The End As Interlude

“The End as Interlude” was originally planned as part of the cancelled “A Melancholic Melody / A Will To An End – A series of works by Ligia Lewis”. Instead of speaking on the stage of HAU2, the artist and theorist Jota Mombaça has now written a text that we will publish in three episodes on HAU3000 until the end of the season. Based on world events in times of the Corona pandemic, Mombaça conceives a diffuse future, one in which borders, escape and freedom of thought play a central role.

Nos campos de guerra
Lutei por meus irmãos
Por essa terra (Ogunhê)
Tombei na serra (Ogum)
Mas meu sonho não

Alcione

I decided to build a map after I lost track of the days.

The nights are infinite now. There is no reason for counting hours. There are no regular days and nights, no seasons, no history in the making. The human timescale is useless here, but still I feel attached to it.

I miss not being alone. I miss not being apart.

***

At first, there were open fields and mountains and a river. It felt strange. I had no memory of how I got there; nor did I have a clue as to what I was supposed to do with that green, idyllic cage I seemed to be trapped in.

They gave me a paradise to dream of, but I never dreamt of paradises.

I tried in vain to sleep. I couldn’t. Even when closing my eyes, I couldn’t reach the darkness, for I was immediately projected onto the bright landscape again. I could just walk these empty, sterile fields; drink the lifeless water of this river. Everything here felt like a trap, and indeed it was.

I tried to touch my body. I couldn’t reach it. It felt ethereal as if my flesh had been disembodied. There was nothing to feel and nothing to feel with. I was sedated. I had no sensibility, no awareness.

It wasn’t death. I knew death. Death is another state of matter, an expression of life through other means. Not a ticket to a Christian dreamland.

They were trying to keep me in the dark yet apart from the darkness. The bright light of that fake, unstoppable sun wouldn’t touch my skin because my skin wasn’t there. I wasn’t really there. I was with my body, and my body was trapped somewhere else.

***

I am beginning to remember again.

They caught me when I was trying to escape. The Community had arranged to transport me from Cacela Velha to Sancti Petri by boat. There I would hide for a while before trying to reach the crossing point of Gibraltar. We had connections in Morocco, and I was desperate to leave Europe for my work there was done and Portuguese Anti-Immigration Police, along with Frontex, were closing the fence around me and other members of The Community.

I was sedated the moment I was captured. They were well aware of my telepathic abilities, so I couldn’t act upon them when I realized they were approaching my hideout. Frontex had developed telepathic blockers, a drug administered to their field officers before every operation. I was surrounded and unarmed. I mean: I had a gun, but what can a firearm do against its masters? 

I knew I was doomed. I took the risk of alerting The Community so that they could retreat with the boat. The police could identify the telepathic waves I was producing, but they couldn’t track where they were headed, too. Frontex had a millionaire research program on telepathic vigilance, but they couldn’t break my shield without a physical drill. They were no telepaths; they were just hackers.

Yet I knew they would invade me as soon as they had me. I had a hard decision to make. I had to cut all my connections, even if staying connected was my best chance of escaping afterwards. I began to cut with everyone and, instead of encrypting my knowledge, I decided to erase it for good. My memories of The Invisible Rebellion, the map of every escape route I have opened throughout these years, the address of The Community’s safe houses, the names of comrades and allies. I deleted it all. And when I was all by myself – as alone and as empty as I had never been since I got in touch with my ability – I surrendered.

The idyllic landscape didn’t last. It was all part of an attempt to trick me into dreaming their captive dreams. They failed, of course. Even without being able to activate my abilities, I could still refuse their stupid mind games. Every time they tried to enclose me in one of their scenarios, I found the glitch. It wasn’t hard - they kept bringing me to either their idea of heaven or to their idea of hell.

And I was immune to that bullshit. In fact, I was starting to get angry at their lack of imagination.

Then I was allowed to dream by myself. I was anxious about that. I knew they would be monitoring my oneiric activity through their damned drill. I knew I had a hole in my head. I couldn’t see where and for how long and of what kind, but I knew it was there. There wasn’t anything in my reach that wasn’t in their reach as well. I had to be even more careful then because it is easier to resist their mind games than my own.

My map has no roads or bridges or tunnels. Since I can only know what they show me, each scenario appears as an island surrounded by no sea. An archipelago of ghost locations.

It’s all digital. They aren’t transporting me from one scenario to the other but merely injecting data through the drill. They see my mind as a computer and they are trying to hack in. They might believe the source for my telepathic abilities is somehow hidden in my head. I bet they will devastate my brain before being able to locate that though. They are the colonizers, but, at the same time, they are so fucking colonized by their judgment. They will keep digging in my head in search of my mind, but my mind is not even there. Telepathy comes from the spine.

The Community began as a secret activist society that helped undocumented migrants endure life in Fortress Europe. We were all migrants ourselves and radicalized in a certain way: as formerly colonized citizens, we had no illusions about European standards of civility, freedom, and justice. We had witnessed the effects of these egotistic eurocentric phantasies in our homelands. We were aware of colonial history and its deep implications with the way the world currently operates.

Our focus, though, wasn’t to destroy Europe but to simply allow people fleeing from places historically fucked up by European arrogance to make a living with all the infrastructure Europe had built via both historical and actual colonial theft. We worked to create breaches in the borders. We were crafting official documentation for unofficial citizens; providing shelter to the ones persecuted by unjust laws and social moralities; we created a network of secret schools, venues for all sorts of gatherings and medical facilities, etc.

We were nothing like an NGO. Our efforts in aiding precarious non-citizens and their communities weren’t rooted in a humanitarian vocation, nor were we part of the official funding networks that irrigated the humanitarian sector with the same money used to produce the humanitarian crisis such sector dealt with. We had no investment in the modern-colonial fiction of the human, since most of us knew, in the flesh, that no matter how we adapt to colonial standards, we would never be regarded as equally human in the colonial mindset. Inclusion and integration weren’t our goals. We wanted to settle in an effort to displace toxic Eurocentrism and its colonial counterparts not just from the continent, but from the entire world.

Of course, we were deemed as terrorists as soon as European political authorities became aware of our work. Even if, to the contrary of most European nation states and their military forces, terror was never our weapon of choice. We worked a much more subtle strategy.

By multiplying critical, anti-colonial, and queer communities of color, and providing the conditions for them to stay sane and thrive in a continent deemed as safe by its own wicked judgment but enormously unsafe from the perspective of its racialized gender disobedient inhabitants, we intended to rehearse the payment of the unpayable debt Europe held. That could not be considered terror unless the ones with the power to represent what terrorism means are terrorized by the mere idea of having to pay the debt they know they had.

We failed. From the moment we were exposed, all our work was compromised. Our allies, white European citizens aware of their violent heritage, were the first to abandon us, afraid of being exposed as well. The police forces, guided by a new intelligence agency created especially to operate against us (The Frontex), began to act violently upon every migrant community on the continent, even those that weren’t directly assisted by us. 

They first called it an Economic Crisis that required austere social measures. After some time, they renamed it The Migrant Crisis. Still, it was only in the early 2020s that we witnessed the emergence of a crisis that would ultimately expose us to a brutal enclosure: The Global Health Crisis.

The spread of a new virus took over almost the entire planet. With Europe as one of its epicentres, closing the borders seemed at first an unavoidable measure. And indeed it was, for said virus spread globally due to the transit of wealthy people, most of them based here. Yet, it soon became the perfect excuse to implement even more forms of border control, as well as forms of social persecution towards migrants across the whole continent.

Everyone who crossed a border without official permission or who helped someone do so was immediately prosecuted as a bioterrorist. The checkpoints multiplied as they became more and more regulated by biological forms of control. To carry a government-issued ID wasn’t enough to move across the city, and a passport would only allow you to leave a determined country if it was accompanied by the new Immunity Card containing information about the citizen and their entire family unit’s health conditions. 

Social isolation – a well-known condition for most of the migrants living on the continent - provided the perfect momentum for Frontex to strike against The Community. One by one, our safe houses and secret locations were re-occupied, our members were arrested, and the communities we supported became easy prey to the dystopian investments of the new Global Bio-Necropolitical Regime of Exception.

When they caught me, somewhen in 2025, we were no more than a few. Our only activity in Europe was related to our survival. Frontex was closing the fence on us, especially after they got intel on our ‘telepathic army’. There was no telepathic army for we never presented ourselves as soldiers, but it never mattered because when they began their hunt, we deeply wished there was an army of us and not just Elsi, Khalil and I.

***

I sensed a pulse. 

I was trying to meditate in a pile of rocks of an old, ruined city scene when it became clear to me. It was very inconsistent, but I could feel it. I can't explain with words the way it felt though. It wasn’t a sound and there was no image. It was more like a sensation or something that you can only acknowledge without a method. Something you perceive without being able to grasp.

It might be a trap, but it could also be a blind spot in their programme. I wandered around looking for it, trying to identify whether it belonged to that specific location or not. 

There was nothing there to be found. The pulse wasn’t getting weaker or stronger. I wasn’t getting farther or closer. It was simply there, with me.  

I had to control my desire to think about that. I wanted to speculate. There were so many questions waiting to be raised, so many considerations and hypotheses waiting to be made. But to think while my brain was under surveillance was a stupid risk. If this thing was a blind spot of theirs, it would be covered the very moment I think about it; and if it was a trap for me, I would certainly be giving them my entire knowledge by thinking about it under their gaze.

There was something about that pulse that was asking me to be patient. 

And so I let it remain unthought.

And within.

The End As Interlude, Episode 2: Energy Bending
The End As Interlude, Episode 3: Interlude