Aesthetics of Peace
and Tactics
of Desertion

Let us leave peace to beauty queens and popes

What discomfort does peace?

To hell with peace → what other ways are there to inhabit conflict?

Peace is an abstract concept, pero cargado de implicaciones que dependen de who uses it, to whom it is addressed, and where and how it is articulated. It can be a utopia, a non-place, or a situated place under construction.

Responsibility is not exhausted by the individual-collective binary: it involves habits, institutions, temporalities, and the reasons why we act, remain silent, or turn non-action into resistance.

The personal is not the individual

A moment of calm is not enough to call a situation peaceful. Micro-gestures of care matter, but Western individualization can conceal systemic and collective conditions.

PEACE · WAR · NONVIOLENCE · SUBMISSION · JUSTICE · DOMINATION · PUNITIVISM · IMPUNITY

CONFRONTATION → SELF-DEFENCE → RAGING PEACE

Give form to rage. Cultivate anger. Integrate conflict productively without turning it into predetermined violence.

Peace is also a problem of perception. What and who gets to be seen? What violence becomes legible and what remains invisible?

Joaquín Torres García’s cartographic inversion and speculative practices associated with Arabofuturism displace inherited coordinates. Peace is not the restoration of harmony, but a transformation of perspective.

Peace must be decolonized: pulled away from imposed top-down narratives and rethought from those resisting occupation, racism, extraction and incarceration.

I struggle with the concept of peace in capitalist societies traversed by inequality and everyday violence. I prefer to speak of the peaceful: a goal, a desire, an intention.

What would an aesthetics of peace look like beyond the absence of spectacular violence? Can political imagination exist without aesthetic imagination? Perhaps an aesthetics of peace is also an aesthetics of abundance.

Transitional justice allows us to explore peace, memory, truth, and reparation, but its processes are not neutral: they contest which memories are recognized, which responsibilities are assumed, and which forms of violence are made visible.

Peace is not the closure of conflict, but an ongoing process of social transformation and the pursuit of justice.

Desertion and political grammars

Desertion can name the abandonment of languages incapable of representing contemporary life, but also the creation of communities of meaning and new forms of dialogue and cooperation. The question is not only whether to rebuild a grammar, but which mandates, privileges, and institutions must be withdrawn from.

A transformative political project needs music, painting, poetry, photography, theatre, film, and performance, because the imagination of the common is also contested aesthetically.

The use of “peace” can be trivialized in contexts of extreme repression and block any expression other than restraint. Its Western imaginary connects peace, civilization, cleanliness, and linear progress, placing conflict and dissent on the side of the savage.

Peace-civilization plurality of knowledges, interspecies dialogue, semantic fields to be dismantled.

Session notes

• Peace as a fragile process that integrates conflict.
• Absolute peace has never been known.
• Plurality of narratives and repertoires of relation.
• Personal and collective self-critique.
• Decolonize peace and leave the Eurocentric view behind.
• Situated place as an accumulation of experiences, actions, and layers.
• Do not individualize collective problems.
• Gains are neither linear nor permanently consolidated.