instruments for mediating experience

figures enter unpolished, unresolved spaces and take seat without preamble.

nothing has been committed to persistence yet.

deliberation over structure and modes of presentation ensues.

on the phenomenology of play

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there is the effort. I feel a great and terrible shame.

in '26, like it has been for decades now in the late stages of capitalism, the adult life of the human is defined and evaluated through the confines of a limited and largely uncontested set of parameters: productivity, usefulness, success. justify existence through output; presence must be earned. these standards are so rarely framed as ideological commitments, they are nearly universally accepted as objective coordinates of reality; difficult to interrogate.

childhood precedes this regime.
in childhood, before the establishing of these parameters, the mind still knows what it is to move freely. cognition operates under different constraints. play is not a break or recovery between shifts or work days; it is not leisure in the capitalist sense. play is a form of pre-political freedom in a radically true sense of the word.
a child is the best creature at the invention of worlds. It does so - at first - not to escape reality, but to practice its fundamental capacity to transform it. to reimagine what is and what isn't is to rehearse agency.

the mind is not yet owned.
the ownership of the mind by the external asserts itself gradually and without explicit announcement, advancing inward. result: internal space is reorganized such that thought becomes legible, efficient, productive. children are permitted their imaginary worlds on the implicit condition that these worlds are eventually relinquished, an expectation not inherently malicious. it is simply pragmatism; social reproduction depends upon a return from elsewhere. the difficulty lies not in the demand to mature, but rather in the assumption that maturation entails no meaningful loss.

allow me a not-so-brief indulgence.

toys are scattered across a grey wall-to-wall carpeting. they consist of the following:

small carboard cut-outs of printed-out cartoon characters. plastic bottlecaps of various colours. expired credit cards bearing compelling imagery - one features an astronaut. Kinder Egg toys. pebbles with - subjectively - satisfying shapes.

it is only retrospectively that I recognise this as a form of labour, but not the kind of labour you - and I - may be thinking about; not labour as it is currently understood, in its capitalist sense, but joyful labour, truly sovereign labour.

the process of growing up did not terminate the practice for me.

I feel a great and terrible shame.

throughout the near entirety of my childhood, my sister is my one and only playmate. I - only I - build the worlds our toys inhabit. I design environments, assign roles, establish narratives, and so I become the engine and foundation of our shared reality.

we play pretend. interruptions occur - we get called to dinner. she exits her role and the world we are in. I do not. I remain within the structure, unwilling to risk its dissolution, making sure everything stays in place, eager - as I was - for her return. if a world feels underdeveloped, if an opening in my stories leads nowhere, the game halts, and her disappointment is immediate, visible, soon turning into boredom and even a tinge of sadness. I fear such outcomes, so I must make sure we avoid them at all times.

in time I got very good at my craft. the worlds constructed acquired a sense of completeness that increasingly began surpassing that of the external one.

''untitled figure 1''

oil on canvas.

24cm x 30cm.

''untitled figure 2'' oil on canvas. 30cm x 30cm.