Tender Prospects
Acceleration is not merely a condition of contemporary life — it is a design. It is how attention is captured, how grief is foreclosed before it can settle, how dissent is outpaced before it can organize. To be slow is to be, in some sense, ungovernable — and perhaps free.
A Score of Slowness takes Simone Weil's concept of attention as its spine — not concentration, which strains toward its object, but receptive waiting: emptying oneself in order to genuinely receive another. The hand that weaves, casts metal, turns a needle through fabric is already practicing slow intelligence — a mode of knowing that unfolds in rhythm with material rather than against it. This project asks what writing, research, and collective practice look like when they take those temporalities seriously.
But the project holds its fundamental tension openly: can slowness be a form of solidarity, or does it risk becoming available only to those with the privilege of time? Whose body gets to be slow — when bodies are differently positioned within the systems that demand speed? The residency develops the architecture of this argument — its questions, its tensions, and the shape of a text whose argument is ultimately about the body: that slowness lives there first, 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.
