thestolencaryatid:

minimalism is bourgeois. large empty spaces are bourgeois. deliberate urban minimalism is bourgeois. owning a large space in nyc and deliberately making it look like an empty warehouse is bourgeois.

i have analyzed the poetics of space, of growing up in small confined spaces, of hoarding books and plushies that individually mean something insofar as they have concretized my memories. i don’t hoard, i assemble. i assemble things that give me a sense of permanence. i don’t give my books away because they tie me to an experience here. and when my parents are gone and i have no family/property/anything left here except myself, my books won’t have changed. but i will have, i can approach them with a different attitude and involve myself in studies differently.

whenever i walk into houses i always feel secretly embarrassed at myself for sometimes fantasizing i’d have a house or some sort of permanence here. but i do not. and i don’t need empty fuckin space to remind me every second of the day. only comfortable people can live without things. can buy things and give them away. can feel free at the lack of being ‘tied down’ by possessions. and i don’t mean possession of wealth, i mean knick knacks and objects that i’ve cathected meaning into since i do not have a stable space.

the precarity of immigration is that you can be kicked out at any moment by the landlord, once again – this time because your father is back home trying to be there for his family – the precarity of immigration is that you always feel like at any given moment you can lose all meaning associated with the space you’ve inhabited for a given time, be reminded that your intimate space was really borrowed

fuck minimalism, really