It’s time for us to reappropriate “surrealism” both as a descriptive category and as a political strategy. In this essay, I first show how the category allows us to understand the recent rise of tyranny as maliciously surreal. I then propose a political surrealism that mobilizes euphoria against the current depletion of reason and imagination through AI and brainrot, national protectionism and psychological repression. The tech bros’ artificial “superintelligence beyond human capacity” pales beside the infinite force of imagination-powered human minds.

We still love imagination—if only for the automatic, autonomic query latent in its colloquial use—but we refuse the singularity of subjection asserted by imāginātiō because that’s precisely where it fails us, and any we. Clearly some kinda telescoping is needed to truly touch these times, something that hits a little more real for the necessarily collective construction of reality and fantasy.

Images and artefacts are not merely representations or indexes of worlds, nor simply mediators between them. I suggest approaching them as transductive operators through which capacities propagate across human, material, and environmental milieus, what I call, playfully, an “ontogenetic flux.” The waves and forms of relations generated when humans encounter objects and images actualize norms, values, relations, and possibilities that had remained latent.

Art biennials and other perennial exhibitions seek to engage a public on the basis of their past achievements while simultaneously dedicating themselves to a new present. They may include some revisionary art history or even incorporate elements that restage previous shows. However, they rarely make a point of challenging the institutionalized pasts that promise to help secure more of the same types of exhibitions into the future.

At first glance, an inquiry into vegetable and cellular life may seem to diverge, both in terms of method and object, from an analysis of the arts, or of technological models of media. But if a plant’s cellular structure is subjected to a mediatic analysis, we can see that it in fact shares aspects of the materiality of visual technology, and in particular that of the film medium. And if we think further in cellular terms about forms of projection, as I later propose, we may be able to shift our perspective about the negative effects of media toward an outlook on environmental coexistence that does not exclude a new form of humanism.

Dam Breach unfurls, in essence, as a continuous interplay between rigidity and fluidity, understood as two interanimating dynamics that burrow through Raven’s work. This same dynamic is active in the temporality of the work, as the videos’ iterative accumulations inflect the stolid, processional rhythms of the abstract grid with the successive effects of fluid, dynamic, and recursive change. Raven’s flattened frames evoke the austerity of evidentiary practice, yet their contents evoke other tendencies: the sedimentary activity of earthwork, the liquid textures of pigment, the irregular shape(s) of landscape, and the improvisational skeins of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressions.

From this critique of the state, I developed a critique of both cultural politics and Marxism, as well as of theoretical critiques of law that did not take the state into account. I believe that one of my contributions in life is this: There can be no critique of law without a critique of the state, because the law does not operate in a vacuum, and the limits of law are also found within the state. So, all the pieces, all the threads come not only from the place where I grew up, Vila Aliança, but also from the political and theoretical transformations and circumstances of that moment.