La ropita no es prestada, me la compré yo

La vida no está tan pelada y fácil como yo pensaba

Pero chale, peor es nada y pa adelante voy”

Natanael Cano

This story starts with three people sharing a can of sardines —or is it a can of tuna? My faith in something better wants me to believe that the three of us had forks, but truth is we shared the same fork, we shared the same bed, the same pillow and sheet, we shared the same homeless pain. This wasn’t an every night thing, yet this memory is burned into my inner child’s resented heart. Unmovable and restless. Im there with my family in this student bedroom, and I can still draw my mother’s face, reflecting a poverty she was not ready to repeat, the same one that has chased and managed to get hold of her again and again throughout her life.

One might stop being hungry, but one never forgets hunger.

For the longest time I spent my nights not sleeping but partying: drinking and doing drugs, getting laid and acting out. For the longest time I’ve shared my bed with strangers, so much I’ve became bedgentle, which means im good in bed —whatever the fuck that means; I spent my nights in a hospital bed fighting an incurable broken leg and an increasingly insane head, praying that freedom will come with better things. For the longest time my housing situation depended on friends and lovers, on the charity of people that sometimes cared and sometimes wanted. Im grateful for some of them and I could’ve avoided the mess that came with what some people around me disguised as help. For the longest time keys where just a tool to sniff coke off of, they never solved the threshold issue.

One might stop being homeless, but one never forgets homelessness.

*

Some weeks ago a friend of mine asked me and my roommates to sign a support letter to the city, a legally bound paper that stated that him and his friends were good neighbors. This letter was an attempt to keep a house they squatted. I made a mistake and signed only one of the sheets when actually I had to sign two. His response to my mistake was quite poisonous. This toxic treat triggered me into thinking a lot about what it would really mean for them to get kicked out of this house and to realise that they have parents that have houses to fall back into. It reminded me that most of the squatters I’ve met in my life didn’t need to squat anything, but only did as a privilege, one very well masked as rebellion.

So fuck it, masks off.

My friend apologised for his bullshit message and it’s all good, im not angry anymore, but im also not not-angry. I mean, wtf, some of this kids really believe that somehow not paying rent in this country means anything! It is nothing besides the big FUCK YOU to all the people that actually have to find a roof to rest their heads every night of this unfair world.

First pay rent, then we can talk about fucking the police.

*

I tend to isolation. I’ve been forced so long to be by alone that I got used to it, my safe space is a bed with a book. In my isolation fantasy I find a small house under the trees with enough space for a bed, a table and one or two bookshelves, maybe three bookshelves. In my fantasy there is a house in the woods in which I live and im happy, smoking my pipe, growing my beard and listening to some weirdo folky tunes. Clearly I need to grow up, but I won’t. Dreaming was what fed me when there was no real food around to bite into.

During most of my childhood I saw my mom struggle and do everything she could to get us a safe haven, a house where the three of us could sleep in three beds and eat with three forks. She gave all of it to make that happen, and she did so just to see us leave her behind to do lives that don’t include her. Everything she fought for left her alone to herself, isolated without wanting it. During most of my early adulthood I saw my brother fight with everything he had to not miss another meal, he sacrificed everything for us and In this battle he forgot what made him smile, isolating himself without realizing it. My father, he says, doesn’t even own a bed to sleep in, but won’t let us buy one for him. He built himself an isolation chamber so thick we stopped trying to take him out of it.

I tend to isolation and sometimes I wonder why.

No, im kidding, I know the reasons very well.

💣

It cannot be argued that what society hates and fears the most, and not without good reasons, is the isolated subject. Terrible stories about lonely dudes that do weird shit permeate (mostly) the western world. There is a subject that society isolates and there is the subject that isolates itself from society, sometimes the same person fits both profiles. This can be a dangerous person because in a lot of different ways this isolated subject is challenging the rules of society, continuously giving its middle finger to the community. Writers, for example, are isolated subjects, and they should be because writing requires distance. Writing is tightroping, balancing over dangers.

It is known that Kafka scratched himself a burrow where he wrote, and was fed by invisible hands he did not allow to cross the threshold of his neurosis; Diogenes lived in an old clay pot he shared with his dogs, rejecting everything except the sun; Theodore Kaczynski, like Walden, moved to the forrest and spent most of his adult life writing letters and walking around in traceless shoes; Pedro José has spent the better part of the last two decades in and out of hospitals, travelling without moving and writing a book that never ends, the list goes on long enough to pay attention to it.

I must be honest: im mostly interested in these subjects, but im scared of them because they hold a very confronting mirror to be reflected upon1. Some call these people radicals, but I disagree. Like art —at least in the last century of its production in the west— radicality is also defined by the angle from which is seen or the context where is presented. What is radical to me, might not be to the reader. And the other way around. Everything, or almost, is a matter of perception.

Except for hunger.

Hunger is real and hungry is how I feel.

When I moved to this country I did it in part because I wanted to live closer to nature, in a cabin, in the woods. The last four years of my life I have shared a home with three wonderful roommates, one of which I love like the father im not. The last four years of my life i met a lot of different people, some of them are my friends today, some of them don’t even say hi when they pass me in the street and that’s ok, its life, they couldn’t take two straight days of my best month so im not wasting energy on them bad vibes. The last four years of my life I have worked in a lot of restaurants and art related projects, im blessed and fortunate, its not casual, im one of the hardest worker I know.

*

This years started with a bomb and continued with an earthquake, in the middle of that mess I’ve thrived because, honestly, the only thing small on my plate right now is the plate.

“They say that history repeats itself,” he says, “but history is his story; it is not my story…Nature never repeats itself. Why should I repeat myself?”

Sun Ra

This story ends with a key. The key opens the cabin in the woods that I was dreaming about while working my ass off for it. I still don’t have a bed, like my father, but I crossed the threshold into the life I wanted for myself, on my conditions. My mother and grandmother, on the other side of the factory, congratulated me while crying from joy. One of my best friends told me that now —finally! I will really go crazy; my brother showed his respects and Juan straight up told me: well dog, you might have to write a manifesto.

I guess I have to.

S

LoL

S

I somehow feel safe to put it here, thanks for supporting me.

one love.

*

Im having dinner with some friends and someone tells the news of a murder in some town nearby. Another person says that the oficial media coverage has turned the murderer into a religious radical foreign murderer, as if local murderers are better somehow, stripped of symbolic weight, somehow killing outside the fear spectrum.

Good timing is everything.

*

You can be trained to hate, but you cant get trained for it.

I correct myself, no one should be trained for it.

Some (of us) are.

*

Vegan oriented workforces, national milk drinking associations, flinta only households, dialect only speaking specialty coffee shops, you name it, is a way in which the white liberal team are allowed (to continue) doing what they’ve done their entire lifespan: discriminate. Its a smart way of giving themselves the right to discriminate thru the gentle art of saving their planet. These disguised restrictions shouldn’t be mistaken for a special branch of wokeness, for anything that would stretch itself outside the scope of traditional racism. All this word play (language) is not the birth of a new (non) racist subject, painfully born out of a conscious struggle. No. Most of it is just the same old white power wearing Salomon shoes. Tecnocratic-Digital-Capitalism is insanely adaptable, while most of the contemporary social bubbles thrive on self-restriction, the power that runs them pleasures itself on everything that appears on its way. This is one of the reasons why its dangerous to not know what it is that is affected by our own existence, how is it that some of the things our daily lives uses to keep going are outside of the sustainability Obsessive Complex.

*

In culture there is always the talk about the artist and the work. For some time know, and due to the problematic nature of western art canons, this has been an unavoidable discussion that tries to make sense of what we like, how and why we like it. I think its a necessary work. But I also think its “ok” to enjoy or/and like things that might be off by the “new” standards. Thats my hot take, it is at least one of my hot takes. People that act like their entire values don’t rest and thrive on the shoulders of problematic art, murderous histories and exclusively male gazed philosophies are (in my opinion) very suspicious. It seems like a very unprocessed attitude towards life. A life that has not done any substantial check-in with itself in some five hundred years.

*

Green parties all over the white world are transitioning into the right, and although it might seem out of place, one should remember that the white liberal ecological discourse was anchored to sustain a way of life that is actually unaffordable outside of its bubble.

What the eco parties are about to do it’s nothing but their natural path.

*

Sustainability is a tricky word, who and what gets carried thru it is a valuable question.

It has been said that the only thing needed to beat power is nothing —except of sustaining it no longer, freeing our shoulders from the burden of carrying it with us all day long.

*

By the way, if we all agreed that the artwork cant be separated from the artist, does that mean we also accepted that the people cant be separated from their politics?

Don’t buy local: feed a Global South mom.

:)

*

There is also infantilisation which in the case of language comes in subtle forms, like the one that prays to the consideration that being invited/forced to speak in a national language would be most helpful to learn it. The superficial answer is yes, but no thank you. The real answer is that the way in which each person engages with their learning curve should not be disguised as aid when in reality its just laziness hiding soft oppression. It has come to my attention that the majority of people don’t want to communicate in a common language2 because they are shy or feel ashamed when making understandable mistakes, but what amazes me is what makes these same people think that —at the first stages of learning one of the most bureaucratically complex languages in the world, German!— feelings of shame and/or shyness wouldn’t be aroused in the other. Putting the person learning to the impasse of publicly practicing your language is a social levelling act.

*

Integration is a taming process. One that was thought of by the same people that brought you zoos and prisons, psychiatric hospitals and circuses; it responds to the same needs: passivity, control, expectations and compliance.

*
No one can be fully integrated for two reasons: one is the fact that who demands it doesn’t want it, the other is that complete integration demands a loss of oneself that would entail complete symbolical death.

*
Abundant with NPCs3 Kafkas literature is swollen with people that we cant really see —but whose presence we feel— but know are there. A feeling imposed by an unwelcoming language, an expecting society, in Kafka everything is an attempt to integration since all the main characters in his literature are out of place, foreigners to the norm.

*
Integration is to the foreigner what domestication is for the animal, that is “a public pedagogy of power”4.

******

I wanted to know if Guy Debord could be Printed out avoiding bullshit, which is --i know— bullshit in itself. Something tells me that Debord1 would not approve of me asking the robot about this.

Today is one day after International Book Day and to celebrate that i’d like to share a manifesto i’ve been writing on and off, a sort of (un)asked explanation for a publishing project im working on for more than a decade. Through out this journey its name has changed numerous times, but the core of it remains the same: lack of platforms results in self-made platforms that never end evolving and searching for unification in a coherent project based practice, one that unifies languages, research, theories and questioning.

*

Off-center assumes that we’ve been shadow-banned, that what we do is already and will be in the near future (purposely) forgotten; Off-center are publications that come from the margins; Off-center is the practice of printing with what is at arms length; Off-center is the circulation of knowledge outside the mandated circle of knowledge circulation; Off-center opposes the compartmentalisation of cultures from top to bottom and proposes a side by side collaborative approach inside the building that houses every culture; Off-center agitates the table where, most certainly, it has not been invited to eat; Off-center deals with knowledge and with those who own it; Off-center distributes printed matter that subvert, and further develops, the structure shaping contemporary culture; Off-center positions itself in combat mode against the passive perception, looting and exoticization of foreign/alien cultural products, whichever they may be; Off-center focuses on the why(?) of our printing practice more than on the what(?) would be printed; Off-center is an access platform that welcomes unaligned culture; Off-center is about the toppling of oficial narratives with unofficial fictions that are, none the less, as real as reality; Off-center reserves its reproduction rights, yet it believes in your right to reproduce us; Off-center steals —not unlike reading, wandering and gazing— time from power; Off-center reckons that publishing is a powerful apparatus, one that can hold powers accountable; Off-center is neither possible in our homeland nor yours, its the direct result of migration; Off-center is an alliance, a community of like minded difference; Off-center is basically papers, but from a different space and from an upcoming time.

Off-center started as misplacement, an imaginary library/bookshop that would travel in space and time, able as it was to cross borders2 of lands unknown, slowly mutating into publishing, sharing and selling cultural products that do not comply with the world3 and thus positioning itself proudly on the side, yet close enough to trespass it through a never ending migration process that carries knowledge created before, during, and after transit. One may ask: who is this migrant being? what is this migration process about? A migrant is anyone or anything that needs and dares to take a different route to its ends than the one proposed by oficial discourse, and the process is precisely the way it uses to follow up and achieve specific results. What are the ends? Ends are anything a migrant considers necessary and helpful to its struggle, while being at the same time the result of its effort. Most times these are the surplus product, a residue transformed into self preservation and the well being of those it holds dearly to its heart and actions.

Off-center reckons that publishing is a powerful apparatus, one that that can potentially hold power accountable, we believe that imagination is our most valuable asset4.

*

Recently I discovered the work and writings of Renée Green5 —the great North American born writtist— she has a publishing project called Free Agent Media6, in it I found the heart of my project extremely reflected.

This manifesto will be edited, re-written and tampered with by the parties involved.

thank you for reading <3

*

“Der wahre Weg geht über ein Seil, das nicht in der Höhe gespannt ist, sondern knapp über dem Boden. Es scheint mehr bestimmt stolpern zu machen, als begangen zu werden”.1

Franz Kafka

First I’d like to say -because I believe it- that literature comes from life, but I also believe that it should go back to it, somehow. Now, the path to integration is a line, and once you cross it there is another line: integration is a perfect design of thresholds and obstacles. Integration is then two lines: one of it disposed horizontally and the other vertically, both of them placed against those who are outside its disposition, integration is then, and by all means, an impasse. In their constitution integration laws make obvious that their main goal is to support and continue ways of living that are in its core contrary, or at least conflictive, to the so called integrating party. There is no integration without a complete make over by the foreigner attempting it, integration -and this has already been stated in the introduction to this series of essays- is a one way road. As a lawful entity it enunciates a harsh compendium of lessons: we are already here, we are just waiting for you; you can come in, but you cant play with our toys; please participate, just do it on our terms; etc…2 Thus integration is a negative de/reterritorialization of its finish line, a constant movement of the goal that it also set out to be its border. Integration, like Kafka’s literature, is a never ending transit of failures imposed on the other.

“No hay diferencia entre los aldeanos y el castillo—dijo el maestro”.3

Franz Kafka, El castillo.

There Is a question of availability: are we able to separate the artist from the work? And in the case we agree to do so, how do we proceed?

It is the work of the law to sanction. Sanctioning is a paradoxical disposition of the law, meaning that sanctions can both punish and allow, forbid or permit. I propose, through Kafka, a series of questions that might help us navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth that is the law. Is it possible to separate the legislators from the law? Is it possible to separate the legislators from those who elect them, and place upon them the power draft laws that will affect the life of those upon whom these laws will be executed? if the answer is yes4, then it is correct to state that legislators, the law and the commons are representative of a specific idiosyncrasy, one that relies on sameness. An equality built upon and into -what for the lack of a better term I’ll call- the national character5. One of the most interesting things about Kafka’s literature, one of the things that makes it contemporary6 is that its populated by beings that are trying to, and/or being forced to integrate into spaces in which no one wants them to be, least of all the inviting party, this is a fact that backbones the entire narrative of the Castle. Life -on the contrary- is not the same as literature, and integration is but the final tool7 of a state that failed to secure its borders from uninvited guests. As an apparatus —and it is one by all means, a dispositif in the sense in which it operates in/as the intersection and the transit space of elements like the law; work; family; culture and language, just to name a few of the most important thought machines that dialogue and fight inside of it— integration is expected to delay, obstruct and difficult the process of migration once it is officially, im talking legally, operative. This is the main reason why it appears to be static yet moves covertly as soon as it starts to feel desired.

Integration is a stealth vehicle that uses language as a legal decoy to beat the intruder in the castle8. One can never forget that the success, or the failure of it is that relies on the citizenry to be fully successful, and that as a democratic device its application involves the people that first forwarded it and that are later responsible for executing it, and since it works as a sort of conceptual gadget, or in any case as an unnoticeable actualisation of the law through the people, integration is precisely the perverse side of the double binding that sanctioning implies.

Der umgekehrte Seiltänzer

As a child my father forbade me to read Kafka’s castle. It is one of those unforgetful “growing up” moments in my (literary) life, and from time to time i still look for its meaning: what did he meant with such a precise prohibition? As i publish this i know that he knew I’d figure it out at the right time. He was trying to protect me from the mirroring effect of a book that would expose my condition, that of displacement; he wanted to keep me away from the reflection that reminds us, foreigners, that we are not only chasers, but we are also being chased.

Integration is staying in the right lane.

Integration is a labyrinth of assumptions.

Integration is Kafka’s castle: ein unendliche Prozess.

Integration is a border after the border, after the border, after the border(…)

Integration is a management apparatus.

Integration is a subjectivation machine.

Integration is a recognition tool.

Integration is a flattening device.

Integration is an archive of expectations.

Integration is tightroping through history.

Integration is petting disconfort.

Integration is unpaid emotional labor.

Integration is the price of difference.

Integration is vulgar display of power.

Integration is unsolicited education.

Integration is the shame of cultural disappropriation .

Integration is the enemy showing up in the mirror.

Integration is an already broke promise.

Integration is the law at its pettiest.

Integration is the guilt of assimilation.

Frantz Fanon

Language, it’s been said, is the country of writers. But what happens when a writer is born to a language which will not be used by them, but later forced to learn? What happens when the amount of languages necessary to function multiply and complicate an already trouble head?

*

For Roberto Bolaño the country -das vaterland- of a worker are his hands. He is trying to overcome the shame and anger being forced upon him through a life long exile, by establishing an acute difference between writers, politicians and finally workers he builds a very complex defence mechanism. I think some exiles are forced by their time to be those three things at once, or three things at once, at least.

*

My first conscious experience of language is its presence as a lack, to be more precise, language as a limit. Let’s be even more precise, my first realisation of language as necessity—something it always is—was language as an obstruction that needed to be transgressed. It goes like this: I stand up in the middle of the class and approach my teacher knowing that I don’t have the means1 to say what I need to say. Im a useless five year old boy and my pants are buttoned so tight I cant unbutton them. I will pee myself. My teacher understands what is happening, and although she seems too overwhelmed to act on time she still manages to do, so I get to the bathroom on time. I did not pee myself that day, but I will pee and shit myself out fear and anxiety, a set of reactions that came along with not being able to communicate with anyone, outside an apartment they called home, until I learned, mostly by myself, to speak a language that i know, but continues to be alien to me.

Still today that first day feels like an eternity.

*

Fast forward an entire life: Im sitting inside another classroom, in which a large group of people understand each other, but don’t understand me, there im learning a new language and fast enough I get fairly good at it. I need to learn this language to live and work better at this new place I -want to- call home. Integration, I’ve been told, runs through Language, work and finally the law. I don’t think that the order of factors alters the plot.

*

While having Breakfast, and after reading the first few lines of this text, my partner asks me if integration isn’t a two way road. Its a very obvious and unexpected question to which I have no answer, on one side because I have not yet investigated enough about the origin of the word, and in another because I have never felt integration as a common apparatus2. I would even go as far as to say that it functions well as a legal trick that endlessly moves the target which migrants, exiles and refugees uselessly chase.

*****

In this new series of essays I will try to tackle integration. I will do it, as it’s usual within my texts, from a personal perspective. Meaning that my experience is the main informer of the ground im building, from this standpoint I will try to prove facts that are, not because of this method, only personal ones. This is a tricky endeavour, but I do enjoy a good puzzle. Integration -conflictive word- is my favourite puzzle right now.

to be continued…

UNheimat 3.0 – or how to carry worlds on your back

What does it mean to carry your house with you?

Unheimat is a term I coined to describe the feeling of estrangement within one’s own home—whether old or new. Inspired by the linguistic link between Heimat and unheimlich, Unheimat refers not only to the absence of a home, but to the improbability of belonging, even in the place where one currently lives.

This project emerges from personal experiences of migration, in which home is no longer a fixed location, but rather a place in motion—fragile, fragmented. As a foreign/migrant artist living in Switzerland, I ask: is home the place where I live and work? Is it what I build from afar—for myself and for my family? A building for a future that remains uncertain.

Living in a country where I will never completely belong means constantly shifting between time and space: one foot in the present, the other still in the history that shaped me. Within this in-between lies Unheimat—not as a lack, but as a space of possibility, a way to think, create, to live and survive.

This artistic position revolves around the interplay of migration, labor, memory, and care. The kitchen where I work is not just a space of labor—it is a place of connection. It is a strategy for survival—not just for myself, but for those I’ve left behind. Rather than pursuing art as a profession, living itself becomes an artistic practice: something built between life, literature, labor, exile and care.

Unheimat is standing in the fringe, an imperceptible movement in the threshold, it’s magic.

ATLAS

There is a vital—and often hidden—difference between the peoples forced to migrate today and those who once traveled to the lands from which we flew away from. This difference can be embodied in the figure of Atlas. Our Atlas never stops; he cannot afford to be still. Unlike the Olympian Atlas, we carry the world not only as punishment, but because if we stop, the cycle breaks, and the handover—another Atlas, another migrant—disappears.

Here emerges another crucial shift: our Atlas is not a single being but many, beyond gender and genealogy. And along the journey, we all become Atlas—at some point and in some way. Technically, an atlas is also a guide: a layout of the world as we know it, with its lines, shapes, and images; a compendium, an anthology of paths traced. An Atlas is also a map carved with the intention of its makers.

Our Atlas transcends the limits of any region secured by force; it is an open route along the border. Their power is inversely proportional to the weight they carry—a force shaped under oppression. That weight is made of worlds upheld and displaced, of dreams set in motion. In myth, the curse is stillness; in life, the burden must move in order to be sustained.

Unheimat 3.0 is the continuation of previous works that deal with migration as -when possible- a performative action. Taking into consideration the value that comes from movement to use it as a strategic form of art that leaves traces when it settles. Unheimat is not only a new word that reshapes the feeling of homelessness intrinsic to the movement of migration, but a thought apparatus that dares to understand this feeling thru an aesthetic practice developed on the go.

Bookshelter is the result of a mistake, the unwanted offspring of a summer fling

For the sake of rationality (that beautiful unicorn) one should say bookshelf instead of bookshelter

Its the blunder of emotionality, the glitter of vulnerability, the bedazzlement of empathy

Words that come from erring are the most beautiful thought machines

A brick can build a house and break its windows, depending on where is it, what its used for and what mechanical value gets applied to it: force+speed+direction=CRAC

A book is a brick and a house is a shelter, hence many books are the possibility of a shelter

Being warm and eating food; the (un)chanced encounter between differently coloured eyes; the fear that manages the economy of affections; the coincidences of disjointed limbs; the bonding of the same traumas; the chair that holds the reader; waking up to that insomniac reader, lost in his desert, (un)slept by your side

Bookshelter is the impossibility of an encounter, but the acknowledgement of a possible home where the books rest.

*

Some time ago I went to Barcelona to empty and bring back my books from my storage room. Being there things start cascading aggressively: books and comic books, clothes and notebooks, documents and blankets that document a beautiful moment that I destroyed; books that meant the world to me and that I could not care less of a fuck about at this moment in time. Fuck my entire life, I took this trip to pick this up and bring these books back home with me, to Bern, because home is where the books are, but it’s bullshit, home is something else, something Ive been searching forever and that I have not felt for a time that feels fornever.

And it scares me to think that I wont ever feel.

A friend would say Im being dramatic. I am, I am selfish and I cant think of a bigger drama than the one that finds no rest under any roof.

ARCHITECTURE ANIMOSITY

“Architecture is the expression of the very being of a society, just as the human face is the expression of an individual’s true being. It is, however, mainly to the visages of official persons (prelates, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison pertains. In truth, only the ideal beings of a society, those who have the authority to order and prohibit, can strictly speaking be expressed in architectural form. And so, the great monuments raise themselves before us like levees, countering all troubling elements with the logic of majesty and authority: it is in the guise of cathedrals and palaces that the Church and State speak to and impose silence upon the masses. It is clear, in fact, that these monuments inspire social compliance and often, real fear. The storming of the Bastille exemplifies this state of affairs: it is difficult to explain the motivation of the crowd other than through the peoples’ animosity toward the monuments that are their true masters.

Moreover, anywhere architectural composition manifests itself other than in monuments, whether in physiognomy, clothing, music, or painting, one can infer a predominant taste for authority, human or divine. The grand compositions of certain painters express a willingness to constrain the spirit toward official ideals. The disappearance of academic construction in painting, on the other hand, leaves the way open for the expression (hence the exaltation) of psychological processes deeply incompatible with social stability. This explains in large part the wild reactions provoked for over half a century by the progressive transformations of painting, which up until then had been constructed upon a kind of hidden architectural skeleton.

So, it is clear that this mathematical decree carved in stone is nothing less than the culmination of the evolution of earthly forms, manifested in the biological order by the passage from simian form to human form, the latter already displaying all the elements of the architectural. Man appears to represent but an intermediate stage in the morphological progression from apes to great edifices. Form has become increasingly fixed, increasingly imposing. And human order increasingly bound to architectural order, which is its ultimate development. So much so that if one attacks architecture, whose monumental productions all across the land are our true masters, gathering servile multitudes in their shadow, inspiring admiration and astonishment, order and constraint, then one is also, somehow, attacking man. A whole sphere of current practice, without doubt some of the most intellectually brilliant, is tending in this direction, challenging the predominant anthropomorphism: so, strange as it may seem when it comes to a creature as elegant as the human being, a path forward has been opened for us - by the painters - toward the bestial and the monstrous; as if this represents our only true chance of escaping the architectural overseer”.

-G. Bataille,

Documents.

Animation backgrounds are drawn alone, entire cities have been sketched for fiction without anyone walking thru them before the story and the characters are laid in and put to play. Cities are made alive by the necessity to fill a void that would be unbearable to witness. When its over and everything is finished this cities go to rest infinitely at a drawer somewhere, dark and silent cities which we will never see what actually happens.

*

We are driving underneath the bridge that waters into the Bolivar Av. in front of us and at the end las Torres del silencio, one of the migration post that separates the city and safeguards the class struggle. My friend Alexander invites me to look up as the tunnel finishes and immediately Im attacked by las Torres de parque central, the modern brutalist guardians of an unfulfilled intention: a cultural compound/housing complex, the wet dream of an oil extracting Midas that Caracas failed to please.

Alexander then quietly whispers in my ear: it’s Neo-Tokyo bro, we are living in AKIRA.

*
Some ideas have the capacity to change the way one perceives reality, mushrooming into obsessions. Obsessive bodies, organfull bodies of obsession that lack the space to action themselves into the self preserving space of reality, that boundary building monster. Caracas is the city that inspired Otomo’s epic, a dystopian entity that surpassed its future.

Carakira is a city we will only see after the apocalypse.

*

(Dis)ORIENTED(UN)reliability

I arrive in Cairo at 02:30 am and make my way windows open thru the highway to my Airbnb, breathing in the smog and enjoying the light show that keeps the city going way beyond the night. I don’t sleep, I close my eyes a couple of hours, open them and go on a walk around the area Im staying at. Its (Un)expectedly familiar so I don’t feel lost nor scared, Im bizarrely oriented and make my way thru motorcycles, buses and improvised businesses around this labyrinth. The reliable mistrust of this place makes me feel back home, Im again walking around Caracas, Venezuela.

Caracas the city that builds, destroys and builds itself again everyday; the self contained valley that fears itself into submission and feeds our survival in the form of mangoes; a dried out river filled with gold.

The last day Im there someone takes me to Cairo tower, the overwhelming tower overseeing a city that exceeded its limits long ago. She asks me if I feel disoriented in Cairo, I have to admit the contrary: Im extremely oriented here, there is a familiar beauty in its dizziness.

*

Unheimat is a word I started thinking of after a conversation with a friend. She started to talk about the feeling of estrangement that comes when being far away from our homeland long enough that you actually live in this not-so-temporary new place. She was looking for a word for something she’s feeling abroad and thought of: uncanny land. She needed to name the place she is going to be living in for the next six months and how her general lack of belonging was giving her a feeling of emptiness. I have always thought that whenever one would spend more than three weeks elsewhere from home, one is officially not travelling nor on vacations, but in a place where life happens.

#bleiben

I told her that uncanny (unheimlich) has always been sort of an non precise translation of a complicated German word, and an even sketchier psychological term coined by Freud. She acknowledged and I winked at her because I love wordplay.

*

Unheimat is a word I came up with by sticking together the negative prefix «un» to the word «Heimat», taking into consideration that unheimlich also has «Heim» as an integral part of its overall meaning. Unheimat refers to the feeling of being estranged at/from/in our home, new or old. One is pushed away from feeling at home in our own home: one can be estranged of our Heim being there or/and making the effort to be and feel there.

Displacement comes as no surprise for those of us that have been moved by life to places in which we do not belong completely, especially if life forces us to make a living in them.

So, what is home? Home is (as my therapist told me) where the wound grows and builds a safety to make us feel comfortable in our wounded womb. The womb is from where we come from and to where we spend our life travelling back to. Home is – by every means – the combination of the womb and the wound that expels us from it, home is a place which we constantly try to acknowledge and sometimes repair.

#Heim

Unheimat is not an estrangement from home, but the lack of its presence in the place our house is located right now.

In the process of migration, we search and collect the pieces of a place that is being built elsewhere: in an undisclosed land, in a present tense we don’t know, nor really care about, since factually it reminds us that we are not going home at the end of the day. A land that unknowingly affects and shapes our days in unfathomable ways.

#sammeln

This process of estranging our home and the evidence that it will never be our Home, this strength that moves us to build and imaging an un-present Heim stripped of its present presence, has the ability to transform us and renders us travelers in time and space: coming from a historically stiff and alien past we are pushed towards a future whose material evidence is bound to a present in anotherland. Migrants are the only (painfully) free humans, as we are able to travel in time, even though space is generally bordered for us as an un-cohesive group of people.

#Ausländer

I have been in Europe since 2017 and have spent most of that time travelling because I used to make a living as a tattoo artist, but since I have moved to Switzerland last year, the feeling of not belonging anywhere has grown exponentially, even if as a kid I moved a lot coming from a diplomat household. I came to think that there is no home for me and that home is indeed the place where my displacement wound would bleed me, but as a part of the ever growing Latin-American diaspora, I have also started to think that we assume a present tense unheimat wherever we are (dis)placed: going to the new world we are bound to be an integral part of an alien history and of the power architecture that was placed within the process colonization.

«Fue entonces que creyó que la promesa que le había sido hecha era su misión. Aunque no entendiera por qué nos corresponde a nosotros cumplir una promesa que en realidad no fue hecha».

Clarice Lispector, la manzana en lo oscuro.

While living in Switzerland, two constant questions have always found their way to me, one is «why Switzerland?» and I will save myself the trouble of repeating the answer, because of its layered nature; the other one is «why are you working in a kitchen when it is evidently underneath your capacity?». This second question is at the center of this text, in a way I am writing down the answer to those questions they never stop asking.

#kodwoeshun

I work in gastro1, which allowed me to make a living that surpasses my needs and those of my family back home. I have gotten them the necessary means to thrive, and not just to survive. That would answer not only the second question, but also gives a hint for the first one. As a migrant, we always find ourselves with one foot in the place we live and with the other one in the land we left behind. This human bridge makes possible a life that is sometimes exceedingly complicated to clarify to those who don’t (have to) participate in it.

#erklären

By deciding not to make art as a (im)possible means of living and instead doing a job that is seemingly underneath my capacities as an “artist” I make magic in a faraway land, where having my job would not account for much, less so to making any form of art, besides the art of surviving, since that is the rule for the majority of the people on the other side of the Atlantic.

There, instead of making art, we have faith and F.A.I.T.H. means: Family Abroad In The Hustle, or like we say in Venezuela: F.E.: Familia en el Extanjero.

#vertrauen

In this case, as in many others similar to it, this process of unheimat becomes a way that propels itself into the future by looking at the past.

Not feeling at home anywhere is the way I participate in igniting processes elsewhere, somewhere. Anywhere.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Anyways. I think it is also important to say also that robots are already doing emotional labor.

Pause.

Faced with the idea that machines will one day have autonomy, someone at that dinner made a very particular face, a perfect mixture of disgust and fear that I imagine not so different from the expression made by people in the Old Continent, when they were told that in the so called West Indies, the then recently discovered and named Americas, some savages and some slaves could speak, even think; that they could desire! And also -god forbid- organise themselves! That they aspired and understood freedom, using the very same concepts and terminology that their oppressors kept hidden away in the dark from them. Terror in the face of difference and the fear of the Other has always been capable of manifesting itself with an authority that escapes beyond the control of the person who senses it.

Like laughter and tears, inevitable and commanding, fear too has its own ways of controlling and destroying what has been trained for centuries to appear decent and civilised: your face at the doors of difference.

*

One of the things I like the most about Science Fiction is that it has always made its way into life, in a very similar way in which 3-D printing made possible internet outside of our computers. I believe, and this is where (i)t get(s) weird, literature is but a script of things that happen after they were written. Im referring to whoever runs this mess and how it must be a well read psycho—not talking about me, but about the bad guys that run the worlds2. There is a branch of Sci-Fi whose subject is no other than the other, the intruder that came to be (in the west) thru the process of civilisation and colonisation. Whatever this iteration of the genre spins out is nothing but the past for an immense part of the world, continents that had their first apocalipsis around 1491. This is why I still get scared when I see the news, and realise that im going to be living once again an event that already flew me out of my country a couple of times: The continuation of civilisation thru other means.

Pause.

A few years ago I was speaking with a friend about love and machines. She argued that robots were incapable of feeling anything, but specially that they would never be capable of loving, of feeling loved. According to her understanding, love belonged exclusively to humans and to no one or nothing else. Only humans were capable of feeling and making love; of enjoying and suffering it; of carrying it out. Humans, were for her, the only beings with the ability to love. Love, for her, remained the most complete, absolute, sacred of all feelings, something impossible to transfer beyond human bodies, human intellectual experience and human emotional capabilities.

Sadly, for humans, I think most people agree with her. Changing this idea would imply such a traumatic rift in the paradigms of Western thought3, an event that could be only possiblethru the lubrication of a new “discovery”, yet another conquest of the “unknown” that is strong enough to re-center Man (once again white and triumphant) upon the grave of his despicable passage through the centuries.

Space Race, anyone?

*

Much to my regret I no longer believe in the sacred aspect of this feeling, which is not the same as saying that I am incapable of experiencing it. For me, anybody, and I mean any-body, is capable of organising a language and using it to communicate within, and beyond itself; any-body is capable of loving and feeling love, of expressing it and suffering it; ultimately, any-body is capable of sacralising, and ultimately feeling the betrayal inherent in any moderately complex emotional process and loving is part of that constellation. I love robots that feel, because it reminds me that if it were for the west, I wouldn’t be human and thats ok, you couldn’t catch me dreaming of being it; that if it were for the west, thank God!!! I will never be a man, like it’s a bad thing not to be the hu-man they want me to be. If the robot was thought thru the other and I am the other: that intruder! then I must be the robot or at least, and hopefully, a cyborg.

And i tell you: I feel.

*

To believe that you possess authority over what others are capable of feeling has always been, and always will be nothing but the disastrous confusion of thinking you own management, agency and transit. Because its better to think that you’re out of danger. So much so, that you prefer to imagine that if danger ever comes, it will only mean disappearance, the complete disappearance of all of us4. But history—that horrible machine set in motion by fear—has shown us, time and time again, that the apocalypse is nothing more than a brutal war in which difference is massacred and that, as we all know, that already happened to a bunch of us.

Pause.

Audre Lorde

DREAMS

I wake up crying from the other side, and by that I mean: i was crying in my dreams and I bring my tears with me to this side of reality. This is not the first time it has happened, just the first time in a long time. It has never been the symptom of anything good, nor has it ever really broke me. I don’t know what it means, but i do know it’s scary enough not to google it although i’ve been brave enough to have asked my therapist about it. This tears are a border, the final frontier between some hard earned sanity and the memory of terrible times: memories of futures past.

My tears water down some sort of failed postalgia1.

*

Im talking to someone I know from Tel Aviv, we feel together that everything is a joke. It saddens me that I don’t know anyone in Teheran, Afghanistan nor Gaza. I live with a Ukrainian, me being a Venezuelan, thats what the world decided for us. I talk to my cousin in NYC, she says im being way too anti Trump about 2026, that everything shakes, but at the end—she: a brown immigrant living in the states, she is telling me this—everything will turn out alright, there is money to be made. My father used to say that too: in times of war, make money.

*

Im dreaming of an underground world, there is no sunlight, none of us can see the sky. In this dream my friends are at some party, posting stories of a concert that sounds extremely depressing, thus on point. It makes sense in this scenario, a sad theater my dream just built for me. In my dream at least, I’m part of the lucky ones: I get to see darkness with my friend in a shelter that protects us from the outside, from the outlanders.

*

The books in my room continue to pile up, a clear sign of an unclear and dangerous headspace2.

UNFREE

Someone once told me: I won’t let them take you to the airport, a most certainly expired offer. On one hand if they take us3 to the airpot thats means we are not free; on the other hand, and this is where it gets tricky, if they don’t take us we remain unfree, but on land, here. The question isn’t anymore if we are free, but how unfree can we continue to be before we die.

*

One of my passports allows me to travel safely to any non aligned country id like to. Well, that might have changed a bit in the last months, but I find it interesting that -officially- my place of birth doesn’t coincide with the culture im invited4 to consume.

*

But how can I think about flying when nothing can assure my safety?

SECURITY

I wake up crying from the other side. I open the gram and I see the new developments. Bad idea. Now my entire weekend is fucked and I still have two long days at work that require me to be present, but honestly: who can afford to be present in this economy? im working back to back 10 hour shifts three days a week on a new job -in a super cool place filled with nice people, and this is really challenging me because it takes attention and sweat, and clearly -as stated earlier- tears; im stressed out all day and all night, either all the way on the insomnia diet or crazed-the-fuck-out having weird ass dreams in which I cry or have sex (or both) with people I shouldn’t be having sex with; I have a second job -that means another day of my week goes down the flusher- which is pretty chill and also in a very beautiful place, but also stressful in its own peculiar way; on my “free time” I write and I have an artistic practice, a relationship, friends, enemies, and family members I don’t see nor will I ever see again—and that, the family part, I thought was the difference between me and your everyday street dweller in this beautiful land im posted at right now, but its bullshit. There is no difference. I just wasted energy describing the condition of the so-called precariat: a (not so) new downgrade that capitalism uploaded. I know people that do all this and still have the body to party it out and I admire them, since i realised that whenever I do the “two coffees no lunch” routine I get motorcycle racy and my head gets all confused and pre psychotic, which is only the negative version of what some of my friends get when partying in this economy.

I am sad and I am tired and im angry.

Anger is a valid feeling.

*

Some time ago, in some kitchen lost in some darkness, im chopping the usual onions and vacuuming some liquid when one of my co-workers gazes around and then looks at me: These kids here Jose, they wouldn’t survive it. I pant, trying to mind my own business, able only to utter a hey to squeeze myself out of the nightmare been proposed to me with that topic. Later that day, I think to myself that my co-worker was right, but wrong at the same time. Yes, they wouldn’t and very probably they don’t have to survive anything. They won’t ever experience anything beyond the screen or outside the shelter, these kids are blessed.

PRIVILEGES

What do you do with your privileges (plural) you ask5?

So first of all know your world and know your war, and then assume your responsibility and obligation to own them6, then please stop posting stuff you don’t believe in and stop pretending that you are going to do something about it; remember that desire is what we dream while being awake, and be clear that if everything you uploaded into the scroll machine would be brought to life your entire existence would collapse, your world wide view would mutate into a horrible nightmare, everything you know would stop making sense and the ground under your feet would swallow you whole; never forget that our entire world is being killed, at the moment and again, so you don’t even have to readjust them, and by them i mean your privileges.

Enjoy your privileges.

*

Be careful what you wish for tho, your desire might be the dream of someone devouring you.

DREAMS II

What is a man?

A man is a machine capable of sleeping.

What is a machine?

A machine is a man that can dream.

What is a dream?

A dream is the never ending chase that the hunter started.

What is a hunter?

A hunter is a man with a machine.

A war machine.

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

― James Baldwin

-Thrust.

Raynald Goetz, RAVE

I (cant) DANCE

I drag my right foot through the bathroom carefully. Very carefully. I drag the left one, less carefully, but carefully all the same. If I weight too much to the right, I(t) might break again. I don’t want to, I don’t want (it) to break again. I drag my right foot, carefully, extremely carefully. And so, little by little, I manage to do in one or five, five or ten minutes anything that would normally take three or four seconds: moving from the w.c. to the shower; taking a T-shirt out of the drawer; grabbing a book from my library, making my morning coffee and taking it back to bed.

I cant walk, but I move fast, faster than those beside me that complain, “you move faster on crutches than I do walking, can you please slow down?” and the truth is, yes, I move faster than the average. It is always harder to see what’s obvious, and in this case, this means: the crutches make me a four-legged animal, returning me to an axis from which men pulled me away. I look forward, I run and hunt, nothing else. As an animal I stand opposed to the fundamental human error: being able to stand upright whilst unable to look at the sun as plants do, The stunt that makes humans stand, yet hinders them useless for any else, the misfortune of being able to stand up, but unable to resist.

As punishment for the thumb, nature imposed the big toe: humans can’t fall, thus they won’t fly.

I drag my right foot carefully, very, very carefully through the planet. I try to be silent, don’t want to be heard when I move, my movement is the subject of a law that forbids it. I drag my left foot unable to move it, yet forced to move myself. I drag my right foot quietly and against all odds I arrive safely to my destination, the place where my battle really begins. I drag my right foot carefully and my left foot, like my left hand, is very much alright.

A fracture chases me when I dream of dancing.

You (can) DANCE1

There is a blue windows-screen-saver rug on the floor; on one wall, there is a screen of the same generic blue where internet flows and follows itself; two turned on laptops rest on top of the blue rectangle, and the images shown on the wall are clicked, edited, by a uniformed girl laying on the carpet, from this spot, this student from nowhere, this generic web-being, voices orders to another uniformed figure who repeats what she dictates. He says he loves her, moving inside a hysterical glitch, dancing to the rhythm of a musical mash-up similar to the sound of life when one scrolls down thru instagram.They look at each other, but they do not see each other. When he speaks, she is already looking at the screen; when she is about to respond, he has already turned away. A typed voice digital-whispers: “I LOVE YOU,” repeating it algo-rhythmically while the (mis)encounter continues.

They stand up and something reminding of a .gif made from the images by Bourneville & Regnard at the Salpêtrière begins. Holding an invisible phone in their hands, they look at one another, searching, while the laptops continue playing their role, projecting images that at first glance seem unrelated to what is happening outside of them—(un)like every screen everywhere. They drag their feet, carefully, very carefully; they approach each other, carefully; they fit into each other for one second, and in that instant they synchronise and choreograph something that comes from somewhere else, from a closed circuit to which we have no access—even if we can double-tap like it.

(They) DANCE2

They are on top of a heliocentric machine pulling in every single look in the room into them, thrusting our attention into submission; they move in circles, well, the machine moves circularly while they are on top, maintaining a beautiful yet improbable balance; they are two beautiful brown men flirting with each other and ignoring us, sweating to muffled music as their dance excludes us from a party we paid to be invited to; they drag their feet, carefully, very carefully, like I do; they approach each other, carefully, they fit into each other every second, and in this moment they choreograph and combat something that looks like somewhere else, from a closed circuit to which we have no access—even if we can double-tap like it; they let us look at their romance while it unfolds: an (un)intended center of attention they peephole us into; They approach each other, carefully, very carefully like we wish we should, but don’t; They touch each other, like we wish we did and don’t, and a laser showers them with sensuous thoughts that shower us, the audience.

An affair is always a performance, a game of hide and seek where the participants are unaware of their role thus participating more freely in it. I see the dancers, they fight and breathe, they sound and sex. We might not accept it, but the room is aroused by the sensual energy of their rave(ing).

We (don’t) DANCE

In the middle of the room, sitting on a sofa with a table lamp acting as a spotlight, I see two dudes — I already heard about them, legends — taking lines. Both were elegant: on the run yuppie fits, well dressed dot com executives. They were key-ing coke into their noses as if the living room were a bathroom and the audience people waiting their turn—a puerta cerrada. In that context, doing this was unthinkable; witnessing it too. And even though the air reeked of premeditation, truth be told, their gestures carried an unhealthy balanced freedom, a liberty earned by knowing they were being watched, yet forcing themselves invi(n)sible: those where the gestures of two people who understand each other, choreographing through improvisation—al natural. When they finish, they stand up and brush each other noses to shake off the crumbs, slipping the baggie into the small pocket of their trousers, stretching towards the floor just like athletes do before starting a marathon, just after finishing it; they check and clean each other’s nostrils, tenderly with care, as lovers would, they turn toward the audience, and at that moment the truce breaks: one of the guests wrinkles his face in honest disgust; a glass falls, and for hours, the muffled echo of its shattering can be heard across the city; hidden lovers fucking in the bathroom are interrupted dripping smells and sweat, unable to cum.

Choreography

One of the things I love about dance is that it makes me think, it forces me into me through thought, to search not only what I know, but also how I feel about knowing. Last weekend I was invited to see a dance show, and in that hour I travelled some years back into days I couldn’t move. It’s a short story: For the best part of almost 13 years my right leg was broken because my femur, the bone that holds our human body, did not heal after a car accident, the end. I didn’t think about the way I moved or, in many cases, did not move until I was invited to a dance show in Barcelona some years ago, an event that changed entirely my perception of and my relation to my body.

Thru dance I discovered the choreographic value of a life set in rules it did not choose, I was able to find the beloved, yet lost, dancer in me. Believe me: showering in crutches is as good a contemporary dance piece as any other else.

Combat

We must learn to recognise, in the present, those moments that are pregnant with history as much the empty ones, we must be capable of distinguishing what will become memory from what is oblivion: the untimely is a dance, an exhausted never ending present of fleeting recognition.

Against the choreographic authority imposed by history, we can perform the erratic dance of the untimely. The irregular dance of lovers in their present tense.

*

I remember dancing one night in the middle of a raving swarm of joyful bodies, producing a stampede, cracking the ridiculous ground of history to unusable crumbles.

*

I drag my right foot, carefully.
Very carefully.
I keep waiting for the day when I’ll be able to dance, again
without fear of breaking (myself).

*

Earth is a house where we step on our own burials.

*

Kunsthalle Bern

Kantonale Berne Jura 2025,

Exhibition text.

Heimat

Throught out the last century, and a long part of the one ahead, heimat might be the most symbolically complicated and socially charged word that ever hit the language of thought and science. Because of its almost impossible-to-balance weight and its speed-of-light factual disappearance in our world of things, one must be careful when using it.

(Un)Heimat

Unheimat is a word I came up with by sticking together the negative prefix «un» to the word «Heimat» also considering that unheimlich also has «Heim» as an integral part of its overall meaning. Unheimat refers to the feeling of being estranged at/from/in our home, new or old. One is pushed away from feeling at home at our own house: we can be estranged of our heimat being there and/or making the effort to feel here.

Unheimat is not an estrangement from home, but the lack of its presence in the place our house is located right now.

Dinosaurs

As a kid dinosaurs were one of my first sources of obsession. Being the sign seeking little monster that I already was, I couldn’t help but notice that the my dinosaur pokedex1 showed none in my country. As a way of protecting me from the world my mother told me that dinosaurs transformed into oil2, and oil we have a lot. We probably have more than anyone else, whoever that we might be. This, she explained, meant that we were, with other countries in the so-called global south and/or middle east, the most dinosaur packed countries ever. I was happy, I was happy until the double-checking fact that, a couple of weeks ago led me to discover, the dinosaur equals oil math was a scam produced by some company with a brontosaurio logo to steal our oil.

Oil is our black mirror. Oil is the place where we project all of our shame and our wars. Oil is a weird little house in which we try to produce a home that is unable to house us, the home of whomever is able to pay its image inside it. Oil is the little mirror we gave for gold at the cost of our image.

Détournement: Richard E. Chapman

Primary migration may be strategically upwards or downwards, depending on the direction of decreasing energy. Secondary migration hides within porous and permeable units, generally moving towards land while stretching time. Petroleum accumulates and settles when it arrives to the point in which there is insufficient energy to move it further.

Coda:

In the light of their 2010 nomination to the Turner Prize, Channel 4 news produced released a short introductory video to the Otolith Group3 practice where they speak about what they do as “a kind of post-studio practice” that takes hints from film making as an inherently collective, integrated—and most certainly integrating activity. At the end of this short video, in an unusual dramatic twist4, Kodwo is talking about what probably was or should be called image pollution. He stresses about the (art)work as a demanding subject, as an object that requires something from its audience; this work is susceptible of interrogations and demands thus raising questions about the responsibility of image making and image showing.

“What is an image capable of? It is a question they never stop asking”.

Kodwo Eshun, a question(…)

E-flux journal #59

“I came to the realisation that the current becoming of the world could be better understood if observed through this kind of horrible madness, rather than through the polite madness of economists and politicians”.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes.

Resist

I come from a place where, one day, everyone spoke of resistance—of resisting. Those who were not paying attention understood resistance as a daring, anti-authoritarian act, when it just meant betting every penny on your own exhaustion.

Some words carry the weight of their own failure, the unavoidable sentence of every battle lost in their name. Personally, to resist has always sounded empty to me, a word vacuumed of any force. Where I come from, those who “resisted” best ate hot meals; the rest -most of us- resolved, made ends meet. Of all the words prefixed with re, resolve is the one I love the most. It has no net worth, yet it’s swollen of potential. To resolve, I love it. My mother resolved her entire life, and still resolves everything, every day, year round. I never saw her resist anything, because resisting, it seems to me, implies a return to the coziness of certain securities she never had, and still doesn’t. Resisting sounds like acceptance disguised as hope: trusting that things will somehow fix themselves if you cheer them loud enough -if one jumps and shouts- as if language could repair what actions have never been brave enough to mend. We are told to trust that everything will work out, we are told to trust, to resist.

I have a friend who says that trust is resistance, that anything we want to improve in the world—and what is the world if not that place that opens up our chest so others can enter—begins with trust, that most beautiful wound. When she said it, a rush of Vicks VapoRub ran down my throat, I wasn’t expecting anyone to strike so accurately in the center of our present confusion. I did not imagine that, right beside me, this riddle could be cracked open without the maps imposed by theory and newspapers, memes and slogans. Trust: so simple, yet absolutely improbable and impossible to manage. How do we rule over something that overwhelms us through its absence? That very thing which spreads its lack and still reaches us with the brute shine of its invisibility.

It might seem that trusting means having a good vibe about (almost ) everything. But I dare to say that today trust no longer belongs to some long expired ethical automatism. Good vibes are nice, they open possibilities, soften shared spaces and function better at the after-dinner beer-conversation routine. Good vibes, however, assume that whoever speaks wants whats best for me, that they are guarding our common good. And it is exactly there, in that precise place and time, where trust collapses. Because if those who manage our well-being lie while feeding on our trust, who are the rest of us to speak the truth?

The fucked-up part is that I do trust. I trust anyway. And I am fairly certain my friend does too. I suspect she does what I do: trust during the day, not sleep at night.

Rhythms of consumption

I am a horrible consuming monster, anything goes. It sucks, I know it, but is true. I’ve quitted everything I liked because of this fail, because I overdrive everything to its limits. I don’t think im the only one tho, I think it’s the appropriate metabolism of an ideology that found its way to a body, that mutated into our bodies. My body, somebody, any body. I cant stop thinking about my next snack, whatever form it might have, whatever the fuck it might end up being. Im feeling very challenged by my current self, by this overwhelming ritual thru which I travel to a darker past signed by self-destruction and pain. I feel bad, but it’s hard to stop wanting, to stop consuming and it makes me wonder: Is it this what they feel? Is it also uncontrollable? Are we -the world- at the other side of an insane all-you-can-eat bender headed by the powers that be?

It disgusts me to think that I have something in common with some of these people, but I cant continue to rule it out. I must see myself in the mirror of the power hungry few, those that eat us up for breakfast everyday. Those that transformed an idea of prosperity into a tunnel to insanity, it makes me wonder: how can I resist you?

Détournement: Audre Lorde

I dont honey, im sorry. I just cant let go of it, the past. I need no swimming far down there to realise the dream ain’t mine, yet I cried and fought, stormed and yell, but I just knew it clearly: I was female and black, I was brown and undesirable. I am out, wherever the power lay. If i decided to live, id had to do it by myself, alone, because no one was dreaming about me. Nobody was paying attention to me, except as something to get rid of. What im saying is that I only exist in this world as a nightmare and I knew this all along.

Coda (or my inauguration into latampessimism)

Perhaps this is what we finally are: Maria Corina humiliating herself in public, a convulsion of indefensible gestures finally exposed; the permanent fixture of a theatre whose curtains never fall because there is too much money, too much oil and too much fuel to stop this play; a spectacle that cannot end, a dark grey glitch that loops as a turned loose .gif, yes, maybe we are the total coincidence of pretension and concealment, turned inside out, trapped in an unbearable reality that confirms the infinite pessimism of being us: the last pretended autonomous Latin Americans, the black oil maquila1 mensch proxied to its limits, at last well and officially administered. I wish to know what will all the pro-bomb babies do when the disappearances begin? Some of us will vanish for knowing how to read and write, for speaking and having opinions; others will vanish because they were born vanished, already (always) excess, unwanted and feared; then the bodies required to keep the filthy oil factory operating—the assembly line that bankrolls war, the machine that runs fast towards an end that erases us—and last but not least the return flights: expelled, airborne, strapped into that low-cost air machine called aerobus, sent back home when Europe grows tired and Madrid is repossessed by the Spaniards and Miami by the Cubans.

“But I with the conscious heart of one who can live only in history, will I ever again be able to act with pure passion when i know that history is over?”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The empathy exams

Leslie Jamison

Atlas

There is a vital—and often hidden—difference between the peoples forced to migrate today and those who once traveled to the lands from which we now flee. This difference is embodied in the figure of Atlas and unlike the Olympian Atlas ours never stops, he cannot afford to be still. Our Atlas carries the world not only as punishment, but because if he stops, the cycle breaks and the handover—another Atlas, another migrant—vanishes.

Another crucial shift is that our Atlas is not a single being, but many that are beyond gender and genealogy. Along this journey we all become Atlas —at some point and in some way. Technically speaking an atlas is also a guide: a layout of the world as we know it, with its lines, shapes, and images; a compendium, an anthology of paths traced. It is a map carved by the intent of its maker.

Our Atlas transcends the limits of any region secured by force: an open route along the border; our power is inversely proportional to the weight we carry: a potential shaped under oppression, weights made of worlds upheld and displaced, of dreams set in motion. In myth, the curse is stillness; in life, the burden must move in order to be sustained.

Natives

The idea that no one except for natives can talk about the situation of their land is attractive and preposterous at the same time, its understandable and ridiculous, thus around to be (mis)used with pleasure, the idea that some people cant talk about my politics while shaping it its surreal yet very contemporary; the question about who gets to talk (?) and on which terms (?) can the rest of us join the conversation, even if our opinions won’t be liked and risk us shadow bans and cancellations, its part of every contemporary conflict since 9/11 —at least. Right now people are complaining about who talks and what gets talked about in social media, wars are complicated and messy and some people feel that foreigners aren’t allowed to have opinions about them, that it is impossible for a non native to understand the nuances of what has happened to a foreign nation, an alien nation.

Axiom

I wont let you have your opinion publicly if your public opinion is different than mine or challenges it.

I will let someone else opinion become power and invite its execution since that opinion doesn’t challenge, actually it enhances mine. Therefore I would support the execution of that power as long as it prolongs my opinion.

Im now forced to this piece of thought: I don’t have a conscious problem with whom holds and conceals power, I have an unconscious problem with not having power and with my inability to execute it1.

Détournement: Bertolt Brecht

This paragraph has been redacted2.

Coda

We are driving underneath the bridge that waters into the Bolivar Av. in front of us and at the end las Torres del silencio, one of the migration post that separates the city and safeguards the class struggle. My friend Alexander invites me to look up as the tunnel finishes and immediately I am attacked by las Torres de parque central, the modern brutalist guardians of an unfulfilled intention: a cultural compound slash housing complex and the wet dream of an oil extracting Midas that Caracas failed to please.

Alexander then quietly whispers into my ear: it’s Neo-Tokyo bro, we are living in AKIRA.

Some ideas have the capacity to change the way one perceives reality, mushrooming into obsessions. Obsessive bodies, organfull bodies of obsession that lack the space to action themselves into the self preserving space of reality, that boundary building monster. Caracas is the city that inspired Otomo’s epic, a dystopian entity that surpassed its future.

Caracas is a city we’ll only see after the apocalypse.

“Los cuatro puntos cardinales son tres

El sur y el norte”

Vicente Huidobro

Subscribe now

Future

“As an artist I’m more interested in the post-production of the war consequences”

Daria Samoilova

Morbus Helveticus I

Racing heart, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, weakness and mental confusion: im leaving a voice note to my father, I finish the message saying “see you” and notice we won’t see us, thus getting very confused and nervously try to rewind this phrase transforming it into something else, something that has not yet been invented. As I say bye and realise in that same moment that im not here, nor am I there because if I was we would be definitely seeing us at some point or the other, but I will not see my father at one point or another. My father and I, most likely, won’t ever see each other again.

War

About two weeks ago I visit a new art exhibition with a foreigner, someone whose country is at war right now. Before that I go out for drinks in another country with another foreigner, someone whose country is also at war right now. Im a foreigner, something I’ve always been and it’s fucked up to say this, but it feels right to talk to them, to share common time together, its like the bullshit is off, we don’t have to pretend or be nice, we can just be us -foreigners together- whatever the fuck that means1. We share things that we won’t share in our daily contexts nor probably back home, things that cant be said in the countries we live in, stuff that our countries helped us normalise, for example gunshots, we have all heard gun shots, maybe even explosions; we have felt fear and the special anxiety that comes with the future unknown; we have been violent because violence is violent to us; we have felt anger and we don’t have to hate the police because, unlike the 1312 crowd, we have felt the multifocal rage of injustice; the unbearable cry for help in the face of hunger; we might have been pointed and shot at and we might have pointed and shot too -I cant tell so I guess that you’ll never know- and unlike the fevered teens learning to shoot, we are the disenchanted adults who know the secret of war, that is: knowing how to shoot won’t save you, but knowing how to get shot at will. Because it’s easy to pull a trigger, the hard thing is to be on the other side of it.

*

One of them reminds me of the media attention their war gets, the other one is a bit ashamed of it. My war2 is nowhere to be found, it’s private and intimate. Our war is different now, its emotional, covered by the shame it carries, because it’s our first war together. This war is like my diaspora, massive but erratic, a diaspora that hasn’t settled down yet, thus ready to battle against each other over the unresolved pain from the fight or flight. Our war is now affective, it’s all about stretching polarisation. My war, our war, this war is about building misunderstandings, it rests on not finding the middle ground with the ones we love; this war, like every other war, is about blowing up bridges to collapse communication.

*

This thing on our phones, this proxy war that the third worlds are having for the west, this is it, there is nothing else left to fight about. Some of you will win it and take the resources, you will spend them fast, inattentive to the fact that our resources are paying for a weird idea of privilege that most of the world does not enjoy; this never ending entitlement to everything; this insatiable rhythm of consumption that swallows anything in its way. This thing that repeats the explosions on your phones are our resources, those that carry out a representation that was not supposed to hold that long and to which you won’t let go.

You are welcome.

Morbus Helveticus II

Racing heart, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, weakness and mental confusion:

Im calling my mother after I breakfast videos of North American choppers fucking up my country with their bombs. Im worried and im trying to make sense of it all, to grasp a bit of reality from someone I trust. My mom says that she is ok, that I don’t have to worry about her. My mother assures me that this thing im watching online, this mess taking the breath away from some millions of peoples, is nothing to be worried about, since this is not happening to her, its only happening to our government, so they should be the only ones worrying about it. I say bye and hang up the phone even more confused, getting the feeling that im forced into a delirium I do not wish to be a part of.

Détournement: José Ignacio Cabrujas.

When I speak of archaeology, I mean an archaeology of collapse. While some proudly declare themselves heirs to a lineage of great builders, I insist—without apology, with some pride—that I come from a of demolition folk. A long tradition of demolishers who turned rubble into an emblem, who learned to inhabit ruins not as an exception but as a condition, and who understands collapse not as failure, but as a historical method.

Coda

Migrants are the only (painfully) free humans, as we are able to travel in time, even though space is generally bordered for us as the un-cohesive folk we trully are.

Migrants are without the shadow of doubt the subject of our time, the only thing that matters, that human governments would rather not care about.

Migrants are the mirror image in which the west’s narcissism is forced to reflect upon its mismanagement, where the global north (un)bears its rhythm of consumption.

Migrants have everything except for shame, few of us went out to kill people, most of us got out to feed them.

Migrants are F.A.I.T.H.: Family abroad in the hustle.

Migrants are fringe, an imperceptible movement in the threshold, somewhere between here and there -like magic: anywhere, nowhere.

“Robots will be forged on neither an anthropomorphic image nor an image of the human soul, but on the image of human sociology”.

Pedro Neves Marques,

On Colonial Power and Science Fiction.

Subscribe now

Id like to talk about discrimination, id like to talk about in a way that doesn’t make me fearful of my own safety and stability; Fearful of being cancelled: of being put under the microscope, searching for mistakes I made or things I said; mistakes I’ll make and things I’ll say; Id like to feel safe because as a foreigner working in this country my safety is the same as my family’s safety and stability; Id like to talk about racism, not the obvious one, but the one hidden inside all of us, the one that affects the safety and stability of all of those like me; id like to talk about safety and stability, I want to create a safe space where this terms could be thrown into for analysis, maybe even to re-conceptualize them in our context; id like to talk about us, I want to define the us: who claims the us? Are we all us or is us an umbrella that just fits everyone until the rain pours in?

Id like to address the second elephant in the room2. Because at one point we went from having a single elephant to having two real size elephants, one realer than the other. How can one go from no elephants to two elephants, how can one elephant not be enough?

*

Now id like to talk about childhood:

As a kid I always dreamt of having a tree house, but I’ve never been very good at building material things -at least not the ones that last. This dream was of course, now I see it, the stuff of alienation, the result of a TV programming, a way in which I was taught to desire what was never going to be there. Some months ago, partly joking and partly reacting to some of its dynamics, I defined my last work place as a tree house. That was, at the moment of its realisation, not the tree house i dreamt of, but one i mentally built with resentment, anger and a lot of sadness, a place where i could not find myself in, a house in which i felt -at times- very isolated.

Today it’s the first Monday in two years in which i don’t need to go to my tree house and, even though there were lots of Mondays I didn’t show up, I feel like something inside of me is missing, something unexpected that I took for granted, but that nevertheless is very important to me as an ausländer: people that say good day and that care about how I feel, people that can take time to sit down and say how they feel and that would as well let me say how i feel without shame showing up; people that do things that are detrimental to their economy, like working a full shift without payment just out of the love they feel for something bigger than them, out of love for this thing we rebuild every week, and that takes enormous effort to keep alive; people that understand the rhythm of complicated lives, of different forms of living, and take them into consideration as a fundamental part of their complicated and different ways of living; people that -at the end of the day, and before you leave the illusion of the tree house to the reality of the real house, the house the sometimes doesn’t feel like home3- say good night.

*

The day I was invited for the first time to the tree house one of my future co-workers was late for our meeting4, in the meantime the person conducting the interview told me the history of the house and updated me in regards to the complicated substance abuse problem that co-habited with it. I must confess I laughed a bit inside, as a non-active alcoholic and substance abuser that lived in Caracas during its Crack heyday, there was no way that whatever was happening outside the house would impress or -in any case- compare to all the things I’ve already seen and lived through in relation to this subject. I have to accept that there is some real shit happening by the tree house, things that need to be addressed by professionals, stuff that needs to be handled with care by us and by those that use the space around us. By the end of this meeting I was in, I needed the job as much as I longed for the aforementioned adrenaline that came with it. I also needed to find like minded people, people that eventually proved to be closer to me than anyone else around me at that time. In a way, I felt that this place would get me the closest I could get to the outcasts I’ve always needed to breathe in hostile territory.

*

I come from a family of people that can cook, that make things that taste good all the time pretty much by default. Most of them would at least smirk at the idea that I now cook as a way to make a living -in reality it’s almost impossible to believe, even for me. I’m famously known in my circle for my cooking disability, and I really don’t think that I became a good cook at the tree house, but I did became a good worker. I am a big compensator, what I lack in cooking I made up in reliability: I transformed every failed dessert into Saturday snack shifts that no one wanted to do; I transformed every failed quiche into Sunday flohmi shifts with the usual hungover suspects; I stood there during the schliessung5 and cooked so the endless discussion hours would at least be done on a full stomach. Here in Bern when I say I work in a kitchen, most of the people on the other side assume I’m a cook and the truth is I am no cook, but its also true that I can cook. In the same way that I can say “I’m no longer a survivor, but I have survived”.

*

As I close this chapter acknowledging my shortcomings and move onto uncharted waters Id like to share some thoughts that have been pressing my head for the last weeks: its not easy to have to make a living -and a life- where no one speaks your language nor shares your background, thus it is a blessing to have a place like this where all of us, those that haven’t anywhere to go on a Sunday morning, can find a door that remains open against all odds; it’s very important that we take care of this place and its surroundings since it is indeed a shelter for all of us that are not the same, and I speak here of my difference as I join the people in and out6 for whom this house is the only safe haven in this sometimes hostile town. It is important for me to point out our differences in this seemingly horizontal space, not out of resentment, but because I think that knowing one’s place is very important as a migrant.

I will also say this: the treehouse is the place in which I felt the samer I’ve felt in this city, in this country, and that means in ausländer terminology: the safer I’ve felt.

Because same and safe in this beautiful land are -no pun intended- the same thing.

*

Hallo zäme, ich bin jose, kein pronomen. Mir geht es nicht so fit, aber es geht und ich bleibe sicher bis zum schluss.

<\3