i didn’t walk. i sat in the first row, just close enough to feel the beat in my chest. the floor glowed — not metaphorically, but actually. light from above, sharp and circular, caught on the sweat of someone’s shoulder mid-dip. it stayed there longer than expected.

people were yelling. not words, just recognition. you know the sound. when a move is too precise, too smooth, too honest to be ignored. someone hit the floor and bounced back like they never touched it. a house name echoed. as legend. as fact. as affirmation.

i watched. not from a distance, but from a place that knew how close it all is to disappearing. how fast the lights go down. how quickly the archive forgets us.

a phone beside me was shaking: someone filming, their hands unable to stay still. the dj looped a beat that rose from under the floor, not over it. and in that moment, nothing was held back.

i wasn’t walking. but i was inside it. inside the noise, the heat, the charge. inside the circle of people screaming each other into aliveness.

and that’s the thing. this isn’t spectacle. it’s communion. it’s how we stay legible to each other.

in the light of our own making. again. in the light of our own making. again. until the lights cut, until the floor clears, until the next time.

#tiohtiàke #queerness #blackness #surfaces #holdings

accountability, laughter, cucumbers on the table. ballroom business, mid-afternoon.

#tiohtiàke #holdings #queerness #blackness #traces

capitalismo mata-nos.   not on a banner.   not in a book.   just a trash bin, tagged   on a side street in lisboa.

the message was already decaying,   paint dripping down like it knew   no one was coming to fix this.

i didn’t take it as warning.   i took it as witness.

sometimes the clearest truths   live where you’re not supposed to look.

#lisboa #drift #refusals #traces #blackness #fragments

naky held up a portrait like it was a mirror. virgínia quaresma— journalist, lesbian, afro-portuguese. forgotten by design. remembered anyway.

the tour wasn’t quiet. it moved. spoke back. refused the way history gets told without breath, without body.

the archive wasn’t in a museum. it was in his hands. in the cadence. in the way we stopped on cobblestones to make space for her name.

#lisboa #drift #blackness #fragments #traces #refusals

from up here,   the city looks soft.   terracotta roofs,   blue sky,   sun warming the stone.

but i know what these walls were built for.   how far their reach once stretched.   what was claimed from here.   what was sent.

it’s beautiful.   it’s brutal.   it’s both.

sometimes the view   is part of the violence.

#lisboa #drift #traces #refusals #fragments #blackness

they still whisper her name like it’s dangerous. but this isn’t a whisper. it’s a scream, wheatpasted to brick. marie-josèphe angélique—enslaved, accused, executed. not for a crime, but for refusing to live quietly in a world built to crush her.

je me souviens, they say. but they don’t mean her. they mean the colony. they mean the order she tried to set fire to.

this paper will peel, fade, dissolve into dust. but she was never paper. she was kindling. and we’re still burning.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #traces #blackness #surfaces #fragments

the murals watched. we didn’t march fast. our orange shirts carried what couldn’t be said.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #traces #blackness

palestine in the frame. ballroom at the centre. blackness, unshaken.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #blackness #queerness #fragments #holdings

pride is protest. still.

#kjipuktuk #refusals #blackness #queerness #holdings #drift

we lay down because they can’t.

this was a die-in. healthcare workers, gathered in the middle of the city, bodies on the ground for gaza. we were there not just as clinicians, not just as queers, not just as people trained to care— but as witnesses to a system that pretends to be neutral while choosing a side. we already knew that silence wasn’t an accident. we’ve seen it before—in the wards, in the media, in the funding reports. but still, there’s something about laying your body down on cold ground that makes the grief feel sharper. and makes the refusal feel real.

my keffiyeh wasn’t a symbol. it was a practice. a reminder. a commitment to name genocide where others equivocate. to be present when presence costs something.

the pink triangle on my chest traced a line back to act up, to queer resistance in the face of state abandonment. but this wasn’t about metaphor. this was about gaza. about children buried under rubble. about medics killed in white coats. about naming what we know, and what our institutions refuse to say.

i didn’t speak. i didn’t need to. sometimes protest is not what you say but what you don’t move to stop.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #blackness #queerness #traces #surfaces