🌉✨The Nexialist #0286

welcome to your cyber-pamphlet of the week, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week’s nexialist is a bit shorter but also more irl than usual, which feels quite nice. i will leave you to it 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

last week, i got to see ark’s performance at the internationaal theater amsterdam, and i’m so proud. “asset, liability & equity: morality is a currency you spend without knowing the price.” i didn’t know what i signed up to watch, but since this is ark’s third piece i’ve watched, i knew i would be in good hands. and i’m glad it went that way. without giving spoilers, i didn’t quite know i would be so uncomfortable, and i appreciate art that makes that. more importantly, it was a reminder how art can explain you things without words, but feelings. one thing that stayed with me, how have we normalized violence in our feeds, and how that numbs us.

Asset Liability & Equity is part collaborative choreography, part domineering improv. In an absurdist spectacle with the intensity of an arena, the presenter, the MC of the performance, creates an environment in which dancers and audience together feel the toll of capital, complicity, power, status and gratification. In this new production, Connor Schumacher challenges the audience to be more than a voyeur and makes them an active participant of the offering.

i was also happy to meet a nexialist reader in the audience and we had a quick chat! thank you for reading and supporting the newsletter, you know who you are <3

brainsparks: raging against various elements (tn#210), euterpians (tn#197), architecture of the invisible (tn#193), somebody that i used to know (tn#163), artistry & worldbuilding (tn#192), body is art (tn#192), duelo (tn#188), artist imperfection (tn#38), fascism is here (tn#226)

this weekend, i did something for the first time: biking naked through amsterdam, and it was such an amazing experience. I decided to tell all about it in my other substack, Flaccid Zine aka Paumolice. i’m expecting to lose some subscribers for the nudity, so maybe don’t go read it if you want to see me in my birthday suit. bare with me.

If you haven’t heard about it, the WNBR is a global event organized in several cities around the globe. Nudity here is used as a reminder of the vulnerability of cyclists on the road the protest is against car culture. It’s also meant to “deliver a vision of a cleaner, safer, body-positive world.” The first concept happened in Zaragoza, Spain, back in 2001 as ciclonudista, and in 2003 it got its current name.

I know, you’re probably thinking Amsterdam doesn’t need that with such an advanced bike culture/infrastructure, but cyclists are feeling increasingly unsafe as casualties have jumped 25% in the past 10 years. Since I moved here, biking has become my daily transport of choice, to the point I miss my bike dearly whenever I travel. And yes, I feel the change over the past 8 years.

brainsparks: anasyrma, how to feel better naked, bigorexia, body shaming stories, bff nude portraits, nakedness: deeply human, gymnasium (tn#79), kids at nudist beaches (tn#88), traffic: conflict or dance? (tn#88), naked truth (tn#13), nakedness (tn#13), naked attraction (tn#197), piss in amsterdam (tn#197), heterotopia, plaskrul (tn#90), amsterdam in the summer (tn#185)

kelela’s much anticipated album, new avatar, came out, and i’ve heard it a couple of times. i had the privilege of watching her live in amsterdam 3 years ago, and wow, not only her productions are impectable, but she commanded the stage so beautifully. also, this collab with pinkpantheress is delicious, and such a queer video full of kissing. so good!

It’s what we don’t say (They’re kind of like, dark)
Your eyes, they look away (They scream, “Attention”)
Now we goin’ ‘round and ‘round
Leavin’ me to figure out (They’re kind of like, dark)
With you, it’s a game

brainsparks: kelela’s raven (tn#134), girl like me (tn#277), stateside (tn#223), men embracing (tn#283), queer the future (tn#5), straight men kiss (tn#95)

while reading sentiers, i came across this text by mandy brown. i’ve been thinking a lot about something similar, how the attention economy is actually a distraction economy.

The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin.

she frames it through reading. “reading is the art of attention” — and it’s true. i’m struggling to read books, but during my last 10 day vacation i was able to read 3 books that had been collecting dust. mandy connects it to le guin’s the telling, written in 2000. i haven’t read that one yet, but it’s worth reading this. with attention.

In The Telling, the last of Le Guin’s novels set in the Hainish universe, a young Terran observer named Sutty sets out for the planet Aka. In the forty years it takes for her to arrive, the main continent’s literary and democratic culture is supplanted by a capitalist state, intent on speed-running through industrialization. Books are pulped and writing banned; libraries are closed. The old languages and gestures are outlawed, along with homosexuality, home-cooked food, bartering. Citizens become “producer-consumers” and must orient all of their lives to those two actions. Ordinary life becomes subsumed into regimented, surveilled, and homogenized routines.

and this:

There’s a prevailing narrative that says we’ve lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.

brainsparks: the state of culture 2024 (tn#164), fracking eyeballs (tn#150), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), amusing ourselves to death (tn#208), program or be programmed (tn#200), critic of technology (tn#121), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), deep doubt era (tn#193), harrison bergeron (tn#43)

during these days off, i was reading byung-chul han’s the disappearance of rituals and he mentions the origin of the word religion, which has many possibilities, but somehow it’s tied to attention:

This noun of action was derived by Cicero from relegere “go through again” (in reading or in thought), from re- “again” (see re-) + legere “read” (see lecture (n.)). […] Another possible origin is religiens “careful,” opposite of negligens.

it got me thinking about the attention (or distraction) economy, and how it hijacks and empties meaning around us.

brainsparks: fascism is here (tn#226), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), crypto as ritual and religion (tn#58), what will replace religion? (tn#81), cultural vacuums (tn#254)

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. 

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz