Dispatch: Notes On Generosity

1. A Gesture of Generosity

In The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe generosity as a fugitive practice – a form of ‘study’ that gives without reserve, sharing time, resources, and thought outside institutional logics.11.Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe, NY, and Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013. This is precisely what I experienced last November during the second edition of the School of Common Knowledge (SCK). The program asked us to reflect on rooting and uprooting within our colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological present–conditions that resist stability, demand attention, and unsettle.

In this context, generosity revealed itself not as a ceremonial gesture – the kind institutions often perform, welcoming yet subtly patronizing – but as shared rigor, vulnerability, and co-presence. It aligned with what Moten elsewhere describes as the sensual: an attraction, a pull, a vibrational relation that makes connection possible even amid rupture.22.Fred Moten, Stolen Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

Yet a question lingers, insistent and unresolved: Can institutions ever move outside their own organizing logics? Can they sustain the fugitive forms of generosity they seek to convene?

2. The Gathering: A Partial View of a Collective Effort

For one intense week, curators, artists, and scholars from different geographies gathered in a condensed space of study across Madrid and Barcelona. As a participant, I saw only one surface of the labor sustaining the gathering, yet even from that partial vantage I sensed the depth of collaboration: the long preparation, the invisible work, the care that allowed the space to hold so much difference without collapsing. Shannon Jackson calls this often-unrecognized labor the ‘infrastructure of generosity’.33.Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, New York: Routledge, 2011. What appears as surplus – what lies beneath, besides, or around the event – is in fact what holds it together.

Among participants, there was a shared sense of being overwhelmed, of tiredness, preparedness and unpreparedness – the friction that comes from intense proximity. Yet these affective states also contributed to an informal occupation of the spaces we moved through: shared meals, shared tables, shared walks, shared subway rides. In each of these small acts, another form of learning took shape. A form of learning that comes from joy, from singing together, untangling wool and cutting crosses on olives. For every person involved, there was something distinct to carry forward.

This is knowledge that moves like water.
It sticks. It washes away. It returns.

Institutions often struggle to hold such fugitive flows, but they must learn to make room for what escapes capture – and to remain at ease with that escape. It was clear that collective efforts had already been made with different groups and organizations, a labor made especially visible in Reina Sofia’s Museo Tentacular work and its articulation of collaborative, shifting networks.

Achille Mbembe argues that inhabiting the world entails acknowledging our shared vulnerability, our co-exposure, and our entanglement – what he terms the terrestrial condition.44.Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019; and Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. The SCK rendered this condition tangible: bodies co-present in study, mutually exposed, forming a reciprocity that, while fragile, nonetheless structured the entire encounter. There were moments when we were invited – but also pushed by the urgencies unfolding around us – to reflect on our own positionalities, on the fragile and uneven privileges we carried into the room, all against a backdrop of a resurgent far right in Europe and the renewed normalization of genocide and imperial violence.

This terrestriality, as Mbembe describes it, is not a given but an ethic – one that the SCK must continue to hold with care: bodies learning together, exposed to one another, bound by a fragile but real reciprocity in co-learning and unlearning.

3. Small Gestures: The Infrastructure of Care

Mbembe’s call for an ethics of repair implies a shared responsibility – a refusal to remain passive spectators. Under our current conditions, we are asked to become participants, actants, responsible for one another and for the worlds we touch. This requires resisting the deeply implanted individualism that structures contemporary life, the reflex that makes it easier to blame institutional machinery rather than recognize our own implication.

We each carry different experiences of horizontality, and we know hierarchical structures persist and reassert themselves. Yet I learned from people learning – from the ways we leaned toward one another organically. We must learn to sit with discomfort, and trust that knowledge will continue to unfold outside institutional walls – that the most valuable aspects of any collective encounter are often the seeds dispersed elsewhere, the cross-pollinations that exceed capture, the exchanges that are, by nature, immeasurable.

I think of Phaedrus, set outside the city walls, where Plato suggests that knowledge moves like a living thing – taking root unpredictably, germinating where conditions allow.55.Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2012. Perhaps this is the kind of learning that travels with us: scattered, fragile, and persistent. A knowledge that flourishes not within the surveilled spaces of the institution but in the informal, immeasurable intervals in between.

I am grateful – for the discomforts that made us pause, for the silences that held more than words; for smoking breaks, shared meals, untranslatable conversations; for the deep listening and the quiet attempts to hold one another with care; and even for the body faltering under too-muchness, reminding us of our limits and of our need for one another.

4. Uprooting / Unbelonging

Roots are often hidden and difficult to trace. As Emmanuel Coccia notes, they do not belong to a single form or function; they adapt, delegate, and sometimes merge into symbiotic relations that exceed any one organism.66.Emmanuel Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), p. 77.  To think with roots is to recognize that grounding is never singular. It is a practice of entanglement – a continual negotiation with what surrounds us, evolving and improvising as conditions shift.

As participants, we were previously asked to reflect on the meaning of uprooting. I wrote that to think of (up)rooting is to think of grounding, but also of entanglement – of how bodies, languages, and histories take hold in soil that is never neutral. Rooting suggests relation: a reaching downward and outward, an anchoring in something larger than the self. Yet roots are never fixed; they branch, split, graft. Uprooting, in turn, carries its own possibilities: a dislodging from imposed coordinates of origin, identity, nation. To be uprooted is to be forced into movement, but also to invent new modes of belonging – or to inhabit unbelonging itself.

In his closing lecture, Some Prœpositions (On, To, For, Against, Towards, Around, Above, Below, Before, Beyond): the Work of Art,77.Fred Moten, ‘Some Prœpositions (On, To, For, Against, Towards, Around, Above, Below, Before, Beyond): the Work of Art’, lecture delivered at MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Barcelona, November 2025. delivered at MACBA, Fred Moten insisted that – as problematic as it is generative – ‘thinking requires having a location (in time and space)’ – even if provisional. A discourse that he signaled is linked to the history of slavery in the Americas, that radical and catastrophic denial of position, the violent severing from land and kin, the imposition of dislocation as the very condition of life.

This insistence on location clarifies what uprooting reveals: how unstable any ground can be, how every location is provisional. And once that ground shifts, another condition emerges – not defined by lack but by possibility. This is where unbelonging emerges as a generative proposition. Unbelonging, as Iván A. Ramos writes, is not a lack but a force – an affective refusal of forced authenticity, of nation, of purity. It opens alternative modes of community, alternative ways of being with.88.Iván A. Ramos, Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics (New York: NYU Press, 2023), p. 7.

Force was also a word I returned to throughout the week as bodies, ideas, and affects moved around us. Where does that force come from? What does it make possible?

5. Pedagogies of Interruption

While at the SCK, I kept coming back to what Marisa Belausteguigoitia and Rian Lozano describe as pedagogías del contagio: ‘classrooms, workshops, and pedagogical praxis as ‘contaminated,’ that is, committed to social urgencies.’99.Rian Lozano, ‘Contagios y Saberes Incorporados: Feminismo, pedagogía y prácticas culturales,’ in El aula invertida: Estrategias pedagógicas y prácticas artísticas de la diversidad sexual (Elche: Facultad de Bellas Artes de Altea, Universidad Miguel Hernández, 2014), p. 22. These are pedagogies that leak, infiltrate, contaminate, and perforate institutions – creating holes where air and light can move. They refuse containment; they cultivate relations that exceed the classroom, seeping outward. They enact a prœpositions, the co-inspiring tension of working against the institution while inevitably being inside it.

There was a moment when the pervasive borders of the institution became painfully clear. Outside the space we were using as a classroom at MACBA, several police officers harassed a group of Black men that were in public space. I arrived a few minutes after the police had left, but witnessing the aftermath made it unmistakably clear that violence is not an abstraction – not something we analyse from afar. It is already here, structuring the everyday. It enters the classroom uninvited, staining the terms of study, reminding us that learning does not occur outside the world but inside it.

Everyone responded differently, each reaction carrying a story and a positionality. It was not, for many of us, the first time we had experienced harassment or witnessed state violence. What stays with me is the shared discomfort that followed – the collective recognition that study is always shaped by the forces that exceed it, that vulnerability and exposure are unevenly distributed.

Even the transparent window of the education space at MACBA – seemingly neutral – organizes us, distributes bodies, divides sensorial access. To acknowledge this is not to despair, but to recognize how structures act on us and how we might begin to unmake them slowly, patiently.

Perhaps what we need, too, is what Simone Weil calls attention: a capacity to suspend the self, to wait without mastery, to endure the void that precedes understanding.1010.Simone Weil, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,’ in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 57. Attention not as a technique, but as an ethical posture – an act of generosity.

A few hours later, in what felt like a prelude spoken from the future back into the past, Moten opened his lecture with a line that stayed with me: ‘There is a beautiful generativity to being interrupted, and it is an openness to contingent conditions that one hopefully is able to engage with…’ His words reframed interruption not as a breakdown but as a condition of possibility – an uneven, contingent terrain on which relation becomes thinkable.

To interrupt is not to stop.
It is to begin again, and again – without shame.
There are no correct answers, only openings.

True generosity requires knowing that we come from different histories and that relation demands responsibility: response-ability.1111.Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 34. And perhaps that is why we refuse to belong – not in the terms offered by the state, not through a citizenship defined by exclusion and violence. Yet we are continually compelled to aspire to precisely what negates us.

So, I return to the question of ‘force’:
Where does it come from?
Where does it reside?
And how does it shape the ways we move, resist, and relate?

6. Closing: What Continues

The museum, like the state, is a rigid architecture. Can it be decolonized – truly? Can it unlearn the epistemologies that built its walls? And when I think about the museum, I inevitably think of the university as well.

A friend once told me that the only time people will see light coming from the university is when the university is on fire. And yet I do not wish to be the one who sets the building ablaze, not now. I am not there – perhaps I will never be there. I am still drawn to the cracks in the structure, still searching for the spaces where we might reside otherwise, where unbelonging becomes a force for reimagining what institutions could hold.

Moten offered another way of imagining this in response to a question from the audience: we to recognize our implication as an ethical imperative – especially now, when everything feels at risk. In this time, it should be us – those who love art (art as an institution) – who close it down. ‘I don’t want them to shut the museum; we will do it right.’1212.Moten, ‘Some Prœpositions’. His words refused both destruction and complacency, insisting instead on a collective reorientation of how institutions might be inhabited, reshaped, or held to account.

What I learned at the SCK is at once straightforward and demanding: generosity is an orientation, a shared risk, a willingness to let our thinking and our bodies be touched by others. It is an improvised and fragile infrastructure – yet a vital one. Generosity encourages precision and not dismissal.

What unfolded at the school continues to pulse quietly, like an undercurrent.
A reminder that study is collective, and not owned by any institution.
That interruption can be a form of care.
That unbelonging can open the possibility of new attachments.
And that generosity, like water, moves where it is needed – finding its way through cracks, overflowing the structures that attempt to contain it.