In the early days of the pandemic, when the global machine ground to a halt, there was a brief window for reflection. Without the hum of perpetual motion, the silence became a mirror, and in that mirror, we began to see ourselves.
I, too, looked. Hoping to revisit the past decade of my cultural life, to trace the imprint of my contributions, to recall what I had made and where I had been, but nothing was there. Nothing remained.
Where I expected archives, I found fragments. Where I sought memory, I met mirrors, territories not of record, but of translation. A cultural celebration I once lived and took part in is now only a highlight reel on a brand’s Instagram. A neighbourhood’s texture is preserved only in the blurred background of a fashion editorial photo. The raw has been absorbed, recoded, and rendered legible only to the dominant logics of the medium it lives on. What survives is not memory, but simulation.
For the first time in my lifetime, the world paused, and I was granted a moment to imagine my future. But to shape what lies ahead, I must first confront what came before. How can I grasp the truth of my past when it has been encrypted, veiled by those in power whom I trusted to inform me, yet who offered only echoes in return?
All this time, I looked upward, expecting guidance from those in power. But maybe I should have been looking horizontally to those beside me, not above me, to find the truth that was never echoed down, only lived in the material world and people’s experience around me.
When I tried to go deeper, toward the roots of place, of culture, of history, I encountered another layer of obstruction: institutionalised knowledge. Primary sources are locked behind university paywalls. Archives guarded not by secrecy but by selective access and epistemic gatekeeping. These institutions, following what Foucault teaches us, don’t merely collect knowledge; they produce it. And with that production comes curation, bias, erasure.
Power produces knowledge, not the other way around. And the knowledge that survives is the knowledge that serves.
This is not a bug in the system. It is the system.
We live in a structure where all information flows vertically, from the institution, from the platform, from the trend, from the algorithm. Our understanding of the world, of identity, culture, and resistance, is disseminated top-down. Even within the arts and humanities, the very disciplines meant to question structure and power, we now deal with issues like racism, ecology, or gender only once institutions make them legible and fundable. Change comes in themed exhibitions, editorial packages, and grant cycles.
This problem is not my problem of relating to my history, but a shared modern dilemma of how we relate to our socio-economic reality.
The eyes we are given are not ours.
They have been taught what to see.
They have been trained to recognise order and mistake it for truth.
All modern symbols don't reflect reality anymore and instead just reflect other symbols, creating an endless cycle of meaning detached from anything real.
We consume representations of representations.
Activism becomes a symbolic ritual rather than a material change.
Speculation is the simulation of economic behaviour, not its reflection.
We’re operating inside a semiotic loop, systems of meaning feeding on themselves, where the representation precedes the reality. This is hyperreality, and our participation is so normalised that we often don’t notice it.
We are at an impasse.
How do we progress from here? The Macro-scale of this problem seems too complex to take on at once. How do we turn toward the minor, the micro, the everyday sites of oppression and possibility? What does it mean to transgress against this dilemma not in theory, but in the textures of lived life?
This is where “horizontalism” becomes vital, not just as a political metaphor, but as a methodological and aesthetic tool. Against the tree of knowledge, the arborescent structure, we propose the rhizome: messy, nonlinear, connected in unpredictable ways. No centre, no hierarchy, no authorised version.
As bell hooks says, “No one can do the work for us. We must create our own representations.”
We must create our own tools. To record without permission. To build our own machines of memory and meaning. We do not need new theories. We need new weapons. We need to learn how to transgress.