Isolation Journal
2025
Investigation of how neoliberal urbanism and spatial violence impact and manufacture isolation and modern reality.
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elevators don’t stop at my floor
i am not here
i am held together politely
there used to be music here
lit phones instead of candles now
no one noticed
well we gathered anyway
and no one to answer the alarm
nothing heavier than ambition
unless it goes viral
the city taught me how to disappear
politely
with pre-furnished silence
no one sees
but you hope that someone wonders
well we gathered anyway
with senti/mental issues
Power isn’t just displayed in statues. It’s enforced in what’s allowed to touch and build them. Raw surface against raw anger. It felt like the only place those frames belonged, but
why? Spaces get cleaned up. Messages get painted over. I knew I wouldn't see them again. My interruption was temporary, already irrelevant. I turn from their disappearance to the structures that ensure it, the designed removal of estates, the (by force) polished surfaces of capital, and the concrete that cages as efficiently as it comes to life.
p. 2
The concept of abstract space, defined by Henri Lefebvre (1991), occurs via policies that transform basic materials like concrete, steel, and brick into instruments of exclusion. This spatial violence takes apart collective identity not incidentally but systematically, enforcing isolation in the very fabric of life. It describes how space is drawn into accumulation, transformed into a regulated and instrumentalised field where profit dictates design and condition.
p. 3
There is a specific sound that concrete makes when it is falling from the sky. It is not a clean break, but a low boom, followed by a waterfall of tragedy. In Palestine, this is not the sound of accident, but the sound of policy and violence. It is the core of a spatial order designed for a single purpose: the systematic devastation of one world to make way for another. Gaza’s example must be understood not as an isolated catastrophe, but as the logical culmination of the settler‐colonial and neoliberal spatial policies and 'logics'.
p. 10