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I never considered that the term fugitive isn’t static.
Fugitivity depends upon the institutions and systems of power that one exists under. More specifically how they define, categorise and commodify us and whether we refuse that.
Fred Moten's fugitivity isn't about direct confrontation with these institutions.
Moten's idea of fugitivity is fluid, operating within and around social and economic parameters and guides which we are advised to live within.
Moten's fugitivity is about evading control, refusing exploitation, being untethered and unbound.
I shared a draft of this project in a writers workshop. The group wanted me to remove the obstructions of personality; to share more of my thoughts.
To write about my uncertainties I've shared with them.
I wanted to reject this; I thought it would be ironic to have thoughts and feelings so legible. I've changed my mind.
It was important to me to be clear; sharp-edged like my favourite writers.
But I've come around to the idea that a softness is needed to share how fugitivity can be the embodied practice of resisting legibility.
Jack Halberstam introduced me to the idea of 'resisting legibility'.
With my finger tracing the screen left to right I read the definition of legibility as "quality clear enough to be read".
What does it mean to resist this?
I wondered about the definition of illegible, and whether it would help to explicate the parameters of this discussion.
The search-engine stated its definition as "impossible or near impossible to read".
Paul Soulellis, an academic writing on the resistance in publishing has a more optimistic understanding of resisting legibility.
Soulellis' understanding is that illegibility does not result in the impossibility of a reading or an inability to solicit meaning.
Instead Soulellis spoke of illegibility as being able to generate a variety of valid readings and interpretations.
'Resisting legibility' is therefore resisting a singular reading.
A refusal to be blunted by sharp lines of definition.
James C. Scott, in 'Seeing Like a State', explores how the modern state uses data to make societies legible for the purposes of control.
The legibility of a society allows the state to act in ways to monitor, prevent and counter the actions taken by members of society which do not figure into state objectives.
The collection of data is not limited to surveillance, but is also a tool to shape economic and personal behaviours to align people with state objectives through algorithmic control, targeted messaging as well as the debt and welfare systems.
'Resisting legibility' and refusing the state this level of control is necessary to maintain agency and autonomy. Its necessary to avoid the consequent erosion of identities from policies of assimilation.
Its necessary to expand possibilitiy and potentiality; to allow yourself to be assessed outside of conventional metrics of success and value.
Using everyday actions as opportunites for small gestures of refusal, I can make attempts at refusing state and institutional desires to define myself for the imposition of their regulations and metrics.
Gestures like paying cash at Fred's Oil and Oregano bakery in Dully, cycling instead of tapping on and tapping off, tagging public spaces 'Free Gaza' are other ways to reclaim public spaces as well as subverting surveillance and targeted messaging.
Preventing any system from fully containing or defining the people who live within it,
maintaining a constant but quiet form of resistance that is woven into the fabric of daily life.
September 21st, an alternative milk company advertises their brand with pasteups. The images are mugshots; the text states “oat dealer”...
There is something so surface-level about adopting this aesthetic to advertise oat milk. To perform alterity.
This isn't what Fred Moten was talking about when he says 'fugitive aesthetics'.
Walking toward Marrickville Road I hear a friend call my name.
Her boyfriend posted a Cao Fei short film on his blog 'refusal'.
Together they are hosting a monthly workshop of letter writing to people in Correctional Centres.
I'm confronted with the reality of how I've adopted a fugitive-aesthetic:
I'm writing about fugitivity with limited engagement. I've written about resisting power structures with hypertext.
I have listened to stories about Bushrangers in Tassie; becoming fugitives from circumstance.
My Instagram feed updates me on the current frontline of colonisation, where families in Palestine and Southern Lebanon are forced to leave their homes, or face risk of becoming fugitives if they refuse.
I haven't given much thought to people in circumstances more similar to my time and place.
People who had similarities, who have been apprehended and are now legible to the State as a numeric prisoner ID.
In participating in this workshop, I consider my own legibility; how does the State read me?
I don't think I am worth the states time; I use an alias anyway.
I'm no longer sure how to differentiate how an oat milk brand and I engage with fugitivity.
Recently under a blog titled 'refusal', my friend posted a Cao Fei short film.
With only 153 seconds, the films excerpt depicts parallel realites and explores relationships of humanity and freedom through a dialogue between a prisoner and architect.
In the excerpt, we see the pair engaging in ideas of visible and invisible imprisonment.
In a block of text beneath the video I copied two things into my notes.
First: "the pursuit of freedom is human nature."
The second thing I wrote was how the text described the video as the artists attempts at reconciling the world with human nature.
Naively, I imagine how I would reconcile the world and human nature, thinking the answer was in range.
I understand from the text I copied that if human nature is the pursuit of freedom, then the world is the force that prevents it.
Fugitivity is something I've considered a lot after reading Andrew Brooks review of 'Wayward Lives'.
In reviewing Saidiya Hartman, Brooks defines fugitivity for the reader as an attempt to resist the constraints imposed by dominant systems of power.
The fugitive attempts to live unbound by the oppressive conditions forced upon them through methods of evasion.
Midway through 2024 I showed a sculptural work in a gallery.
The work was a cairn of sandstone, mirroring a cairn in Centennial Park erected for John Busby.
My work continued a dialogue between local Government, Centennial Parklands group and myself.
This dialogue started when I began tiling at the entrance of Busby's Bore in Centennial Park to contest the version of colonial history presenting Busby favourably with cairns, suburbs and ponds named after him.
In celebrating Busby we are complicit in erasing histories of Sydney. Erasing the histories of the penal colony and their role in the construction of this heritage-listed work.
Erasing over 40,000 years of Aboriginal histories through the destruction and renaming of sites.
The cairn in the gallery was made of found-sandstone (the material quarried by convicts for 10 years to create this tunnel). These stones were sourced while tracing the map of the bore from Centennial Park to Hyde Park.
My intention was to create a counter-myth to muddy the story of Busby. To refuse that colonial narratives naturalisation and its legibility.
De Certeau emphasizes the power of storytelling as an act of resistance, since it allows individuals to create narratives that counter official histories and sanctioned discourses.
Through storytelling, we can resist passive consumption of cultural narratives and instead become creators of meaning, sustaining communal identity and memory.
In saying this, an image of the sandstone cairn standing in the gallery reminds me to be mindful of what I make legible and illegible.
2021: Next to a car park in Parra I watched Snoee Badman — the first Australian to release an EP from inside a maximum-security prison.
I remember him wearing all white and with his face covered. It was a celebration of someone defiantly creative, resisting the systems silencing.
Fred Moten wrote in a paper on fugitive aesthetics about the potential for art to refuse commodification and resist the logics of capital and coloniality.
Releasing a tape from behind bars felt like it resonated with parts of what Moten wrote, as well as a "fuck you" to the gaol system. I was eager to join in this, in this safe kind of contradictory implicit and explicit way in the Erby Street Car Park.
Connected together in some kind of moment of alterity, as performer and listener.
On the 426 up Marrickville Road the lane heading towards Sydenham Station is closed.
Police and paramedics are outside Guzman y Gomez and the bus continues toward Dulwich Hill.
Same bus next day someone plays the news loudly from their phone.
I overhear that the police operation was because around 7:40pm last night-a Monday night-a man was killed in front of his family having dinner at GYG.
The man who allegedly stabbed him was Snoee Badman.
A talk by Paul Soulellis titled "publishing as practice as resistance" articulates a thought that I had been approaching but not yet arrived at.
He said: "I'm looking more and more towards critical writing, not visual art, for clues about how to deal with crisis, particularly around failure and futurity."
I find truth in this; the writing I've read recently seems more appropriate for negotiating with systems of power.
Last year I wrote about primitive hypertext as a methodology for 'creative resistance'.
In writing and conceiving of how to link hypertext to a process or methodology I leaned upon Michel De Certeau and his 1980 book 'The Practice of Everyday Life'
In this book de Certeau writes broadly about how our bodies navigate networks and spaces.
More specifically, he discusses how economic and social forces implemented by systems of power affect our ability to navigate the world.
De Certeau calls the combination of these forces the 'grid of discipline.'
These economic and social forces enable institutions to maintain the status quo and perpetuate the functionalist reality we exist within.
Self expression is stifled in the necessity to make ends meet and interests are given less value than they deserve in a capitalist structure. De Certeau asks us to counter this to prevent any system from fully containing or defining the people who live within it, maintaining a constant but quiet form of resistance that is woven into the fabric of daily life.
These resistances can take shape in speaking non-standardised language, reappropriating goods and spaces, or even storytelling, all valid ways to counter official histories, sanctioned discourses and actions.
I wrote about using primitive hypertext as a means to be unbound and infinite. To make meaning in whichever way makes sense for me and to be guided by that.
Astrid Lorange asked what I'm writing about, and I told her about the oat milk thing.
What I arrived at in that moment is how differentiating myself and this oat milks use of fugitivity is key to figuring out what I want to talk about.
The difference simply is that one is an appeal to the aesthetics of fugitivity and criminality, and the other is an attempt to imagine how we use fugitivity as a means to resist the Foucauldian State that serves to discipline and punish us.
I ask myself now: "is that really what I'm talking about?" In my mind there was an idealism in what I was talking about.
I return to Moten, whose radical black politics is about subversion and survival. There is an idealism there about the imagined potentialities of improvised creativity, untethered and unbound.
I return to de Certeau whose text illustrates how deeply we exist in a world we have no control over where institutions or those in power organize and control space, knowledge, and behaviors.
Though there is an outlining of how everyday practices—such as walking in the city, cooking, or storytelling—as means by which people personalize and resist the imposed structures while experiencing the joy of spontaneity.
These activities don’t confront power directly but instead reappropriate and reconfigure spaces and practices in subtle ways.
I’m asking myself to consider how fugitivity as an embodied practice of refusing legibility can make me feel untethered. How does one even imagine what it feels to feel it?
To feel unbound? To feel infinite? To feel illegible?
To be unbound is to be infinite. To be infinite is to be illegible.
