i fail

may 25, 2026


draft no 7

it may be flawed.

i fail every day.

and there is failing and failing.

there is failing of the norms that are dictated by our more and more brutally and fascistically capitalist system.

as an invisibly disabled, neuroqueer and transgender person, i rarely fit into our system. i rarely satisfy its norms.

when i have the luxury to feel aligned with my values and safe enough in this failing, then, my heart is alive; i feel i know why i am on this earth; i am in the practice of an aesthetic of failure. a strategic failing.

practicing an aesthetic of failure can be an artistic choice in which one fails artistic normative standards. it can also be a societal choice. in both cases, this practice is about tapping into the transformative potential of failing. it is about societal change towards a just and caring system.

practicing an aesthetic of failure is an "enactment of the very impossibility to gain a perspective on failure."
(Arielli, 2021.
in that sense, failure is not talked about. it is "enacted"; it is in the process; it is performed; and as such it deconstructs the norms outside and inside and inevitably changes something.

"cripping the arts" is a movement among disabled artists that falls into such an aesthetic.

[cripping the arts] "embraces the ways that disability can [on purpose] disrupt the status quo and lead with difference".
(Christina Myers, Canadian Art, February 12, 2019)
Canadian Art, February 12, 2019)



but well, despite my privileges as a white man, i admit that i can still feel the fear that can come with failing to fit the norms.

i get afraid when this failing seems to affect my survival, my housing, my safety, my health, my social body. because, then, i can get very close to the lethal effects of social exclusion and loneliness. lethal. slow death.

and so, there is the failing where, for what i think is survival, and despite all good intentions, i enact the old colonial wiring that is inscribed in my body and that i haven't cleaned up yet. it is a failing where i embody the brutality of our system and apply its standards to others and myself.

this is true failing.

i fail when i do this.

i fail when i deny i do this.

i know i failed you.

i did not want to but still i did.

and then what?

guilt, shame, sadness, loss, fear.

can you please accept my apologies?

and, can you, do you have the capacity, the luxury, the space to let my heart ask you what else you need?

given the rise of the right-wing, we are all failing more and more, one way or another.

and unfortunately it seems that we are also decomplexing our responses to our own co-conspirators. we fall into categorizing them and into punitive attacks, just like the political right does and wants us to do.

and then, what corrupt mechanisms do we reify when in our despair we try to bring repair to the suffering we unintentionally inflicted?

i am sad.

i carry shame.

when my heart makes this shame visible, it is part of an aesthetic of failure.

when it trusts that this could trigger systemic change, it is part of an aesthetic of failure.

and when we both, all fail, near each other or far from each other, or each at our end of our polarized system, but take the radical decision to stay in solidarity, then, what is this?

some old roots of the aesthetic of failure in the arts