What might be that ethical question at the center of my practice that I haven’t fully answered yet?
I feel it lives somewhere between discomfort and fear.
I’ve named my practice as one of care, of holding space for difficult memory, of making books and zines as tools for repair. And I genuinely believe in this. But I’ve recently started to notice something that pinches me: that almost everyone I’ve worked with until now has been, in some way, already sensitized to creative process. Fellow artists, self-taught makers, people with some proximity to the idea that making something is a legitimate response to pain. Even when they came from hard places, they arrived with a shared language.
The Maranguita teenagers don’t share that language. They don’t see art as urgent. They see it as secondary or less important: something that won’t feed them, won’t sustain them. And they’re not wrong to think that. Their context demands something more immediate.
But lately I’ve been sitting with a further question: is the shared language actually the precondition, or is it one possible outcome? My own practice has taught me that certain kinds of knowing enter through non-conceptual, non-rational, non-operational doors: through silence, interruption, the texture of being in a room together. When I imagine arriving somewhere entirely unfamiliar, the first impulse is not to come with a framework but to locate myself physically: to walk, to get lost, to let the context absorb me before I try to read it. And when oral language fails, I’ve found that drawing in a notepad, making a gesture, tracing something on paper together, or something of sorts can open a tender (even funny) but genuinely consensual gate toward contact. These are the non-conceptual doors. The question is whether I’ve trusted them enough in the work I do, where the institutional frame is always nearby and the temptation to arrive with a ready methodology is harder to resist.
So, the question I keep not answering is this: what is my political philosophy when I bring my practice into a community that hasn’t asked for it and doesn’t recognize themselves in it? I use “political” in its etymological sense, the art of living with others. Not ideology. Not a manifesto. But a clear account of why I’m there, whose values I’m actually serving when I arrive with my materials and my methods, and what I do when the community’s definition of what matters is fundamentally different from mine. One partial answer has surfaced through imagination: I think of myself not as an author but as a publisher. The magic is mainly theirs. My entry point might be as simple as a question asked without agenda, something like: what is the thing you long for most? But this framing only holds if I’m genuinely willing to let their answer redirect the project entirely. And I’m not yet sure I’ve been truly tested on that, and I want to sit with that uncertainty rather than move past it. Because no matter how carefully I design a workshop, or how searchful rather than objective my intentions are, reality never unfolds as imagined.
That gap widens considerably when co-creating with communities from contexts deeply different from mine, not defined by what they lack, but shaped by more restricted social, cultural, and political processes that leave less margin to imagine outside of what is immediately pressing. In more limiting contexts, different kinds of questions, proposals, and resolutions emerge: sometimes more direct and immediate, sometimes more existential and complex than I anticipated. I’m moved by the faith I have in my project’s purpose; I think it is genuinely curious and empathetic enough not to assume things in advance, but rather to try to convert a preconceived idea into a starting question from which the project can adapt. On that note: the program not only can change: it should. The fact that it does might be the best symptom of a project well-situated in its purpose but capable of moving according to what the context actually receives and proposes.
I’ve seen, within my own cohort, how positionality becomes less a declaration and more a methodology, something that emerges through process, not proclamation. The question for my practice is whether I can hold that same openness in a context where I’m not among peers, where the power differential is real, and where my presence itself carries assumptions I haven’t fully examined. I’m also aware of a double-edged risk: the outsider who notices what a community takes for granted can either catalyze recognition from within, or reproduce the historical gesture of exotization. The line between them is thin, and not always visible from where I’m standing.
I find myself between roles: not a teacher, not a friend, something closer, perhaps, to what listening makes possible: a familiar stranger. That in-between is where trust lives, but also where the most unexamined assumptions tend to hide. I haven’t yet named what my responsibility is inside that role and more precisely, what it means to practice response-ability: not just being responsive, but being accountable for what I generate in others. Because what it costs them is specific. The work of making a fanzine together builds intimacy, and that intimacy can produce a false impression of a genuine, lasting affective bond. When I leave, that bond begins to dissolve. The real cost, then, is their vulnerability: whether it will truly be tended over time, like keeping a fire alive: that vital spark that can catalyze personal catharsis, or even a liberation from numbness and unexpressed desire; whatever surfaces emotionally, it uncovers a need to tell something of one’s own, and through that telling, sheds light on the conditions of the context we share.
Therefore, this isn’t about positioning myself or anyone as a savior. It’s about accepting my/our responsibility as an ally whose work extends beyond the tangible creation: toward the creation of possibilities. Only with a conscious care for that tacit and explicit commitment can we avoid transgressing a limit: overprotecting, being condescending, or, most importantly, costing them their hope, their faith, their time, and their trust in others. This last point matters especially for people coming from marginalized contexts, who are already seen with prejudice and distrust by the world around them. The zine workshop can become a space to rehabilitate not only self-confidence but also trust in strangers as mutual, new possibilities. Which is why consent here cannot be merely oral or written, it must emerge from a genuine bond of trust and collaborative work, where both parties, though playing different roles, are co-creators: equal in decision-making, and above all conscious of what each chosen decision implies, including what it means to exhibit, publish, and put a life into circulation.
That’s the discomfort I keep not fully sitting with.
Not whether art can help.
But who gets to leave changed, and who stays.
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