's not just the disruption. It's that the chaos was doing something for me, the mess had a logic, piles I'd reach for without thinking, everything I needed within arm's reach even if it looked like a disaster to anyone else. Now I have to learn where I live again. I keep opening the wrong drawer. Maybe there's something here about how the friction of a space is part of how we think in it. The stumble, the wrong drawer, the thing you knock over, that's also material. A too-efficient studio is a studio that doesn't talk back. Or maybe I just need a week to break it in again. But I'm annoyed at myself for fixing something that wasn't broken.