A Small Chain of Commitments

Hosted by Tender Prospects as part of their residency on Freedom, Solidarity, and Future-Making, the project began from an asymmetry: not all bodies relate to speed in the same way. For some, slowness is a form of insulation — built into particular kinds of labour, particular arrangements of time. For others, it has been imposed: the unrecognized pace of care work, of survival administration, of systems that move slowly on purpose when the body waiting cannot afford to wait.

A Small Chain of Commitments is an evolving work in three registers: online research archive, critical text, and accompanying score. Centring Simone Weil's concept of attention as our last true form of generosity, this project asks what solidarity looks like when collective practice moves at the pace the slowest body sets — a question about whose body gets to refuse the tempo imposed upon it.

Assembling images spanning Fluxus scores, performance documentation, instructional plates, and film stills against a backdrop of hyperacceleration, algorithmic dominance, and the politics of speed, it constructs a visual argument about freedom, world-making, and the slow intelligence that lives in hands before it lives anywhere else.

A reading and score performance will take place on April 18, 2026 at Tender Prospects, Travessa da Paz 17A, 1200-759 Lisboa.