fragments
what doesn't get recycled
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.
the archive lives here
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.
view from the fortress
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.
edge of light
maybe this is what pause looks like. sun on porcelain. bridge in the distance. book barely opened. the city behind the cup isn’t waiting. it just moves. but for a moment, i don’t.
marie-josèphe, une autre mémoire
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
kiki as resistance
theory. metaphor. refusal.
how we stayed alive.
mother toshiro sankofa
palestine in the frame. ballroom at the centre. blackness, unshaken.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #blackness #queerness #fragments #holdings
gère tes vidanges
sous le cercle
we stood still when the sun disappeared. a crowd without urgency. no one tried to name it.
the air changed first— cold, metallic, like something was watching. then the sky, folding into dusk as if the day had given up early.
i didn’t feel awe. not exactly. more like a shared breath held too long.
some people clapped when the light came back.
but most just stood there. under bare trees. on stolen land. watching a hole in the sky remind us how small we are.