Radical Presentification
"There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living." Audre Lorde
I'm working to make sense of the notion of Radical Presentification, starting from my efforts in building my own life. I've brought my present life down into the terms "unschooling," "painting," and "publicly thinking."
I've been searching for these terms to communicate what I'm going through in the present moment of my life.
However, it's been a challenge to do so because the use of these terms was built throughout many years of thinking by myself in shame and lonely pleasure, thinking in academia while negotiating many other essential terms, reading and learning intensively, and finally, experimenting with making art and being very attentive every time I met anyone who identified themselves as artists. So, sometimes, it feels like using these terms might erase or undermine a long journey that helped me reach where I am now. Yet, with the trust in Radical Presentification as a way to live life while making art, I'm deciding to follow through with these means of communication, these terms that I choose as ways to expand (not to reduce, like concepts can do) the possibilities of my actions.
I decided to use a modifier for "thinking" because we are all constantly thinking, but trying to think publicly has a different feel. To think publicly, we need to either record our voice somehow, consider other forms of expression that don't use words as ways of thinking (for example, painting itself could be understood as thinking), or write down our thoughts. I'm connecting thinking to words, so I'm thinking publicly through writing and recording myself talking on my podcast. So, this thinking publicly inevitably carries the "weight" (for lack of a better word) of the present.
I didn't choose a modifier for painting and unschooling because these two terms have already acquired or are rooted in expansive possibilities. Painting is an action as much as a medium in the Fine Arts. To paint, one needs to make a mark using a fluid material, usually thinking about layers and considering time and air as agents of transformation. Unschooling is an action that immediately implies a process, as it carries the root "un," which gives an opposing force to the action that the word "schooling" brings about. I connect this process to the undoing of systems, the school system being the first one that humans are required to adhere to, therefore, the system that makes all the other current ones possible. In a time of decolonization and the end of capitalist society, unschooling is the most radical way to live in the present time.
I'm working to make sense of the notion of Radical Presentification, starting from my efforts in building my own life. I've brought my present life down into the terms "unschooling," "painting," and "publicly thinking."
I've been searching for these terms to communicate what I'm going through in the present moment of my life.
However, it's been a challenge to do so because the use of these terms was built throughout many years of thinking by myself in shame and lonely pleasure, thinking in academia while negotiating many other essential terms, reading and learning intensively, and finally, experimenting with making art and being very attentive every time I met anyone who identified themselves as artists. So, sometimes, it feels like using these terms might erase or undermine a long journey that helped me reach where I am now. Yet, with the trust in Radical Presentification as a way to live life while making art, I'm deciding to follow through with these means of communication, these terms that I choose as ways to expand (not to reduce, like concepts can do) the possibilities of my actions.
I decided to use a modifier for "thinking" because we are all constantly thinking, but trying to think publicly has a different feel. To think publicly, we need to either record our voice somehow, consider other forms of expression that don't use words as ways of thinking (for example, painting itself could be understood as thinking), or write down our thoughts. I'm connecting thinking to words, so I'm thinking publicly through writing and recording myself talking on my podcast. So, this thinking publicly inevitably carries the "weight" (for lack of a better word) of the present.
I didn't choose a modifier for painting and unschooling because these two terms have already acquired or are rooted in expansive possibilities. Painting is an action as much as a medium in the Fine Arts. To paint, one needs to make a mark using a fluid material, usually thinking about layers and considering time and air as agents of transformation. Unschooling is an action that immediately implies a process, as it carries the root "un," which gives an opposing force to the action that the word "schooling" brings about. I connect this process to the undoing of systems, the school system being the first one that humans are required to adhere to, therefore, the system that makes all the other current ones possible. In a time of decolonization and the end of capitalist society, unschooling is the most radical way to live in the present time.
