Instructions for Enduring TRUMP Performance
As an artist I view geopolitics from the wings - Remain Seated in Observation Until the Situation Resolves
Pearls of Wisdom From An Artist Studio
# Rehearsal Survival Notes, only until Beyond Survival kicks in!
I come to geopolitics the way I come to making artworks - through space, duration, repetition, and what refuses to resolve.
As an installation artist working across performance, new media, and electronic systems, I’m trained to notice environments before events. To read the conditions being built around the body. To stay long enough for the hum to stop pretending it isn’t there. To sit long enough for patterns to reveal themselves, not through shock, but through persistence.
In the studio, nothing is neutral.
Scale instructs behaviour.
Repetition dulls resistance.
Duration trains endurance.
This literacy doesn’t switch off when the work leaves the gallery. It follows me into how I read power, which if we’re honest, now arrives mostly as atmosphere.
It follows me into how I read power.
Mainstream political commentary prefers clean lines: statements, policies, personalities arranged like chess pieces. Artists are more likely to ask something less tidy and more uncomfortable:
What kind of world is being quietly assembled around us?
And who put the exit sign behind the curtain?
From this vantage point, much of contemporary geopolitics reads less like strategy and more like staging. Not incompetence, not chaos but a carefully sustained atmosphere. A scene that never quite ends.
The long arc of U.S. policy toward Venezuela, particularly as amplified during the Trump years, is a case in point. Read narrowly, it appears incoherent: sanctions that entrench suffering without producing resolution, declarations of moral clarity unaccompanied by consequence, a crisis that remains permanently unresolved. The lights stay on. The soundtrack loops. The exit remains theoretical.
But read as a durational work as an installation maintained over time, it becomes legible.
The crisis is not meant to conclude.
This is not policy failure.
It is meant to persist.
It is narrative maintenance with excellent funding.
Artists understand this instinctively and perhaps more importantly, intuitively. We know how repetition works on the nervous system. We’ve all watched a piece go dead from repetition, then continue anyway because it still fills the room. We know that endurance is easier to extract than consent. We know that when people are kept in a low-grade state of crisis, attention fragments, memory shortens, and causality blurs.
Venezuela, seen through this lens, is not an aberration. It is an archive, a long study in what happens when survival becomes the organising logic of everyday life. Not through constant terror, but through fatigue. Through the slow normalisation of instability.
Survival becomes aesthetic.
Crisis becomes ambient.
This is why the tonal shift during the Trump era felt immediately familiar to anyone attuned to these patterns, not because history repeats neatly, but because the grammar was recognisable. Strongman rhetoric. Personalised authority. Institutions framed as obstacles. Threat invoked endlessly, without specificity or end.
From a fine art perspective, this was never about whether Trump would “become” something. That question belongs to spectacle.
What mattered was rehearsal.
Rehearsal is where boundaries are tested. Where excess is tolerated. Where mistakes are waved away as provisional. It is where muscle memory forms in bodies, in language, in attention.
Trump did not need to complete the performance.
He only needed to introduce the rhythm.
And rhythms linger long after the performer exits.
This is where survival becomes dangerous.
When populations are told to “get through” a period to endure it, manage it, survive it their field of vision narrows. Focus shifts from structure to symptoms, from causality to coping. In the studio, this is the moment when an installation stops being questioned and starts being navigated automatically.
Normalised.
What remains is an environment people learn to live inside without asking who designed it or why it refuses to end.
The work embedded in this essay emerges from that recognition. Faces are removed not to anonymise, but to deny the comfort of character-driven reading. Without personalities to anchor blame or fascination, power becomes visible as pattern: repeated gestures, repeated symbols, authority rehearsing itself through form.
Above this loop, small figures wait. They fish.
They do nothing efficient.
They refuse urgency.
They operate on a different timescale.
This is not whimsy. It is a counter-rhythm.
In a culture addicted to acceleration, patience is destabilising. In a political climate saturated with reaction, waiting long enough to see the structure is a form of resistance.
Beyond Survival lives here in this slower literacy.
It is not disengagement from geopolitics, but a refusal to read it only at speed. It insists on seeing power not just as event, but as environment. Not just as decision, but as duration.
It asks the questions mainstream discourse rarely has time for:
What is being rehearsed while we are busy enduring?
Who benefits from crisis that never resolves?
What disappears when survival becomes the highest aspiration?
Artists are trained to notice when a work refuses to conclude.
Right now, that refusal is the signal.