Constellation: zero
Prefix: RE begins from a refusal of finality.
The prefix ‘re’ means “again,” “back,” or “anew,” indicating an action that is repeated or reversed, originating from the Latin re — “back,” “again,” “against.” [1] Yet re is neither simply a beginning nor an end. It is “an unfolding, an iterative movement of understanding that travels both forward and backward in what might be described as an intensive gesture.” [2] RE therefore does not signal return as restoration, correction, or improvement, but return as ongoing negotiation.
Not because resolution is impossible, but because so many of the systems we move through demand coherence, endurance, productivity, and self-management as conditions of participation. RE instead stays with what remains unresolved: exhaustion, contradiction, repetition, care, dependency, survival. It names processes that do not stabilize or arrive neatly at completion. Iteration without closure. Practice without finality.
To work with RE is to remain in relation with what has already been broken open.
The project began, as much of my work does, with an interest in people: how they live, who they live alongside, and how they continue despite systems that privilege competition over interdependence. I wanted to understand how people were coping within cultural work, whether others experienced the exhaustion and alienation that increasingly felt structural rather than personal, or whether I had simply internalised these conditions myself.
What I found were people taking each day as it comes. People working on projects they loved, with people they admire. People attempting, however imperfectly, to centre care and community within conditions not designed to sustain either.
Care emerged repeatedly throughout the conversations, not simply as accommodation, but as a way of relating. Sometimes this meant physical access, working adjustments, clearer communication, or support structures. Sometimes it meant something less legible institutionally: being listened to, being met with patience, being allowed complexity without punishment, being supported through periods of instability or limitation rather than expected to conceal them.
Across cultural institutions, access is often framed as an administrative accommodation rather than a structural transformation. A set of mitigations designed to reduce friction without altering the conditions that produce exclusion in the first place. Care is similarly instrumentalised: spoken about extensively while remaining under-resourced, inconsistently practiced, and absorbed disproportionately by those already navigating precarity.
Within these structures, participation often becomes conditional on endurance.
The ability to remain productive despite exhaustion, illness, financial instability, grief, burnout, or fear is treated as professionalism rather than survival. Workplaces continue to demand environments that many people must endure rather than meaningfully inhabit. They require forms of bodily discipline and social performance that are frequently inaccessible to even those considered able-bodied, while disabled and chronically ill people are expected to navigate these environments as though comfort, familiarity, flexibility, and rest were optional preferences rather than fundamental conditions of participation.
Ableist expectations and capitalist models of productivity continue to organise work around environments that many people must endure rather than meaningfully inhabit. Within cultural institutions, participation often becomes conditioned on endurance: the ability to remain productive despite exhaustion, precarity, illness, instability, or grief.
Much of this work took place from my bed, with something half-watched on television in the background. From there, I completed writing, administration, tutorials, and some conversations while surrounded by the small infrastructures that made work possible: a hot water bottle, a TENS machine, a tennis ball pressed beneath my hip, moments of lying flat on the floor between tasks. I worked from an environment shaped around care, familiarity, and the practical realities of living in my body.
That reality became increasingly difficult to separate from the project itself.
I became frustrated by the persistence of work models that continue to organise productivity around discomfort, surveillance, commuting, exhaustion, and masking. We create homes around the things that bring us pleasure, safety, and recognition. We will fill them with objects, routines, and people that allow us to feel more fully ourselves. Yet ableist expectations and capitalist structures repeatedly force people away from spaces of familiarity and into environments organised around efficiency rather than sustainability.
It frustrated me that this condition continues to be treated as inevitable.
During COVID-19, I briefly believed that the organisation of work might fundamentally change. The pandemic exposed how much labour could be conducted remotely, without commutes and uniforms. Office buildings, or the daily exhaustion required simply to arrive somewhere else and remain there for hours at a time. For many people, despite the immense isolation and grief of that period, there was a rediscovery of slower rhythms of living: spending time with loved ones, reconnecting with hobbies, resting, and existing outside the pace previously considered normal.
For me, lockdown occurred during the second year of my undergraduate degree and coincided with a period of extremely poor mental health. The lockdown allowed me, unexpectedly, to recover within the safety of my familiar environment. I attended therapy remotely, remained close to my family, and was able to continue existing without the constant pressure of physically presenting myself to the world while mentally unravelling.
I hesitate to frame any aspect of COVID positively, given how profoundly it harmed so many people, including myself physically. The lockdown was never a utopian space. For many, home was not safe. People living within violent households, alongside addiction, or in conditions of instability experienced further danger and isolation. Others living alone experienced profound loneliness and disconnection. The pandemic intensified existing inequalities and vulnerabilities rather than dissolving them. But it did expose the friction that many existing structures are not necessary in the forms they currently exist.
Then came the slow return to offices, classrooms, commutes, public transport, traffic, and exhaustion. The brief possibility of structural change narrowed again into demand for “normality”, despite normality itself being unsustainable for so many people. This return to “normality” also meant the ignorance towards those who continue to self-isolate and be at high risk, as well as those now suffering the consequences of long-COVID and other related co-morbidities. COVID did not end for everyone equally, and we did not return equally.
“This ‘search ahead’ rather characterises an unsettling of sequential time, in which the past is not recalled but actually occurs at the end of a search that nonetheless drives forward from the beginning.” [3] The return to “normality” was therefore never truly a return, but a reconstruction of previous conditions under the promise of inevitability. What COVID revealed about labour, access, dependency, and collective vulnerability continues to persist unresolved beneath institutional desires for restoration.
Within my curatorial practice, this understanding resonates strongly with Julie Gailbird’s reading of Lyotard’s concept of anamnesis. Here, remembrance is not passive but active and therapeutic: a working-through in which what was lost is not simply retrieved, but re-experienced. The movement forward toward an unknown becomes itself a form of reconstruction, partial, unstable, and incomplete. RE therefore does not seek origins untouched by contradiction, but remains with the ongoing labour of revisiting, renegotiating, and re-encountering what structures attempt to stabilise or forget. [4]
I do not think people are doing particularly well.
I speak to friends, classmates, collaborators, and family members; everyone appears to have anxieties, exhaustion, stress, and is increasingly precarious. People are constantly on the verge of burnout, collapsing, dropping out, being priced out, or emotionally checking out altogether. The problem is repeatedly framed as individual failure: an inability to cope, organise, adapt, or remain resilient enough. But the issue is not people themselves. The issue is what is continuously expected of them.
To work beyond exhaustion.
To compromise health, relationships, time, and well-being in the pursuit of productivity.
To accept precarity as ordinary.
To survive systems that increasingly mistake depletion for value.
RE begins elsewhere.
It begins from the recognition that re-learning, re-working, re-building, re-imagining, and re-negotiating are not sequential stages of improvement, but overlapping conditions of survival. They describe how people continue despite institutions that were never designed around collective sustainability, interdependence, or care.
This project moves alongside thinkers working across disability justice, abolitionist study, queer failure, and speculative collective practice, not as authoritative resolve into agreement, but as companions within an ongoing process of thinking through survival, access, and relation.
In Re: An Errant Glossary, the authors suggest that “re” carries the potential to reorient the humanities itself, bridging divides between scholarly discourse and lay engagement while addressing persistent fractures between theory and activism within feminist and queer movements. [5] This understanding of RE is therefore not simply linguistic, but methodological and relational: a way of remaining within processes of unfinished collective negotiation.
RE does not offer resolution. It does not repair the structures that produce exhaustion, precarity, or exclusion. But throughout this project, I encountered people continuing to make space for one another within those conditions.
RE does not offer resolution. It does not repair the structures that produce exhaustion, precarity, or exclusion. But throughout this project I encountered people continuing to make space for one another within those conditions. Friends sharing knowledge informally, practitioners redistributing time, collaborators adjusting expectations, communities building forms of support that rarely appear within institutional descriptions of cultural work. These practices remind me of what The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study describes as forms of collective life that emerge alongside, rather than through institutional recognition. [6] Care persists unevenly, incompletely, and often without support. Still it persists.
RE is not an answer. It is an ongoing negotiation with how collective life might continue to be made and remade otherwise.
[2] Julia Gaillard, ‘Rescerche II’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019)
[3] Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, eds, Re-: An Errant Glossary, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), DOI: https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15.
[4] Julia Gaillard, ‘Rescerche II’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019)
[5] Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, eds, Re-: An Errant Glossary (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019)
[6] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013)