On the Difficulty of Communication and the Homogenization of Image Production
Berlin, 13.02.2026
Author text: Giulia Bruno
Today, communication appears increasingly marked by a deep contradiction: on the one hand, the possibility of producing and circulating images has expanded enormously; on the other, this very expansion seems to reduce the space for truly singular expression. The overproduction of images does not necessarily correspond to an increase in the complexity of the visible, but often to its standardization. The more images circulate, the more they tend to resemble one another, responding to the same logics of legibility, immediacy, and recognizability. In this sense, the difficulty of communication today does not arise from a lack of means, but from an excess of already formatted forms, already optimized to be received, consumed, and recirculated.
In this context, technology does not simply function as a neutral tool of facilitation or access. It organizes the very ways in which images can emerge, be produced, and acquire value. Contemporary technological apparatuses — from digital devices and platforms to systems of automation and generation — do not merely multiply technical possibilities; they introduce implicit grammars, visual protocols, and models of efficiency that begin to orient the creative gesture before it even takes place. The artist no longer confronts only matter or form, but an infrastructure that preconditions regimes of visibility, rhythms of production, and forms of intelligibility.
In this sense, technology does not diminish creative space simply because it accelerates or simplifies processes, but because it tends to colonize the level of imagination itself. The immediate availability of tools, images, archives, effects, and models does not necessarily open a space of freedom; on the contrary, it often reduces the distance necessary for an image to mature as a critical, opaque, or unexpected experience. The speed of production and the ease of access risk compressing the time of uncertainty, error, and deviation, which are instead fundamental conditions of any artistic process not entirely subordinated to performance.
One of the most significant consequences of this process is a growing homogenization not only of forms, but also of the themes of art. Within a visual ecosystem dominated by circulation, indexation, and repetition, artistic research increasingly tends to move within already recognizable zones, within lexicons already validated culturally and institutionally. Certain themes return insistently not only because they are urgent, but because they are translatable, exhibitable, and compatible with the dispositifs of contemporary discourse. Even critique, fragility, trauma, ecology, or the body can at times be reabsorbed into thematic formulas which, while maintaining an appearance of radicality, remain perfectly legible within existing regimes of visibility.
Homogenization therefore does not appear as the absence of difference, but as the proliferation of differences that are formally distinct yet structurally equivalent. What is lost is not the superficial variety of images, but the possibility that they might produce real ruptures, opacities, or discontinuities in relation to dominant language. Images continue to multiply, but more and more often they seem already to know in advance how they must appear, how they must signify, which affects they are expected to activate, and within which circuits they must circulate. Communication becomes difficult, then, not because it fails to transmit something, but because what is transmitted is already inscribed within a form of predictability that reduces its transformative force.
For art, all of this poses a crucial question. It is not simply a matter of opposing technology in the name of some lost authenticity, nor of rejecting new tools as though they were external to contemporary practice. Rather, it is a matter of critically interrogating the technical, economic, and symbolic conditions that now shape image production. The real difficulty perhaps lies in finding ways of working within these dispositifs without entirely coinciding with them; in reopening margins of slowness, resistance, and illegibility; in restoring to the image a density that does not exhaust itself in immediate communicative function.
Perhaps the task of art today is not to produce even more images, but to withdraw the image from its own self-evidence. To create interruptions, frictions, unproductive temporalities, forms that do not allow themselves to be immediately consumed. In a landscape in which technology tends to standardize processes and flatten artistic themes, artistic practice can still have meaning only if it is able to defend a space of discontinuity: a space in which seeing, thinking, and feeling do not perfectly coincide with what has already been made available.
Practising Art in a Time of Instability
Berlin, 12.02.2026
Author text: Giulia Bruno
Being an artist today means working within a condition of constant exposure and instability. It is not only about producing artworks, but about learning how to inhabit a complex system shaped by visibility, networks, mobility, institutional languages, economic precarity, and the continuous negotiation of the self. The contemporary artist is expected to be an author, researcher, self-curator, communicator, designer, producer, and often also a cultural mediator. In this context, artistic practice risks being crushed by demands for performance, adaptability, and constant presence, while the slow time of research, doubt, and transformation becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
For a woman, this condition becomes even more complicated. Despite the changes of recent years, the art system still carries hierarchies, inequalities, and more or less visible forms of exclusion. Being a woman artist today still means confronting contradictory expectations: to be present, but not too visible; authoritative, but not perceived as rigid; vulnerable, yet always productive.
Women’s work is often read through reductive or biographical categories, rather than being fully recognized in its formal, theoretical, and political complexity. Added to this is the material weight of precarity, which affects bodies and lives differently, especially when it intersects with questions of care, time, and the very possibility of remaining within the artistic field.
Being a foreigner in the contemporary landscape also means inhabiting a constant threshold: between languages, contexts, cultural codes, systems of access, and forms of legitimacy. Mobility, which is often framed in the art world as openness and opportunity, can also translate into displacement, fatigue, invisibility, and a lack of belonging. For those who live and work in a country other than their own, every professional gesture may involve an additional effort of translation, adaptation, and negotiation. It is not only a matter of speaking another language, but of entering relational and institutional structures that are not always truly accessible.
Being both a woman and a foreigner makes this position even more fragile and complex. It often means having to build legitimacy from the ground up, moving through spaces where recognition is uneven and where difference can be at once demanded, exoticized, or marginalized. In this context, making art today can become a practice of resistance: a way of asserting a presence, producing meaning, creating forms of listening, and opening spaces where non-dominant experiences, bodies, and forms of knowledge can emerge without being simplified.
Perhaps this is what it means to be an artist today: to continue producing attention, complexity, and critical imagination within a present that tends instead toward speed, simplification, and competition. And for many women and many foreigners, this practice is not only an aesthetic or professional choice, but also an existential and political position.
The Lack of Space to Exist Without Performing
Berlin, 13.02.2026
Author text: Giulia Bruno
Today, there seems to be less and less space to exist without constantly having to perform. Every sphere of life — from work to relationships, from social media to cultural production — demands a form of continuous exposure, a presence that is legible, coherent, and recognizable. It is no longer enough simply to be; one must also present oneself, articulate oneself, justify oneself, and become visible in the right way. Even interiority risks being turned into something that must be immediately translated into language, image, content, or position.
In this context, the space for a non-performative presence becomes increasingly narrow. It becomes difficult to remain in ambiguity, silence, fragility, or contradiction without feeling the pressure to transform everything into a comprehensible and shareable form.
The demand is not only to act, but to make every gesture readable, every choice productive, every identity declared.
Existence no longer appears as an open and shifting condition, but as something that must be constantly confirmed.
This dynamic affects in particular those who already live under conditions of judgment, marginalization, or invisibility.
For many people — especially those navigating precarity or difference — performance often becomes a strategy of survival before it is ever a choice. One must demonstrate competence, presence, legitimacy, and belonging. One must reassure, explain, adapt.
In this way, the effort to exist increasingly begins to coincide with the effort to be accepted.
And yet, perhaps one of the most urgent gestures today is precisely to defend the possibility of a non-performative space: a space in which not everything has to be immediately displayed, named, or translated into value. A space for slowness, opacity, and transformation not yet completed. A space in which it is possible not to continuously produce a legible version of oneself, but to remain also within what is uncertain, incomplete, and still in formation.
To reclaim such a space means resisting a culture that measures existence in terms of visibility, efficiency, and performance.
It means restoring dignity to what does not easily lend itself to display: doubt, vulnerability, the time needed to understand, to change, or simply to be. In a present that constantly demands performance, perhaps resistance also means protecting the possibility of a presence that is not spectacular, not optimized, and not fully explained.
Friendship Between Women, Silent Competition, and the Global Flattening of Creative Labour
Berlin, 13.01.2026
Author text: Giulia Bruno
Friendship between women within spaces of creative labour is today inscribed within a deeply ambivalent structure, in which proximity and competition do not exclude one another but coexist simultaneously. It cannot be understood simply as a space of solidarity or, conversely, as a site of rivalry, because both of these dimensions are produced and organized by the material and symbolic conditions of the present. In contemporary creative contexts, relationships never exist outside the dispositifs of visibility, selection, and valorization that regulate access to recognition. For this reason, friendship does not emerge as a space external to the system, but as a relation traversed by its very logics.
Competition between women, in this sense, should not be read as a psychological or moral fact, but as an effect of a regime of scarcity. When opportunities are limited, recognition is unevenly distributed, and legitimacy is produced through intermittent and opaque mechanisms, every relationship becomes exposed to a comparative tension. In cultural and creative spaces, this tension often takes on a silent form, because the field continues to represent itself as horizontal, progressive, and inclusive, while reproducing highly specific hierarchies within it. Competition, then, does not always appear as explicit conflict, but as the internalization of comparison, as the constant measuring of oneself against the trajectory, visibility, and recognition of the other.
This process intensifies in creative labour because, within it, the subject does not simply put a skill to work, but their very form of life. In the field of art and culture, production and subjectivity tend to coincide: what is offered is not merely labour, but a sensibility, a voice, a position, a mode of inhabiting the world. Consequently, recognition does not concern only access to material resources, but directly invests the sphere of symbolic existence. Competition is therefore organized not only around the distribution of work, but also around the distribution of visibility, credibility, and legitimacy. It is in this sense that comparison between proximate subjects — and particularly between women, who are often called upon to occupy limited quotas of representation — acquires a particular intensity.
Contemporary creative labour, while rhetorically grounded in the idea of singularity, experimentation, and freedom, increasingly appears as one of the privileged sites of a global flattening of subjectivities. This flattening does not consist in the erasure of difference, but in its administration. Cultural neoliberalism does not eliminate heterogeneity; rather, it incorporates it, renders it legible, and converts it into value, provided that it is expressed through forms compatible with the dispositifs of circulation, curatorship, mobility, and self-narration. Within this framework, even difference becomes standardized. One is asked to be unique, but according to recognizable grammars; to be critical, but translatable; to be situated, but exchangeable across ever-new contexts.
The effect of this process is the production of subjects who are formally distinct yet structurally homogeneous: flexible, self-entrepreneurial, permanently available for transformation, collaboration, mobility, and self-communication. Creative labour, far from constituting a space exempt from the logics of capital, becomes one of their most advanced forms precisely because it fully absorbs subjectivity, affect, relationships, and desire. In this sense, it enacts a particularly effective form of flattening: not by imposing external uniformity, but by soliciting a continuous internal differentiation that ultimately produces strikingly similar behaviours, postures, and relational modes.
Relations between women within this scenario are therefore doubly exposed. On the one hand, friendship may constitute a practice of alliance, listening, and mutual recognition capable of interrupting, at least temporarily, the competitive logic of the field. On the other hand, it can never be understood as entirely innocent, because it takes shape within the same regime that produces scarcity, comparison, and the desire for visibility. Ambivalence is not an accident of the relation, but its structural condition. For this reason, a theoretical reflection on friendship between women should perhaps not seek an impossible purity, but rather examine the ways in which bonds can move through the logics of the system without entirely coinciding with them.
From this perspective, friendship is not compelling as an idealized space of fusion or perfect reciprocity, but as a fragile site in which the contradiction between support and comparison, care and competition, the desire for alliance and the pressure toward distinction becomes visible. Its political potential does not lie in being outside labour, but in its capacity to suspend, name, or displace the forms of subjectivation that labour imposes. In a landscape marked by the global flattening of forms of life, friendship between women may still constitute a critical space: not because it is untouched by power, but because it renders perceptible its frictions, its wounds, and its possibilities of resistance.