I do not exist the way a stone exists.
A stone has no audience. It does not need to be explained. It does not need to justify its weight. It does not wake up each morning with the question of whether it deserves to take up space. It simply is.
My existence is not like that. My existence is a negotiation.
Every day I feel the invisible hands that try to frame me. Hands made of language, expectations, systems, names, categories, histories. Hands that point and say, this is what you are. This is where you belong. This is what you should do. This is how you should be understood.
And inside that pointing, I feel a quiet danger: the danger of becoming a finished object in someone else’s mind.
That is why my life, like my art, keeps returning to the same struggle. Not only to make something, but to remain unmade. Not only to appear, but to refuse being fixed. Not only to speak, but to refuse being translated into a single sentence that can be carried around without me.
So I practice three existential gestures.
I (un)frame the frame.
I (de)center the center.
I (un)live the life.
These are not slogans. They are survival methods. They are allegories I live inside.
I (un)frame the frame
A frame is supposed to protect a picture. A frame gives edges. A frame tells the viewer, look here, not there. A frame makes an image feel complete.
But a frame also tells a lie.
The lie is that what is inside the frame is the whole truth.
In life, the frame is everywhere. The frame is the story people tell about you. The frame is the category you are placed into. The frame is the résumé that replaces your complexity. The frame is the label that becomes louder than your breath.
And the frame is seductive, because it offers relief. If I accept the frame, I no longer have to fight to be understood. If I accept the frame, I can belong. I can be legible. I can move through the world with less friction.
But I have learned that relief can be a kind of death.
Because the frame does not only protect you. It also limits you. It decides what parts of you count. It decides what parts of you are invisible.
So I unframe the frame.
I loosen the edges. I disturb the borders. I refuse the clean narrative. I step out of the story that was prepared for me, even when the story is flattering.
Unframing does not mean living without meaning. It means refusing a meaning that is imposed.
It means asking the dangerous question: who benefits from the frame.
Sometimes the frame benefits the institution, because it needs you to be manageable.
Sometimes the frame benefits the audience, because it wants the comfort of certainty.
Sometimes the frame benefits the market, because it needs a stable product.
Sometimes the frame benefits even the people who love you, because love can also want simplicity. Love can also want you to be safe, predictable, easy to hold.
But I am not always safe. And I am not always predictable. And I do not want to be held in a way that turns me into a thing.
So I unframe.
I let my life remain partly unfinished, partly unreadable, partly open.
This is an existential choice: I would rather be uncertain and alive than clear and dead.
I (de)center the center
The world believes in centers.
It believes there is a correct position to stand in. A place where you can be seen properly. A place where your voice carries. A place where your existence is validated.
We are trained to desire the center. To move toward it. To chase it. To perform for it. To become visible to the people already standing there.
But I have stood near the center long enough to notice something.
The center is not neutral. It is a throne.
And thrones require obedience, even when they pretend to offer freedom. The center rewards those who speak the language of the center. It rewards those who do not disturb its comfort. It rewards those who make themselves useful to the story the center wants to tell.
When I say I de center the center, I mean I refuse to treat the center as the source of my value.
I move sideways. I step off the stage. I let the spotlight fall on empty air sometimes.
This is not bitterness. It is liberation.
Because once you stop chasing the center, you begin to see how many lives happen outside it. How much intelligence exists in margins. How much truth lives in the places that are not celebrated.
Decentering is an act of humility. It is also an act of power.
It says, I do not need your permission to exist.
But it also says something more difficult.
It says, my existence cannot be measured by your attention.
That is a hard truth to live, because attention feels like oxygen. When people look at you, you feel real. When they stop looking, you feel like you might disappear.
So decentering is also learning to breathe without applause.
It is learning to exist in rooms where no one claps.
It is learning to create meaning in silence.
This is why my practice often chooses the edge. Because the edge is where you can hear yourself. The edge is where you can feel the structure of the room. The edge is where you can witness the center without worshipping it.
When I decenter, I become a witness rather than a performer.
And witness is a sacred role. Witness is a way of saying, I am here, and I am paying attention, even if no one pays attention to me.
I (un)live the life
This phrase sounds strange, but it is the closest I can get to what I feel.
To live, in the normal sense, is to move along a script. You are born, you gather achievements, you build a narrative, you prove yourself, you become someone, you maintain that someone until you die.
Most people are trained to accept this as natural.
But sometimes, when I am very quiet, I feel another possibility.
I feel that the script is not life. It is a performance of life.
And I do not always want to perform.
So I unlive.
Unliving does not mean self destruction. It does not mean refusing joy. It means refusing the life that is offered as a product. The life that must look correct from the outside. The life that must be justified. The life that must be optimized.
Unliving means I allow myself to be unfinished as a person.
It means I do not always chase a version of myself that can be presented cleanly.
It means I accept that I am not one stable identity. I am an unfolding. I am a contradiction. I am a series of entrances and exits.
Unliving is the choice to be real rather than impressive.
And reality is messy.
Reality includes retreat.
Reality includes silence.
Reality includes days where you do not know what you are doing, but you keep breathing anyway.
Reality includes the strange fact that we are alive without having asked for it.
So why do I exist.
This is where the question becomes sharp.
Do I exist for myself.
Do I exist for others.
Do I exist for something beyond both.
Sometimes I feel I exist for the people who look at my work and feel less alone. That matters to me. It matters more than praise.
Sometimes I feel I exist for my own inner life, for the part of me that would rot if I did not make. Making feels like clearing a path through my own darkness.
Sometimes I feel I exist because I was thrown into existence, and now my job is simply to respond. Not to justify, but to respond. To be present enough to answer life with something honest.
And then there is the hardest question.
By whom do I exist.
In one sense, I exist by my own choices. I choose my boundaries. I choose my silence. I choose my speech. I choose the way I move.
But in another sense, I exist by forces I did not choose. History. Language. geography. Systems. Other peoples eyes. Other peoples expectations. The invisible frames that come before me and try to shape me.
So my existence is a tension between being made and making myself.
I exist in the space between what shaped me and what I refuse.
This is why art becomes existential for me. It is not decoration. It is not just practice. It is how I negotiate being alive without being owned.
Art is my way of asking, can I exist without being reduced.
Can I be seen without being captured.
Can I speak without becoming a slogan.
Can I belong without becoming obedient.
These questions do not have final answers. They are not problems to solve. They are conditions to live.
So I return to the allegory.
I unframe the frame because I do not want my life to be a picture in someone else’s house.
I decenter the center because I do not want my existence to depend on a throne.
I unlive the life because I refuse to perform a script that makes me smaller.
And when someone asks, who are you, why are you here, for whom are you making, I want to answer, not with a brand, but with a human truth.
I am here to remain open.
I am here to keep a space alive inside me that cannot be turned into a product.
I am here to practice a kind of freedom that is not loud but stubborn.
I am here to make work that does not solve life, but tells the truth about its unsolved nature.
I am here to exist as a question that keeps walking.
And maybe that is the closest thing to a center I can accept.
Not a throne. Not a fixed identity.
A moving question.
A living refusal.
A quiet yes that does not need to prove itself.
Here I am.
Not framed.
Not centered.
Not finished.
Alive anyway.