This article is going to sit between the rational; so we’re going to be speaking about definitions, and the most intuitive part of myself that’s putting all these things together because this is what I’ve been observing from the place where I am right now. A lot of these movements or cultural heritage were given to me via visuals. I lived in New York for so many years, I lived in Europe, so I was able to grasp a lot of it just intuitively. I’ve always been attracted to abstraction, attracted to very clean lines. It’s just the way part of my aesthetics work. But that doesn’t mean I cannot appreciate Gothic or Baroque. It’s just the way I find harmony. It’s more with geometry, so that’s why my work is more abstract in a way. But within the abstraction, I always put emotion in it. I put colors, but I embed with textures and with whimsical elements of what could be the absurd. I like the absurd in my work. I think they’re not expected to be there, they make a contrast, and then they can create and trigger an emotion in the moment that the art can be viewed, or the piece can be read, or it can be encountered and experienced. So I’m very aware of that. But now what I’m doing with this article is speaking from a very personal perspective. Because what I feel is happening right now with me is that I’ve entered a different alignment in my life, where I’m just going to go deep and try to deconstruct what I’m doing—not in a postmodern way—but more as a synthesis, by integrating all the pieces without having to deconstruct them and isolate them. Because I think that’s the problem I have with postmodernism. It segregates things so much that it’s very difficult to find the connection between them. Tempo, Territory, and the Property of My Own Body What is private property? What does it mean to have autonomy and ownership over your own body? These questions became real in 2021, standing in a castle in Umbria, Italy, surrounded by poets, musicians, and visual artists from around the world. I had been invited to an artist residency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. A gift from the same government now busy dismantling those funds—but I’m not here to argue that part. I took the opportunity, I made the most of it. But before I arrived, I made sure of one thing: that my body would not be subject to forced medical procedures. That was my line. They assured me it would be respected. But halfway through the residency, in the middle of the summer, the Italian government changed the rules. They brought in the infamous Green Pass, and suddenly, my body wasn’t entirely my property anymore—not if I wanted to stay. One of the directors called me into her office, her hands on her heart, her head tilted toward one side of her shoulders, her little dog on her lap. She asked me to “do something for them.” But she didn’t say I—she said we. I remember asking, “Who’s we? You and the dog?” Because I knew where this was going. What happened next wasn’t just about vaccines or politics. It was about territory, about property, about how easily the ownership of the body: the most basic form of private property, can be eroded by collective pressure wrapped in polite words. A day after I declined to be tested every two days at my expense because everyone else would feel “safer,” the Italian director joked that I was making a big thing out of nothing—>a s they could vaccinate me during my sleep. Guys, I am not dramatic, but then I felt my body freeze. And I decided to cut my stay in Italy short; alas, the country had submitted to a collective blob of very efficient and obedient NPCs. Since then, I have enrolled in educating myself on common law and been able to stand for my rights on many occasions. It is about language, y’all. That moment was the beginning of me tracing how all these threads intersect—private property, modern culture, coercion, value—and how they land as challenges to confront.. Slavery Slavery is such a dirty word. The first time you ever heard slavery, you were probably very young, and then you ask for something too much, and somebody just responds, what do you think I am, your slave? And then you ask your mom, your dad, what is a slave? And they probably say, oh, maybe the meaning of slave comes from Latin, sclavus, originally meaning Slav, as many Slavic people were captured and enslaved during wars in Eastern Europe. But did we really know what it meant? Slave is something that is defined as a person who is the legal property of another. I’m going to say that again: the legal property of another. When it’s legal, it’s not lawful. This is a very big distinction. Somebody taking over somebody else’s private property, or the property of their body, so being a slave is actually an unlawful thing. “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” – a question posed by Deleuze and Guattari quoting Spinoza on how people demand their own submission. But legal and lawful aren’t the same th
