The letters are outlined, forming a list of aligned words composing rigid, ordered sentences in columns that, disguised by a schematic rationale, advance through paragraph divisions neatly justified by the progressive occupation of space. How can we proceed without writing being dominated by militaristic commands? How can we sabotage the warmongering of grammar and its instrumentalization by a sense of victory? How can we reject the triumphalism of the insignia that decorate argumentative logic in projects that echo colonial occupation: hierarchical escalation, conquest, domination, territorial expansion, and plunder?

 

Sometimes it’s better to be remembered for what’s left undone, than for what is done. I declare conscientious objection, as someone seeking to tune in to collective approaches to rejecting hypocrisy and the mechanisms that guarantee personal prestige and permanence within systems of institutional legitimation, disguised by strategic ambiguity.

 

In 2024, the digital version of Terremoto magazine published an excerpt from “Resiliências artísticas” [Artistic Resiliences][2] and commissioned a new text from me in line with its program Travesías. Amidst short, panting breaths, oscillations of despair/hope permeated with paralyzing uncertainties, after more than eighteen months of rewriting, A lo que queda [To What Remains] re-updates and extends reflections from, about, and based on the notion of residence, attempting to rescue it, to drive it away from the dominant reductions brought about by the modulation of the art world. To this end, I take the notion of residence as a medium and vehicle, as a place for and from which to think about habitability, which is inseparable from the conditions of habitability, that is, conditions that go beyond survival and demand the reaffirmation of commitments.

Would it be possible for the movement of professionals to temporary residencies in the context of the arts not to be dominated by processes of colonialism, occupation, extraction, and private accumulation?

 

I believe in the need for processes to eliminate ambiguities that summon the materiality of words, proposing from scales where all correspondence implies being in a relationship of codependency. I seek to escape concepts of speculative consistency whose formalist guidelines function as onto-epistemic devices of colonial-modern (dis)figuration, making themselves available—that is, granting access to the extraction and private accumulation of power and value, perpetuating systems of dispossession and subjection.

 

I think about resizing, about decontextualizing the displacement of professionals and other agents toward the modality of temporary residency in the context of the arts, their hermeneutics, and systems. When we remove the “artistic,” we are left with the act of residing, or rather, the word “residence” takes on a verbal character, synonymous with cohabiting. And cohabiting implies a decision for and through life. When what remains for us in life is to conspire—that is, to breathe together—we do so to escape from that which encloses our own and to open ourselves to a space of mutual belonging.

 

This text is an invitation to be careful with the use of words and their materializing powers, paying special attention to the term “residence,” in order to rescue it from the reductionist effects that predominate in art world systems. I say this because I believe that thinking about residency should lead us to examine the forms of segregation that affect the planetary conditions of existence. Distorted by mercantilist logics, these are managed as market reserves, restricted to VIP clubs, inscribed in eschatological, messianic, and apocalyptic narratives, imposed by the distribution of the modern/colonial racial matrix of monotheistic-proselytizing, extractivist, cis-masculinist domination.

 

Framing

I believe that coloniality constitutes a mass of extreme density, capable of generating gravitational fields that distort everything around it, that attempts to transform every resource into availability, into raw material that awaits—and demands—its formalization. I also begin with the idea that there is no preexisting space-time, no ontological priority that sustains everything, that precedes and remains pristine and intact before the presence of words. From this perspective, I conceive of writing as a practice that (co)produces space-time in order to de/occupy it.

 

The self-proclaimed liberal division of the world is formulated from ideological vectors whose foundations are moral and binary—good and evil—dividing the world into enemy camps positioned on opposing axes engaged in perpetual wars, epic battle scenes of good versus evil. In such a division, the liberal world simultaneously grants itself the ideal position of fighting for freedom, for good—for the supposed common, universal good. A freedom encapsulated as a political platform. Opportunistic geometries and false equivalences emerge to embody nonexistent polarizations. Brutality and extermination have no side; they are not a side, and there is nothing to interpret or understand where they are affirmed as the sole, absolute, and exclusive. What remains is embracing the colonial dimension—structural and structuring, inherent and inseparable from the liberal world—to extricate ourselves from the hijacking of the imaginary by the political field, a political field that postulates that the only way out for the future of settler people is the fear and certainty of their own annihilation. This is nothing more than a psychotic denial; an inversion of material reality and a constant channeling of the brutalization promoted by racialization, by the nation-state form, which—we know—can only exist by mobilizing violence. In this context, submission, subjugation, and dispossession are merely temporary and secondary “collateral” effects that require correction in order to overcome current contradictions on the path to incorporating and assimilating the common, universal, and liberal good.

 

Sometimes it's important to repeat the obvious: the supposed opposite of the liberal world—the illiberal world—is not a path either. Similarly, multiplying the poles or axes of power is not a solution.

 

The Painting Supports the Nail that Supports the Wall

 

Modern and contemporary formations of arts systems actively participate—involuntarily—in the production of the onto-epistemic conditions of the colonial-modern world. Despite certain transformations, I believe that many of the practices identified as “contemporary” reproduce, perpetuate, or simply continue to operate within the framework of modernity. Therefore, I insist: the arts are not passive victims. They are part of the framework. They are the painting that supports the nail that supports the wall. Without a radical shift in practices, I have little expectation that art can claim for itself the power to produce critical material for tearing down walls—without being, almost inevitably, reabsorbed by individualism, inscribed in the logic of personal profit, or trapped in systems of speculation that internalize accounting as a relational mode, where calculations aimed at minimizing risks and maximizing profits dominate. All of this in terms of one’s own accumulation, of accumulation as one’s own. And the property of accumulation is ownership.

 

Let’s abandon the open calls and seek collective formulations that invoke an entanglement in the singularities of the infinite scales of the territorial intersections in which we aspire to inscribe ourselves. Perhaps the contours of some ethical density can emerge from gestures that are not concerned with delineating or securing their own conditions of possibility. I think of the destructive resonance of a hurricane and of attuning to local practices of liberation that have a planetary reach.

 

Brutality, Terror

 

Faced with the intensification of global horrors—which are and always will be necessary to remember—I think it is essential today to frame and fix in the global imagination—without fear—genocide and ethnic cleansing: the Nakba (catastrophe) of the Palestinian people perpetrated decades ago by the entity, the nation-state of Israel. But also, in its broader imperialist context, we cannot forget its attacks on the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, alongside the so-called “collective West,” highlighting its co-responsibility—especially alongside the US and England—for the devastation in Iraq. Colonialism and imperialism walk hand in hand. From the river to the sea, Palestinian liberation is global liberation.

 

In 2023, UNHCR estimated that 1.5% of the world’s population was forcibly displaced,[3] while in June 2024, the number was estimated to exceed 120 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. The increase in displaced people is a direct result of colonial and genocidal wars for hegemony, as well as for the control of material resources, as in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For many of these forcibly displaced people, reality consists of living temporarily permanently, whether in refugee camps, in detention camps, along borders, in continuous displacement—displaced from humanity, displaced by humanity. These people were born, they breathe, they have names, dreams, loves, they have fears, they play, they fight, they have frustrations, they think, they laugh, and they have hope; they live, despite everything, despite this world, and while they still can.

 

Worldwide, the number of people upon whom prison conditions have been imposed—people who breathe, who have names, loves, and fears, whose function in the production of capitalism, which, it is worth remembering, is always racial, was located outside the law—totals 11 million.[4] We should remember that racialization is a determining factor in the attribution of the condition of imprisonment, which is also influenced by socioeconomic markers, belonging to political and cultural movements, homo- and trans-affectivities and sexualities that do not correspond to what is violently imposed as the norm, as well as spiritual practices and ways of life associated with non-hegemonic worldviews. In 2024, in Brazil, more than 632 thousand people were formally in legal custody of the state and had prison as their temporary residence.[5] More than 2 billion people—that is, more than a quarter of the planet’s population formally recognized as human—do not have access to drinking water and basic sanitation in their residence.[6]

 

While numbers can give a sense of the scale of horror, their abstract nature can also operate as a form of distancing bordering on cognitive separation, halfway to desensitization.

 

Earth

 

In 2020, the anthropogenic mass—that is, the materials and objects produced by humanity—exceeded the total biomass, the mass of living matter existing on the planet.[7]  An estimated 125 to 250 million new art objects are created each year.[8]  The conditions enabling life are becoming scarce in their total inclusion in the speculative economy, while certain parts of the planet are being rendered uninhabitable. In this context of devastation, artist residency programs are multiplying. 

 

How else can the statement “if you happen to be in town” be addressed if not as a kind of formal mechanism for accumulating symbolic value? A device whose principle is almost an empty message, where the important thing is that the world knows that something is happening somewhere—anything,[9] anywhere. It matters little whether anyone will see something, even remotely, or whether the message will be read; what matters is that the greatest number of people, who are somehow inserted into systems of circulation and value production, know about it. Circulation has become the commodity.

 

What does it mean to move around in a homogenized world made up of endless, interchangeable landscapes of monocultures—intensive and extensive—or of disfigured cities transformed into open-air shopping malls, repeated sets of the same stores choreographing an Instagrammable life of voluntary self-commodification? On social media, speaking becomes an announcement, and what you say matters little, as long as you say something—anything, as long as it feeds the feed, in a world increasingly verticalized by infinite scrolling.

 

Pushing back against the displacement of arts professionals for temporary residence beyond the contours of the hermeneutics of systems, narratives, and art worlds must, in my opinion, follow the ethical horizon formulated by Denise Ferreira da Silva: “The end of the world as/to the extent that we know it.”

 

Simulations in a World of Mirrors

 

In 2014, in the text “Resiliências artísticas,” I engaged in an exercise in futurology when discussing remote residencies, questioning the need for geographical displacement of art professionals for the purpose of artist residencies in the face of an increasingly monocultural world, with the homogenization of rural and urban areas, as well as ways of life and subjectivation. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic normalized the oxymoron “remote residencies” and expanded profit margins. We will soon see the implementation of artist residency programs through these so-called human-machine interfaces, where artists and curators will be able to choose their avatars or conduct residencies in metaverse-like digital simulations. In this way, we can conceivably discard the physical displacement of people in favor of displacement to other bodies, where art professionals can be in residence without leaving their beds. Displacement to a “foreign” context may provide the opportunity to be racialized differently, to experience another gender, to be seen as an immigrant. Decommissioned concentration camps have been transformed into luxury hotels, prisons into overnight facilities, offering controlled and simulated experiences of what could have been, was, and is the terror of individuals and groups.

 

Temporary residences in other people’s lives as a form of accumulation. We know that for some people this already occurs: there is no real displacement in physical displacement, because everything has been absorbed by the internalization of the accounting and public relations departments. In other words, for some people, displacement is not a necessity imposed by colonial-imperialist-capitalist systems, but rather the compulsive desire for personal accumulation. Leaving their context does not represent an escape, but rather a disguise, the concealment of a situation of extreme privilege in apparent “anonymity.” In these cases, the displacement does not point to a residence, but to the establishment of an offshore company. There is no risk, only investment—a safe bet—because there is always the possibility of returning without any consequences. Deepfake residence services funded by their own foundations. Something between hyperrealism and hype-realism.

 

Coloniality has always been post-truth. The novelty of fake news, of competing narratives, of consensus culture, of the economy of in/attention, of the production and management of oneself, of I love you/I don't love you binaries, are the portable formats of the world in our pockets. The categorical imperative of ubiquity.

 

Perhaps one of the potentialities of residencies in the field of the arts would be to function as a place for rehearsing collective collapse, creating space-times where we can experience the fractures of sociability, seeing together what art does to people; suffocating individuality and competitiveness. I think we need to activate, through residencies, the potential for engagement in collective and collectivizing practices and experiments to protect ourselves from personal fragmentation, psychic dissociation, and social atomization. But how can we generate encounters between people when the relational has been confused with the transactional?

 

I want, in my own hand, to write you a letter that begins something like this:

We need to meet in secret.

_______________________

[1] The original title of this text, initially written in Portuguese, is “Ao que resta,” with restar translated here as “to remain.” Intransitive verb: 1) To exist after the destruction, suppression, or dispersion of things or people. To escape; to remain (to stay); to flee; to maintain; to oppose; to stand (firm); to persist; to to reappear unexpectedly; to resist; to be left over; to survive; to subsist; to endure. 2) To be a person in debt to. Intransitive verb: 3) To diminish, to subtract. 4) To lack, to conclude; to be in debt, unfinished. 5) Surplus. 6) Yet, to have. 

[2] Amilcar Packer, “Resiliências artísticas,” in Mapeamento de Residências Artísticas no Brasil (Río de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 2014). Text commissioned by Ana Vasconcelos, coeditor of the publication. Link to full Portuguese version: https://sistema.funarte.gov.br/noticias-antigas/?p=71706. Link to the Spanish and English versions edited by Terremoto, published on May 4, 2024: https://terremoto.mx/nota/65481/resiliencias-artisticas.

[3] “Global Trends,” UNHCR, June 2024, https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends. 

[4] UNODC, Prison Matters 2024: Global Prison Population and Trends; A Focus on Rehabilitation (United Nations, 2024), https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/briefs/Prison_brief_2024.pdf. Penal Reform International, Global Prison Trends 2023, (Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice, 2023), https://www.penalreform.org/global-prison-trends-2023/. “Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total,” Prison Studies,  https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All.

[5] Ministério da justiça e Segurança Pública, “SENAPPEN divulga Levantamento de Informações Penitenciárias referente ao primeiro semestre de 2024,” October 11, 2024, Gov.br, https://www.gov.br/senappen/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/senappen-divulga-levantamento-de-informacoes-penitenciarias-referente-ao-primeiro-semestre-de-2024.

[6]  “Más de 2000 millones de personas no tienen acceso a agua potable ni saneamiento básico,” Naciones Unidas, https://www.un.org/es/desa/new-un-water-development-report.

[7] “La masa antropogénica generada por el ser humano,” Iberdrola,https://www.iberdrola.com/documents/20125/40495/Infografia_Antropoceno.pdf/91e3a9bb-791a-1981-6ae3-b2a0fc1103a1?t=1634281284201.

[8]  Julien Delagrange, “Art World Statistics Every Artist Needs to Know,” Contemporary Art Issue, December 2, 2023, https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/art-world-statistics-every-artist-needs-to-know/.

[9] If you happen to be in town.