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# Periphery as Method: Art, Materialism, and Revolutionary Creation
The periphery is not a place. It’s a way of seeing. It’s not at the edge of the map, but in the way the map is drawn. And that drawing is almost always done by the center.
In the center there is shine—lights, shop windows, money. In the periphery there are shadows, broken streets, half-finished houses. But in those unfinished houses something else appears: the possibility of creating without asking permission.
Artists on the periphery don’t wait for grants or invitations. They don’t think about contests. They work with what they have. A blank wall. An old radio. A dusty square. Precarity becomes a method. An aesthetic that doesn’t try to look like one—it simply happens.
Walter Benjamin wrote that every work of art holds within it a spark of the future. In the periphery that spark ignites with little: a bare lightbulb hanging from a wire, a badly recorded sound on a phone. The unfinished is not a flaw; it’s the natural condition of things.
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Marx said that capital turns everything into a commodity. In the periphery, art slips that trap out of sheer exhaustion. Not because it plans to, but because there isn’t a market big enough to absorb it. A painting that gets wet in the rain. A song only the neighbors on the corner hear. A piece made to disappear.
What’s revolutionary isn’t proclaiming slogans, but the material way those works circulate. Sometimes they don’t circulate at all. And that is their strength: they don’t depend on a buyer or a catalog. They are living gestures—gestures that are consumed in the very moment they exist.
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The periphery, as method, teaches us to accept error. Error not as accident, but as path. A concert cuts out because the power goes out. A mural is interrupted because someone calls the Carabineros (police). None of that destroys the work; it completes it. The cut is part of the form.
Hemingway said that what’s true always looks simpler than it is. Peripheral art works like that. It doesn’t need ornaments. It presents itself as it is: direct, fragile, sometimes brutal.
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What’s revolutionary, then, is not the utopia of a perfect future. It’s the daily practice of the unfinished. The distrust of the finished object, of the polished commodity. The periphery reminds us that what matters is not the closure, but the process.
Truman Capote spoke of writing as a way of looking at life closely. The periphery is the same: radical attention to what the center ignores. To look at the crack, the delay, the precariousness. And to understand that in that precariousness there is truth.
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The periphery is not deprivation. It’s a method. And that method, even if no one calls it that, is deeply materialist. You create with what there is. You turn what’s given into something else. You lean on failure.
The revolution may not arrive in crowds or in flags. Maybe it arrives in those small gestures that never resolve: a poem written in a school notebook, a piece of graffiti erased and written again, a melody someone hums on the way to work.
The periphery teaches this: that to create is to resist, and to resist is to continue even when everything is half done.
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