Memory, myth, and abandonment thread through TRACE’s work, creating a complex emotional landscape that speaks to the trans experience. In her album T4TEARS, TRACE gives voice to lost histories, crafting songs that mourn the childhoods and lives that might have been—yet never were. The music and visuals merge to form a coherent whole, each element amplifying the other’s emotional resonance. The apocalyptic world in T4thirteen, a collaboration with Kurt, becomes a metaphor for the deep sense of isolation that often accompanies trans survival. Through this post-apocalyptic vision, TRACE invites listeners into a world where memory is fragmented and myth is both a refuge and a reckoning. It is an exploration of what it means to exist in the absence of full recognition, both from society and from oneself.

TRACE’s journey is haunted by memories she “never had”—an intriguing paradox. What role does unreliable memory play in shaping the narrative?

TRACE: For me, memory—and its inherent unreliability—plays a significant role in trans narratives and history. Often, we must make and remake ourselves and our histories from scratch—out of nothing, from a void. In doing so, we also create memories that may never have existed, ensuring they hold us in the future.

My album T4TEARS, its songs, and its video are memorial artifacts that facilitate mourning for trans pasts, lives, childhoods, and teenagehoods that never were and may never be.

The post-apocalyptic world in T4thirteen feels like a character in itself. How did you build the visual language for this environment?

TRACE: The world of T4thirteen and the album T4TEARS have several key characters: myself, my inner trans child (whom I’m trying to connect with), my collaborators who join me on this journey, and the inner void we seek to fill, traverse, or describe. The visual language and the post-apocalyptic world Kurt proposed resonated on a deep emotional level with these ideas.

KURT HEUVENS: I have always been interested in our built environment, how we shape and treat what surrounds us, what we as human beings leave behind and how change and transformation manifests itself in it. The town featured in the video has been almost completely depopulated many years ago due to a planned expansion of the Hambach lignite mine, the largest surface mine in Europe. In the Rhein-Ruhr area where me and Trace live there is an abundance of industrial wasteland, shaped by centuries of mining and steel production, a gigantic terraforming experiment. There is a generous amount of symbolism lying around here. You can’t live inside a memory but you can go there on a trip, or something like that.

Myth-making seems to play a significant role across your body of work, including your documentary in Colombia. Do you view TRACE as part of that mythological exploration?

KURT HEUVENS: Right now I am at a carnival in a small mountain town some hours outside of Medellin, Colombia where they celebrate the arrival of Satan. For almost three years me and my partner have been investigating myth-making as a practice of telling stories that defy the bondage of a rationalized world, a deliberate rejection of a life without magic. Both this film and the video series Рідне I made with our collective Remote Control in Ukraine are collaborative works that weave together not just my artistic authorship, but those of others as well. Working with Trace meant stepping into an already rich musical and visual universe – building upon it, but also trying to remain free from its constraints to create something new.

The music and visuals feel inseparable in TRACE. Can you talk about the collaborative process with the album and its sonic elements?

TRACE: Although TRACE is, strictly speaking, a solo project, I’ve always viewed it as deeply collaborative. At one point during the album’s creation, I felt I no longer wanted to be on my own. I was trying to connect with this trans child—my younger self—and create an album for her and through her, one that she would love. Along the way, I realized she deserved a sense of community and more warmth. I wanted her to hear other trans and queer voices, not just mine. I wanted her to hear that other people came out to create a unique sonic universe with and for her. It felt important to gift her something to look forward to because she deserved that.

T4thirteen’s pacing and imagery suggest a deep sense of abandonment. Was this emotional landscape informed by personal experiences, research, or something else?

TRACE: This deep sense of abandonment is at the root of most trans experiences and survival. Most of the straight world has abandoned us—and continues to do so. Even within the queer world, there’s often this lingering sense of abandonment.

If you talk to any trans person, trans girl, or trans child, you’ll likely find a strong connection between abandonment and transness. Much of the world would prefer we didn’t exist, shaping their campaigns and policies around erasing us. In response, we as trans people often live in timelines and rhythms that diverge from the rest of the world. T4thirteen’s video captures the ambiguity – the beauty, but also the unbearable nature of this.