Screen – Art Viewer

OUTSIDE LINEAGE

Curated by Raisa Maudit

“A ideia de progresso é a que sustenta a destruição de tudo em nome do futuro.”
Ailton Krenak, Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo

Broken lines that pretend to be straight. To think from the idea of lineage is to confront a promise of continuity, of orderly passage, of an inheritance that flows without resistance. It tells us that we come from a clear, universal place from which we move toward another equally legible one. Beneath its soft appearance, lineage draws a straight path and demands fidelity: to origin, to form, to rhythm. Everything that does not conform to that line—what deviates, fragments, bifurcates, or is interrupted—falls outside the narrative, suspended in a time that does not progress and cannot become genealogy. To name lineage is also to decide which memories may be inherited and which must disappear. For this reason, to speak of what exists outside lineage is not to deny the past, but to listen to what insists when the line breaks. When linear temporality becomes a tool of hegemonic power, resisting definition, classification, and inheritance turns into a device for survival.

In a context of intensified neo-imperialism, where old logics of domination reappear under renewed technological, economic, and cultural languages, Outside Lineage emerges as a space of friction: a series of twelve videos that think and practice resistance from the margins of inheritance and outside the temporality that sustains it.

Imperialism—yesterday and today—does not only occupy territories; it administers time. It decides which temporalities are valid, which are relegated to backwardness, and which are declared obsolete. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has noted, colonial violence also acts upon the imagination, breaking the relationship between language, memory, and history. Added to this rupture is another: the imposition of a single time that invalidates rhythms, cycles, and durations not aligned with the logic of power. In response, many contemporary practices operate from bastard genealogies that cannot be cleanly inherited, and from presents that refuse to be read as a transition toward a predetermined future.

In dialogue with this condition, the notion of ch’ixi memories developed by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui allows us to think overlapping temporalities that neither merge nor reconcile—layers of time that coexist without integrating into a single narrative, without obeying the imperial chronology of progress. Outside Lineage situates itself precisely there: in the friction between times, in the refusal to order the present as a promise of the future, and in resistance to the dominant languages that organize thought—toward a rebellion against the end of the idea of the world… of “one world.”

The twelve episodes of the program bring together artists who work from visions historically linked to resistance against hegemonic power— orality, opacity, myth, linguistic disobedience, the body, the night, fragmentation—activated as contemporary strategies that disrupt the linearity of time. Languages that do not move toward synthesis, but insist, reappear, fold back on themselves, and refuse closure.

Outside Lineage does not propose a new canon or an alternative genealogy. Nor does it propose a new chronology. It proposes something else: breaking with the idea of an inheritance without fissures. To think and create outside lineage also means to think and create outside imperial time, where history is not inherited or advanced, but contested, interrupted, and reactivated.

At a moment when neo-imperialism flourishes massively and at speed, this program affirms that resistance cannot be limited to a single language, a single era, or a single tool. It must be activated from all the times power has tried to erase, and from all the forms of knowledge it has never fully managed to domesticate.

September 29 – October 23, 2026

YESSi PERSE

CYBERMEDIEVAL

2025, HD video, sound, color, 40’33’’ min

Welcome to a New Liturgy, Update the System

The European Middle Ages, as a historical category, were defined retrospectively: those who lived through them did not know they were entering a “Middle Age,” nor was there a specific day on which the ancient world ended and another began. It was a slow transformation, shaped by cumulative shifts — political, economic, religious and technological — that only much later would be recognized as the emergence of a new era.

CYBERMEDIEVAL operates according to a similar logic: techno-feudalism does not arrive as a visible rupture either, but as the progressive expansion of structures we already inhabit. Each platform, every piece of data surrendered and every “I agree” expands its domains; perhaps only in retrospect will we be able to name the moment when we stopped living under capitalism and discovered that we were already inside another Age.

CYBERMEDIEVAL, by YESSi PERSE, is a conceptual album and an audiovisual work lasting more than forty minutes that imagines the advent of a new era: the moment when capitalism definitively transforms into techno-feudalism, and the major technology corporations cease to be companies and become territories, sovereigns and de facto powers.

The work is structured around five exercises in sonic speculation, “MIDIeval” tales and hymns dedicated to the five technological giants that dominate the global digital market — Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Google-Alphabet and Amazon, grouped under the acronym MMAGA. Their hymns emerge from the companies’ own legal texts: the endless “Terms and Conditions” we accept in order to enter their domains. YESSi PERSE transforms them into poetic material through choral polyphonies, synthetic voices and a soundscape inspired by European medieval music.

What emerges is a liturgy for a world that is gradually ceasing to belong to us.

The starting point is techno-feudalism, a concept that emerged in science fiction and was later incorporated into contemporary economic and political thought. If feudalism was built upon the relationship between lords and serfs, CYBERMEDIEVAL transposes this architecture into the present: technology corporations occupy the position of the new lords, while those of us who inhabit their platforms become a new class of digital serfs.

YESSi PERSE calls them USERFS, a fusion of user and serf: user and serf.

The USERF does not arrive at the castle in chains. They arrive voluntarily. They enter, accept the terms, and begin to work.

Their territory is not land, but the network. Their harvest is data. Their labour is attention. Their tribute is the information they produce with every search, every image, every conversation, every movement and every gesture. The user feeds the territory that contains them while remaining unaware of the true dimensions of the power governing it.

The ancient castles have disappeared beneath new architectures. They are now called servers, platforms, clouds, data centres. The walls are interfaces. The roads are networks. The archives are infinite memories. The tithes are data. And the lords no longer need to sit upon a throne: they govern from invisible infrastructures capable of recording, predicting and ordering our lives.

CYBERMEDIEVAL imagines the moment when this transformation ceases to be a metaphor.

The future proposed by the work does not arrive with an explosion. It arrives as an update. There is no precise instant at which the ancient world disappears, just as there was no such instant in the European Middle Ages; we simply keep clicking “accept” while the structures organizing our existence change shape. The apocalypse takes place silently, behind the interfaces.

Within this landscape, the promises of infinite economic growth and unlimited technological development acquire the character of a religious narrative. Innovation becomes dogma. Efficiency becomes doctrine. Progress becomes a false promise of perpetual salvation. Corporations construct their own universes of belief, and we participate in them through everyday rituals: connecting, identifying ourselves, accepting, sharing, producing, consuming.

YESSi PERSE does not merely present a dystopian future — or is it the present? The work constructs a hypothesis of transformation: what happens when the tools we create begin to become the territories in which we live? What happens when those who control these territories can establish their own rules, accumulate our data and determine the conditions of our presence?

The USERF thus embodies a radical paradox: we are free to enter, but the rules have already been written.

The pact is not signed in blood, but with a click.

The prophecy of CYBERMEDIEVAL does not announce the arrival of machines. It announces something more unsettling: the gradual disappearance of the boundary between using a technology and belonging to it.

I accept the Terms and

YESSi PERSE

YESSi PERSE (Multidimensional Artists & Quantum DJs based in Barcelona, Spain. IP: 62.174.182.94.) is a fictional persona, a hyperstitional interface that allows its users to enter alternative narratives. YESSi employs the political strategies of science fiction and urban fantasy to speculate on posthuman avatar identities, the techno-feudal digital economy and future xenofeminist ecologies.

YESSi PERSE’s hybrid practice combines sound experimentation, video art, CGI, videogame design, the production of immersive experiences in expanded virtual reality, and the mutation of institutional artistic performance, with memetic variations emerging from popular formats such as club contexts (using the DJ/VJ set as a format), Cosplay/LARP conventions (Live Action Role-Playing), Online Communities and Virtual Worlds.

YESSi PERSE has received the 2023 Generaciones Award from La Casa Encendida / Fundación Montemadrid, the 2022 Can Felipa Arts Visuals Award, the 2021 Barcelona Producció Award from La Capella, the 2020 Miquel Casablancas Award, the 2020 PREMIS BARCELONA Award, and the 2019 Art Jove Award.

YESSi PERSE was a long-term resident artist at HANGAR, a centre for artistic research and production in Barcelona. Their work has been performed and exhibited both within institutional art contexts (HKW, MACBA, IVAM, EACC, La Capella, Arts Santa Mònica, Fundació Joan Miró, MNAC, Matadero, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media), galleries (Okela, New Art City, PS Mirabel), and biennials (Manifesta, Athens Biennale, Barcelona Biennial of Thought, The Wrong Biennale), as well as within club culture and at art and electronic music festivals such as Primavera Sound Pro, Sónar, Transmediale & CTM, and New York Fashion Week.

In 2020, YESSi PERSE co-founded the digital art collective and record label NeuroDungeon.

YESSi PERSE is currently presenting their first LP, Cybermedieval, at ArkDes (Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design) and Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Sweden) as part of the exhibition Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities, curated by James Taylor-Foster.