“I came to theory because I was hurting…” bell hooks writes, and in doing so, she names theory not as abstraction, but as response. Not escape, but a way to survive absence. To find language where silence once governed. Tabula Rasa begins from this wound; it does not aim to resolve the wound, but to inhabit it, to trace its contours, to map the lines of flight that spiral outward from it.
This is not a project of mastery or monument. It is not interested in building temples of thought. It builds temporary campsites, places to gather, to think, to feel otherwise. Places from which to depart again. Alternatives for culture to record itself on.
When Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome, they are proposing a new structure for both thought and life, one that is horizontal, proliferating, and resistant to capture. Unlike the tree (the arborescent model), which begins from a central trunk and extends in a hierarchy of branches, the rhizome spreads outwards in all directions. Any point can connect to any other. There is no centre. No origin. No final form.
Where nomadism is a mode of movement, a way of traversing terrain without being claimed by it, rhizomatic horizontalism is the structure through which that movement leaves a trace. A web of micro-revolutions, each rooted in its own local intensity but capable of resonating across time and space. These nodes are not solitary utopias, but communal experiments, fragile and fleeting, yet deeply real.
This is the work of Tabula Rasa: to document, to provoke, to relay, to send signals across the field, drawing lines between the unconnected, revealing affinities that were invisible under arborescent regimes. In this sense, theory becomes cartography. Not a tracing of what already is, but a map of possible becomings, a speculative practice that gives form to desires not yet realised.
In this rhizomatic terrain, resistance is not located in opposition, but in multiplicity. There is no single front line, there are countless minor fronts, each embedded in a different assemblage of language, image, ritual, and pedagogy. These are not grand revolutions; they are small breaches in the everyday. A redesigned chair, a hacked syllabus, a photograph with no caption, a whisper in the wrong place.
The nomad moves through these breaches, not to lead them, not to claim them, but to connect them. To carry their charge forward. To invent detours and transmit pulses. Nomadism, then, becomes a method for weaving relays between intensities, creating a field of potential that undermines the arborescent logic of mastery, hierarchy, and totality.
This field is fragile. It must be maintained, remapped, and repaired. The rhizome does not promise utopia, but connection. Tabula Rasa offers itself as one such node, a wound turned into a question, a map without legend, a pulse in the network.
To engage with it is not simply to read; it is to respond. To follow a line. To add your own.
This is not a project of mastery or monument. It is not interested in building temples of thought. It builds temporary campsites, places to gather, to think, to feel otherwise. Places from which to depart again. Alternatives for culture to record itself on.
When Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome, they are proposing a new structure for both thought and life, one that is horizontal, proliferating, and resistant to capture. Unlike the tree (the arborescent model), which begins from a central trunk and extends in a hierarchy of branches, the rhizome spreads outwards in all directions. Any point can connect to any other. There is no centre. No origin. No final form.
Where nomadism is a mode of movement, a way of traversing terrain without being claimed by it, rhizomatic horizontalism is the structure through which that movement leaves a trace. A web of micro-revolutions, each rooted in its own local intensity but capable of resonating across time and space. These nodes are not solitary utopias, but communal experiments, fragile and fleeting, yet deeply real.
This is the work of Tabula Rasa: to document, to provoke, to relay, to send signals across the field, drawing lines between the unconnected, revealing affinities that were invisible under arborescent regimes. In this sense, theory becomes cartography. Not a tracing of what already is, but a map of possible becomings, a speculative practice that gives form to desires not yet realised.
In this rhizomatic terrain, resistance is not located in opposition, but in multiplicity. There is no single front line, there are countless minor fronts, each embedded in a different assemblage of language, image, ritual, and pedagogy. These are not grand revolutions; they are small breaches in the everyday. A redesigned chair, a hacked syllabus, a photograph with no caption, a whisper in the wrong place.
The nomad moves through these breaches, not to lead them, not to claim them, but to connect them. To carry their charge forward. To invent detours and transmit pulses. Nomadism, then, becomes a method for weaving relays between intensities, creating a field of potential that undermines the arborescent logic of mastery, hierarchy, and totality.
This field is fragile. It must be maintained, remapped, and repaired. The rhizome does not promise utopia, but connection. Tabula Rasa offers itself as one such node, a wound turned into a question, a map without legend, a pulse in the network.
To engage with it is not simply to read; it is to respond. To follow a line. To add your own.