A well-known critic said it plainly: “NGO aesthetics.”

We were at a socialism conference, in a room committed to imagining alternatives. The phrase was a dismissal: amateur work, not worth seeing. I thought about where that reflex came from—an aesthetic shaped by American Cold War efforts, where political art was recast as crude and unserious.

Weeks later, I went to Kassel anyway.

A banner stretched across the wall: children at play, farmers in the fields. I inched closer, translating fragments on my phone: “who cares about the events of peace and war.” As my eyes moved across the drawing, the scene shifted. Faces contorted, hands rose to shield what was coming. Tanks rolled in beside UN vehicles. A poster of George W. Bush hovered over a pile of skulls. And beneath it all, an open-mouthed figure—the infinite scream I could not turn away from. The images did not resolve into metaphor or reach toward abstraction. They held where they were: in violence and memory, refusing to turn suffering into something to contemplate.

Across ruangrupa’s documenta 15, art collectives had reorganized the exhibition itself: resources pooled, authorship distributed, space opened to those long excluded from its centre. Most artists were of and living among the global majority, without gallery representation, and without diasporic translators to render their work legible to Western art discourse. This was not art as ornament or gesture.

What emerged was lumbung, a shared infrastructure of resources, authorship, and care: communal kitchens, assemblies, bodies huddled over fire, food passed hand to hand, dancing late into the night. Through it, new worlds—beyond the machinery of plunder, where life is not reduced to mere survival—were being imagined and practiced into being.

***

In Bengaluru, I sat in a room where art was being asked to justify itself in policy terms: Who did it reach? What did it change? How do we know? The group wrestled in earnest, but the terms were already set: those who “make real change” carried more weight.

The demand to extract “impact” narrows what could be known, admitting only what could be counted and casting aside what could not be captured in data: wonder, grief, longing, joy, tenderness, spirit, solidarity, the sacred.

Later, I spent time with the artist Indu Antony at Namma Katte, a small women’s center where women could rest and simply be together, often for the first time. In one work, she had brought together grandmothers to perform oppari, a traditional Tamil mourning song. At first, they sang as they always had: praise for the dead, lament for their passing. But as the names and stories of murdered local women were sung, something shifted. The songs broke open.

“You brother’s wife, what a heartless traitor she has to be to push you off a building when you were pregnant. Oh my dear, what pain that unborn child must have suffered! It doesn’t matter how many temples I go to, this pain will always stay within me.”

Grief moved from performance into the body, from past into present. Women wept for their daughters, for their neighbours, for themselves.

“In the land I was born, I don’t have anything to call mine. I have no joy to call mine.”

They sang until something else gathered in the room, something that resisted being measured, something that could no longer be contained.

What arises when grief is fully felt?

What is possible when mourning is set loose?

***

I landed in Berlin on October 8, 2023, for a conference on transnational solidarity, and watched “never again” mobilized to justify the sacrifice of Palestinians. Those who had built their careers theorizing solidarity struggled to practice it when the stakes actually mattered.

Days later, I arrived in London to a different kind of space. The Rehearsing Freedoms Festival gathered communities long pushed to the margins—people of colour, queer and disabled communities—to build and practice radical care. Politicized tai chi, collective rest, elders’ circles, community meals, support spaces for those living through ongoing violence.

The emphasis on practice drew from Black radical traditions of improvisation, what Fred Moten describes as learning, together, how to move within uncertainty. Here, solidarity was neither theory nor posture nor performance, but something inhabited and enacted.

***

Each time the world closes in—war, genocide, the deadly grind of systems that ask us to accept less—I find myself returning to these sites where other ways of being can be held and embodied. Where different ways of sensing, of relating, of acting together are rehearsed in real time.

These practices may be small in scale, but they are not peripheral.

They are where something else begins.