On Good Days I'm Angry About Everything

This need to be permanent. Leave a mark forever. These goals of mattering. They’re all just fed into us. The pressure to matter in ways that don’t matter at all. Being on the side – that matters. How much are we all entrenched in the system? Is there any oppression, violence or marketing that any of us can consciously choose to not participate in, as oppressed or the oppressor.

Why do anything?

Who controls anything?

Who controls me?

Why be productive

Who produces?

Whose product am I?

There are markets

And ventures

There are market ventures

In this jungle of hate

Of rocks and tear gas

Of being choked to death for loving

Of being raised on a platform for killing

Of crooked cow lovers and half crazed women haters

Of those lying on the ground and the deal makers.

Whose product are you?

Our awareness of the other when we live in small/big bubbles of our own. Our fake comfort with the brands we wear and the malls we go to. The fears of the body and mind. It has been thrashed into us to not question, not wonder, not cross the road, not even look to the other side. Taught to believe that what matters is never the other. We are taught to not think beyond the banalities of sensorial experience - only our own sensorial experience. So who gives a fuck right whether the mall got built on land that was stolen from the poor? Because in summer to walk around in an air-conditioned building for fun is the only important experience for me. Wrong. 

A student is told that her work may not be accepted because she has given it in late. Her work borders on the bizarre because she has thought it through. She has thought about sustainability, erotica, futures, formless-ness. SHE HAS THOUGHT. But in all of this what matters most is that she is late for a submission. And that is how a student learns that thinking isn’t as important as dead-lines. Dead-end. We’re creating dead-ends. Dead end people. Dead end discourses. Dead end wars. And can an artist break that bubble? Can an artist choose live beginnings over dead ends? Is it possible still? It is imperative. With the day job, the soulless work we often have to do. It is still imperative for an artist to locate herself on the other side. Maybe just for a little while every day. Over time the little may become a lot. Over time the process may become the product itself. And we as artists would have recorded and spoken of our times. We would have waged a battle against all the odds stacked up, and told the history of the other. An important history, a truer history. This is our job.

How do we organize ourselves to support each other in this job? How do we create spaces to collect, to converse, to take courage when all seems pointless, to give hope, to be critical and disagree in trust. Can these spaces be static? No they cannot. Because these are dangerous spaces. They will always be questioning and challenging the system in which they exist. And soon the system will not be able to bear the questions and fear for its existence, because the questions are obvious and everyone who has broken the chains of fear and silence will be asking them. Soon the space will be shunted, co-opted, broken down. The system has so many strategies and means to create its dead ends. But nothing is permanent. So permanence of collectives cannot be our aspiration. We have to move, be fluid, adapt and like guerillas in a jungle, we have to fight smartly and strategically. We have to subvert, at times even ourselves.