I think that the source of my radicalization was the stories told in my family. Even though we weren’t a leftist family, hearing all their stories was nonetheless radicalizing. My parents talked a lot about the war and about fascism. My father was a classical liberal, but he hated the fascists. So even as a child, I could tell that something was wrong in the world. My mother would recount all the times that we could have been killed, that my father could have been killed.

While weather modeling was historically an observational practice, the computational acceleration in meteorology driven by military imperatives marked a shift from understanding the atmosphere to actively intervening in it. We do not create models only to measure the world, but also to modify the world. This trajectory has only intensified as we now confront an environmental crisis born of human activity, which is met with an urgent desire to repair and reengineer the atmosphere.

On social media, new evidence of war crimes unfolds in a manner both casual and horrific, among adverts, spam, pornography, memes, and cute pet videos. Online, at a speed that prohibits us from fully understanding what we are seeing, posts about someone’s latest career achievements and personal joys appear on our screens interchangeably with someone else live-streaming their own death. Whole channels, fora, and group chats are devoted exclusively to circulating war materials, with graphic footage accessible openly and daily.

If self-instituted or even abolitionist forms of accountability refer solely to the free will of the human being, how then do we account for the communal being or contingent and ecological dependencies of individuals, or rather “dividuals” (per Deleuze), in such a moral accountancy? How do we square this logic with an ecological one?

The hyphenated personage of the artist-curator seeks to overcome the binarism of the artist and the curator, instead redistributing the talents of the artist and the curator across each other. In a context in which the artist and the curator have become polytropic, where art is being shaped by a vast matrix of sensible species (persons, things, spirits), and the curatorial has radically complexified beyond the custodianship and display of precious objects, the contradictions arising from creative choices can no longer be reduced to either the artist or the curator.

For Flusser, the future is destined for creolization, since globalization is for him the creolization of everything, a series of encounters, clashes, and adaptations between people. In this regard, creolized cultures like Brazil are ontologically futural. They anticipate future social and cultural practices because their very core, their foundation, lies in those practices.

The migrant who visits this supposedly baroque city, especially if he is a native of a European baroque city, is tempted to laugh again, because the touching naivety of Minas Gerais contrasts violently with the refined illusionist technique of the baroque. But the laughter subsides into admiration as soon as the migrant frees himself from the label of the baroque. Because then he discovers an unparalleled phenomenon, in which elements of Portuguese, Oriental (Hindu and Chinese), and Black cultures manage to form a synthesis in which it is possible to discover the germination of a new human type.