i fail

march 28, 2026


this is a draft.

it may be flawed.

i fail every day.

i fail when i embody the brutality of our system and apply its standards to others and myself.

i fail when i deny i do this.

it is almost impossible to not fail.

the system fails us.

we are failed.

i failed you.

i did not want to but still i did.

can you accept my apologies?

what else do you need?

as an invisibly disabled, neuroqueer and transgender person, i rarely fit into the standards of our system and should be proud of it.

but well, i admit that i can still feel the fear that can come with failing to fit, when it 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.

given our right-wing politicians's love for individual shaming and blaming and their hate for systemic analyses, we are all made to feel that we fail more and more (i.e. facing more and more judgment when failing normative standards) and under pressure, maybe we also truly fail more and more (through ourselves embodying and applying the brutality of these standards).

and then, what corrupt mechanisms do we reify when in our despair we try to bring repair to the suffering we unintentionally inflict or when we try to address the systemic issues that make us really fail?

when artists choose to fail normative standards, artistic and/or societal, they tap into the aesthetic of failure and into its potential for social change.

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)

when we fail and face our guilt and shame and from our hearts ask: "what do you need?", we tap into the transformative power of shame, and this also belongs to the aesthetic of failure.

and when we fail, 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