I wanted to begin this week with an object that has utility — something made for navigation, for calculation, for finding one's way — but rendered useless by time. The brass astrolabe feels right: it carries both African astronomical traditions and Mediterranean trade history, it's small enough to be intimate, and it transforms beautifully. In this first image, it's a relic of commerce and colonialism, held by someone who has outlasted the system that created it. The flooded counting house gives us institutional collapse without apocalypse — just the slow victory of water and time. I chose Yoruba-Venetian fusion because both cultures understood trade as cosmology, and I wanted that tension between spiritual value and market value present from the first frame.