A Conceptual Framework of A War
Title: Echoes of the Soft Catastrophe: A Speculative Schema for Geoaesthetic Interruption in the Age of Clotting
Abstract:
This speculative essay outlines a conceptual art framework that interrogates the contemporary geopolitical crises involving Israel, the United States, Iran, Iraq, and peripheral state actors such as Russia, China, and Turkey. Anchored in archival reconstruction and clotting as critical lexicon, this work proposes a multi-modal aesthetic methodology capable of mapping the spectral reverberations of imperial violence across historical time and speculative futures. Drawing from Marxian materialism, psychoanalytic fragmentation, and Filipino vernacular epistemologies, the project situates the artist as a cartographer of geopolitical afterlives—aestheticizing rupture, latency, and the recursive residue of war as a performative haunting.
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I. Introduction: Toward a Genealogy of Crisis
The contemporary geopolitical tableau—bookended by Israel's intensifying militarization and the United States' strategic bombings in Iraq and Iran—should not be read merely as presentist crisis. Rather, these events are symptomatic of deeper historical logics: colonial mapping, imperial substitution, and the persistent non-resolution of post-WWII global order. The world stage is not a theater of spontaneous eruption, but a palimpsest of strategic choreographies, long rehearsed.
In reimagining this rupture artistically, the practitioner must grapple with what Ariella Azoulay has termed the “unshowable archive”—a repository of political relations that resists documentation yet demands aesthetic intervention. This essay theorizes the current condition as a soft catastrophe, a prolonged rupture without climax, wherein the violent sediment of history clots, resurfaces, and coagulates affectively in collective consciousness. In this schema, clotting is not metaphor, but lexicon—a methodological prompt and an ontological residue.
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II. Archival Sedimentations and Performative Sovereignties
The U.S.-Israel alliance, often articulated in militaristic terms, exists as a phantasmatic inheritance of Western security narratives. Iraq and Iran, alternately framed as sovereign threats or passive landscapes of intervention, are continuously imagined through regimes of visibility dictated by Western optics. These optics historically rely on two archives: one strategic (military intelligence, diplomacy) and one spectral (media spectacle, theological exceptionalism).
The speculative artist is uniquely positioned to expose the discontinuities of these archives—not through documentation, but through counter-archival speculation. Here, clotting provides a method of aesthetic resistance: it marks the moment the body (of the state, the region, the memory) is unable to metabolize further violence and instead suspends it—layered, unresolved.
This suspended violence becomes the material for performative sovereignty. For example, Iran’s retaliatory gestures—symbolic and strategic—must be read as necropolitical performances that neither restore agency nor secure futurity. They instead re-inscribe the state as a ghost caught between martyrdom and spectacle.
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III. Hauntologies of Multipolarity: China, Russia, Turkey
The reactive constellations of Russia, China, and Turkey are not novel geopolitical formations but entropic reiterations of Cold War hauntologies. Each state operates through a different aesthetic grammar:
- China, with its language of stability and global peace, performs sovereignty through infrastructural sublime and temporal patience. It is the curator of future hegemony.
- Russia, more explicitly nostalgic, navigates contemporary rupture through reenactment—its politics are baroque, necrorealist, littered with Cold War iconographies.
- Turkey, oscillating between post-Ottoman yearning and NATO realpolitik, dramatizes geopolitical affect as performance art, constantly shapeshifting roles.
These states do not intervene directly not because of weakness, but because of aesthetic strategy. Their choice of rhetoric over action should be read as a dramaturgy of global order, one where visibility itself is weaponized.
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IV. Filipino Vernacular Temporalities: A Counter-Gaze
As a Filipino artist operating within the interstices of speculative storytelling and trauma-informed pedagogy, Amiel, your vantage point is critical. You inhabit a cultural matrix where colonial residue is both legacy and living organism. From U.S. military bases to Marcosian memory wars, the Philippines is itself a clot—a historical blockage that refuses seamless national narrative.
Your project, then, is not merely to comment on the Middle East or the West but to fold the map, superimposing Filipino historical consciousness onto global entanglements. What does it mean to view Iran’s nuclear dreams through the lens of Bataan? Or to juxtapose U.S. drone aesthetics with the drone of typhoons in Tacloban?
By deploying vernacular epistemologies—oral memory, mythic time, affective annotations—you animate geopolitical critique through embodiment. This epistemic clotting becomes method: a refusal of analytic detachment, a commitment to porous knowing.
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V. Speculative Cartographies and Material Translations
To translate these ideas materially, the project might employ hybrid modalities:
- Topographic Reconstructions: Layered projections of satellite maps over colonial-era charts, where geographic accuracy is interrupted by speculative ruptures (e.g., oil fields becoming bleeding wounds; nuclear sites as neural scars).
- Archival Fictioning: Installation-based narratives where official communiqués are re-authored by imagined witnesses—ghost-scribes who record what diplomats omit.
- Kinetic Clots: Sculptural forms made of coagulated media (steel, resin, human hair) that pulsate or leak, echoing the body's refusal to heal cleanly.
- Pedagogical Theaters: Performative lectures wherein students "animate" lost sovereignties, re-performing treaties and invasions as affective exercises.
Each medium resists clarity. It privileges rupture, latency, and opacity—aesthetics aligned with clotting as both wound and wisdom.
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VI. Trauma, Labor, and the Archive's Refusal
The trauma-informed pedagogy you are cultivating offers further traction here. Just as trauma resists linear narration, so too do these geopolitical crises evade resolution. Your dialogic method—the aesthetic of annotation—can be weaponized here not to resolve meaning but to shatter coherence. It treats history not as curriculum but as residue, smeared across bodies and borders.
Labor enters not just as theme but as praxis. The aesthetic labor of making—folding, layering, bleeding materials—becomes a performative echo of political labor: of resisting, surviving, testifying. The archive, then, is not accessed, but resisted. Its refusal becomes its most potent gesture.
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VII. Toward a Lexicon of the Soft Catastrophe
Ultimately, this project does not aim for catharsis or political clarity. It dwells in soft catastrophe, wherein the apocalypse is neither singular nor total. It seeps instead, like oil across a dry plain, lighting fire only when we forget to look. In this landscape, clotting emerges not as aberration but as ontological condition—the refusal to bleed out, the resilience to remain in rupture.
The artist here is not prophet but listener—to tremors, aftershocks, and inaudible sighs. You are translating what has no syntax yet: the idiom of forever-wars, the grammar of global fatigue.
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References (selected):
- Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019.
- Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003.
- Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
- Pulido, Laura. “Rethinking Environmental Racism.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2000.
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Amiel Gerald Roldan
June 23, 2025
amiel_roldan@outlook.com
amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com
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