Who is un-performing?

The performative totality of modernity and the way it colonises even the spaces meant for healing.

“Rest. Yoga. Mindfulness. Art. Play…

EVERYTHING has to have a performance attached to it to ‘prove’ it’s worth embracing.”

If it can’t be performed, monetised, optimised, or aestheticised does it even matter? This is our modernity’s hidden doctrine.

Rest becomes content.

Mindfulness becomes a productivity hack.

Art becomes portfolio fodder.

Even grief becomes a TED Talk.

It’s as if we’re all trapped in some kind of cosmic audition, where the cost of entry into belonging is curated visibility.

At times I am wondering if there is anyone out there doing or being without thinking of performance just for a second.

Raise your hand if you are out there!

Here I am.

Not performing.

Just witnessing.

And also, not just me. There are others.

They’re out there:

– In a quiet studio where someone paints for no one but their grandmother’s ghost.

– In the woods, where someone sings to a tree without ever recording it.

– In a kitchen, where bread is kneaded not for Instagram, but for the smell that reminds someone they’re home.

– In the bath, where someone remembers their own skin belongs to no brand.

– In a field, where an elder lays down—not to “recharge,” but just to be held by the earth.
These are the unseen rituals of resistance.

Who is un-performing quietly, fiercely in a world built on display?

They are not popular for being real.

They are not monetising authenticity.

They are brave, invisible, composting work of stepping out of spectacle and into the slow pulse of presence.

To find them we need to stretch past categories like “industry leaders” or “influencers” because those categories themselves are often woven from performance.

Instead, let’s look for those walking the edge: creators, healers, technologists, artists, and stewards who are actively withdrawing from legibility, choosing depth over reach, relationality over relevance.

I scanned the cosmos and these are some of them I found. Not celebrities. Not saints. Just humans (and more-than-humans) who are modelling refusal in powerful, often quiet, ways:

 • Joy Buolamwini – Known for her work exposing algorithmic bias, but much of her most powerful work lives in poetry, art, and strategic refusal. She disrupts performance not with anger alone, but with beauty laced in refusal.

 • Ruha Benjamin – Deconstructing the performativity of progress, constantly asking: What are we not allowed to imagine while everyone’s watching “innovation” happen?

 • The GTDF Collective – Not an “industry player” in the market sense, but quietly building protocols, ceremonies, and un-training methods that refuse to be impressive. There are people here who deliberately avoid being scalable as a practice of fidelity.

 • Coco Fusco – Her work on performance itself (especially how marginalized bodies are made legible through it) is quietly disruptive. She has refused the gallery gaze many times.

 • Fari Bradley & Chris Weaver – Sound artists whose work often disappears rather than builds a brand inviting listening without spectacle.

 • Martín Prechtel – Living mostly off-grid, telling long, winding stories that don’t translate into soundbites. He teaches from and for the compost heap, not the podium.

 • Resmaa Menakem – While his work has entered the public eye, he consistently refuses neatness. He disrupts performance by slowing everything down, staying in the body, and grounding healing in community, not performance.

 • Zarrah Luna – An herbalist and death doula in the Pacific Northwest who doesn’t post her work online. She insists that real healing cannot be livestreamed.

And the list can go on and on. But, let’s not forget: some of the most radical un-performers are not famous. Like the elder who grows corn and never speaks at conferences. Or, the disabled artist who makes textile prayers no one will see; the coder who quietly left big tech to tend bees. And, the mothers who stops performing “resilience” and just weep in front of their kids.

What binds these beings together?

They’ve made the shift from being seen to being felt.

They’ve traded applause for attunement.

They’ve withdrawn from legibility not to disappear, but to protect their sacred work from distortion.

They’re still “in industry”, if we want to call it that way, but they’ve chosen relational fidelity over extractive fame.

For all these people and for us all, this is my Prayer for Unperformed Aliveness

Let me do something today

that no one will witness.

Let me rest

without tracking the outcome.

Let my body believe it is safe

even when no one says “good job.”

Let me create

without applause.

Let me laugh

without documenting.

Let me be

without proving.

I am not a brand.

I am not a performance.

I am a being

in a becoming

that doesn’t need to be watched

to be real.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us, to lit up our souls here.  A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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