On Not Participating: A Week of Forgetting and Remembering

9 Years Ago in front of my studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Photo taken by Jason Wheeler.

This week, I wasn't planning to write another blog post for my weekly assignment. I had given myself a different task — to research the intersections of disability and contemporary art, both within the city of Berlin and the broader art world. But then life, or rather my brain, decided otherwise.

For the first time since my accident more than four years ago, I had what I can only describe as a "classic" brain injury week. I completely screwed up all of my appointments — every single one. I'm not exaggerating. There were six or seven (I can't remember), and I either didn't write them down, wrote them down wrong, or didn't look. I even managed to start a fire in the kitchen. There's no need to list every way my brain malfunctioned this week — let's say it was not a sustainable way to live in the society we have built for us.

But it got me thinking: How does someone like me — someone who, at times, struggles with the basic day-to-day — exist within the art world? How does that reality translate when you're an artist trying to "work again," trying to be part of systems that depend on constant productivity, visibility, and performance?

And honestly, it doesn't work. Not for me. And maybe not for most of us.

Even in the ways I think about my art practice, it's rarely based purely on imagination, which my brain is quite good at. Instead, build around constraints: financial, institutional, political, and structural. Around what's possible rather than what's visionary. 

As an Indigenous artist in Europe, I feel that even more sharply — because there's little interest in authentic Indigenous voices that challenge stereotypes or question how European culture has co-opted ours.

So what does that mean, really? Especially now, when I add another layer — my disability — and recognize that I'm no longer "productive" in the way the art world demands. I'm not generating constant output. I'm not "part of the system."

And yet, maybe that's the point. The art world has become a business. And I honestly thought I had escaped that.

When I left the corporate world — where I worked as a graphic designer, winning awards with teams for companies like Time Warner, CNN, HBO, and The Learning Channel, in NYC — I truly believed I was leaving behind that capitalist machinery. I felt that by becoming a full-time cultural organizer and artist, I was choosing something freer, something aligned with purpose and integrity.

But the truth is, I didn't escape. The art world mirrors those same systems — the same hierarchies, the same market-driven logic, the same exclusion of those who don't fit its pace or its metrics of success.

I'm not dismissing what I've accomplished since then. I'm proud of the spaces I've built, the communities I've nurtured, and the art I've made. But I also need to be honest with myself: my resources are limited. I'm not "viable" in the capitalist sense.

And yet… maybe that's where my liberation lies.

As someone who works with energy, I sense that we are in a defining moment — a time of profound realizations and awakenings about our roles in systems that don't support life, that don't help us. My disability forces me to face that truth daily. I often long to be who I once was — the hustler, the multitasker, the person with a full calendar and a steady paycheck. But I'm not that person anymore.

That may be okay.

This week, as my brain faltered, I found a strange clarity. Maybe not participating — not producing, not performing, not "keeping up" — is my way forward.

Because in being forced to step outside of the system, I've stumbled into the possibility of something new. Something truer. Something liberating.