How to practice porosity

Allow yourself to rot. Remember that decay is a form of generosity.

Distill language. Let it soften into mulch. Make it sweat, oxidize, disintegrate.

Humidity as a methodology.

Let your ideas ferment.

Let our bodies be wetlands: zones where categories dissolve.

Revise our research not by organizing it, but by watering it. Regar el archivo.

Shed, like bark, skin and scales, untangle the stories that no longer root us. Desenredarse.

Contradict ourselves often. Contradiction is evidence of decomposition.

Listen to the systems within before assuming authority over what lies outside. Listen to the internal climate before listening to the external.

Accept that some of the things we inherit are moist, heavy, and not entirely ours. Ask ourselves what parts of our practice are inherited, and what parts need burial.

Live with unstable truths.

Take responsibility for the memories we pour into the water, the skies and the bodies.

Compost your wounds.

Generate porous communities: networks where the symbiosis is slow, soft and profound.

Regenerate rather than resolve.

Dialogue with materials as collaborators.

Let grief be porous, not to contain it, but to let it circulate.

Let our research behave like the weather, for it to evaporate and return as rain.

Practice thinking with the soles of the feet.

Lean into discomfort as a sign of permeability.

Allow silence to metabolize complexity.

Ask the soil for advice. Remember to consult the microorganisms.

Understand every project as a temporary ecosystem. Trust processes that are cyclical, slow, and damp.

Accept that not every seed germinates, and still plant it.

Let past versions of ourselves speak softly from the sediment.

Embrace slowness as a form of resistance to linear time.

Allow meaning to seep sideways.

Cultivate spaces of silence.

Carry our migrations in our joints with tenderness, and that art is sometimes a way of softening those hinges. Entenderla como fuerza de arraigo y diálogo, as containers of generational migration, departure, and endurance. Ask: where do the stories of our ancestors settle in the body, and how do they weather over time?

Allow moisture to guide decision-making: what is too dry to continue? What needs watering? Watered, inside out and outside in.

Look for what has been left behind, notice affinities, tensions and contradictions. Ask what they can hear that you cannot.

Return to the body as our first and oldest interface, one that breathes, listens, translates, senses.

Consider that the body already holds the soil it has walked upon. That the skin archives climate change.

Let rocks remind you to think beyond human time scales.

Recognize that not everything needs to bloom to have value.

Understand that the earth burns, and perhaps our homes do too, internally and externally.

Let porosity be a form of listening, allowing something to pass through without needing to hold it.

Practice attention as a soft technology.

Remain permeable to what exceeds our senses.

Compost perfectionism.

Trust any process that leaks a little.

Trust the slow intelligence of decay.

Rearrange discarded materials until they begin to respond, adjust accordingly to what insists. Return later and rearrange.

Identify where you are open and where you resist.

Collect materials that behave similarly.

Follow a material, observe its tendencies. Continue from where it resists, trust repetition.

Gather elements that can move, place them in the wind's path.

Identify what is considered waste, observe traces of previous use, keep these traces visible.

Choose unstable materials. Let degradation occur, document transformation.

Touch before naming.

Notice emerging patterns.

Let materials speak, observe their surface, edges, change the light, rotate, listen to the sounds they make when handled, notice what repeats, what surprises.

Notice where your body's edges meet the world, collect materials that blur this boundary, test them on different parts of your body, allow movement, wear until it shifts.

Observe the threshold.

Select two materials, place them side by side, observe their differences. Let objects contradict each other.

Choose a material that changes daily, begin with what is already there. Work with what leaks, what resists, what remains. Document shifts.

Hold something fragile, notice its vulnerabilities, build around it, let fragility remain visible.

Find something used, broken, circulated. Identify previous functions, let histories coexist, let it remain legible. They carry decisions that were not ours.

Make one decision at a time. Undo if necessary.

Look beyond the surface.

Invite external forces.

Maintain permeability, things pass through, things alter each other.

Follow materials rather than directing them.

Time as a collaborator: oxidation, erosion, fatigue and decay.

Create channels and passages, allow air, light or liquid to pass through.

Build compositions that can shift. Let imbalance guide decisions.