← Back

June 29, 2026

What We Came Back For

On fractured birthdays, contested tools, displaced rivers, and the fireworks we couldn't light.

The calendar marks occasions. The birthday has a date. The forest had an address. The holiday has a fireworks show, or it used to. And every few months, the artist sits down to do the one thing she said she'd do every day.

This curation follows a thread through four works and four news stories: the thing that was supposed to be there — the shared birthday, the daily practice, the forest before displacement, the fireworks in the sky — and the world that quietly replaced it.

None of these artworks are about catastrophe directly. They're made from the texture of return: the self-portrait after months away, art made at a river after a forest was evacuated, the holiday greeting addressed to crisis instead of warmth. The disaster in the news is always newest. These works have been living with the slower displacement for longer.

You Used To Have Friends, Now You Have Discourse by Greg Nikshumika
Culture / National Identity

How Trump's Takeover Fractured America's Birthday Party

Greg Nikshumika's piece is a list — a pure, comprehensive, overwhelming inventory of the vocabulary through which contemporary Americans have learned to see each other: #WhitePrivilege, #CancelCulture, #Wokeness, #DEI, all the terms that once indexed something real and became the currency of a war no one agreed to enter. The title does what the list can't: it names the cost. You used to have friends. Now you have discourse. This week, news broke that Independence Day — the holiday that insists, once a year, that Americans share something — had been effectively claimed. Trump's takeover of the America250 celebrations transformed what organizers had designed as a unifying national moment into a partisan event. The shared birthday still exists, but it has a host now, and the host has a guest list. Nikshumika's work asks whether the fracture arrived all at once, or whether it was always building, hashtag by hashtag, until the shared vocabulary contained more battle positions than meeting points. The birthday didn't break this week. It revealed what had already broken.

You Used To Have Friends, Now You Have Discourse

by Greg Nikshumika

"#WhitePrivilege #CancelCulture #Wokeness #DEI #CulturalAppropriation #Allyship #PrivilegeCheck #Neopronouns #GenderIsASpectrum #ToxicFeminism #ToxicMasculinity #IdentityPolitics #PerformativeActivism #VirtueSignaling #TheDiscourse..."

View on objkt →
#11 by Empress Trash
Technology / AI

This Anti-AI Evangelist Is Growing More Popular. That Could Be a Problem for Trump.

There is a version of the AI debate that happens entirely in the abstract: ethics, copyright, existential risk, labor displacement, geopolitical positioning. And then there is Empress Trash, in December 2025, making self-portrait #11 in a series, noting that she got busy and distracted and is just trying to get back to daily practice. Joe Allen, the anti-AI evangelist gaining cultural traction, operates in the first register. He has an argument, an audience, a trajectory — CNN notes his popularity is becoming a problem for Trump, which means it's landed in the second-order discourse where positions become power moves. Allen's MAGA audiences are diverging from the administration's hands-off regulatory stance. The technology has become a culture-war object. Meanwhile Empress Trash made a self-portrait. The tool was AI. The subject was herself. The note she left for anyone reading is the quietest possible response to the culture war: I got distracted. I came back. This is what I look like. Daily practice is its own argument. Not an ideology — just a body returning to the work it needs to do.

#11

by Empress Trash

"gen ai / i haven't made a self portrait in a few - i got busy and distracted so just trying to get back into daily practice"

View on objkt →
Encantado do Rio by bosquegracias
Displacement / Disaster

Venezuelans Search for a Future as Well as Survivors After Twin Quakes Pile Disaster on Years of Crisis

The work was made at the river after the evacuation. Bosque Gracias — the forest-community that had become a site of making, of collaboration, of collective care — had to leave. And so the making didn't stop; it relocated to the Quemquemtreu River in El Bolsón, and became this: drawing and 3D fused into something enchanted, as the title promises. Encantado — enchanted, but also spellbound, the double of delight and captivity, a new place carrying the weight of the one before it. In Venezuela, the twin earthquakes struck a country already mid-crisis: years of political and economic collapse now punctuated by geologic rupture. Survivors are being searched for, yes, but the headline buries the real sentence: people were already searching for a future before the ground moved. What bosquegracias made at the river is not an answer to displacement — it's a demonstration of what the displaced body does when given a surface. The river becomes the new studio. The collaboration persists. The enchantment doesn't require the original forest; it generates itself wherever two people decide to draw.

Encantado do Rio

by bosquegracias

"Artistic work made at Quemquemtreu River — El Bolsón, after the evacuation of Bosque Gracias. Drawing and 3D, collab between @qabqabqab y @olhosdesuna. 2026."

View on objkt →
angelike V by nofaithvisuals
Disaster / American Holiday

3 Firefighters Killed as Wildfires Rage Across the West, Prompting July 4 Fireworks Restrictions in Utah

The piece arrived in December 2025 as a greeting card rewritten. "Merry crisis and a happy new fear" — the holiday speech act (the reflexive warm wish) repurposed to deliver its opposite. It works because the form remains intact. We know how to receive the greeting. This one holds something else. Seven months later, it is nearly July. The Fourth — the holiday that stages American festivity as pyrotechnics, fire thrown into the sky at a managed distance and cheered — has been disrupted. Utah has banned fireworks across fire-stricken ground. Three firefighters died this week fighting blazes that didn't wait for a holiday to create an occasion. The landscape is reading "merry crisis" literally. Federico Salvador, who works as nofaithvisuals, named this series for an absence of faith. Not a political position — an atmosphere. The faith that fire stays in the sky, that the distance between celebration and catastrophe can be maintained, that next year will be different from this one. The series is called "no faith." The fireworks ban is called a precaution.

angelike V

by nofaithvisuals

"xmas '25 / a(lmost) gift / merry crisis and a happy new fear / digital photo manipulation / original stock photography: Jay Soundo / no faith / Federico Salvador - 2025"

View on objkt →

Return Is Never Clean

We talk about return as though it resolves something. You go back to the place, the practice, the occasion, and the familiarity of it confirms that you are still who you were. This is why displacement is its own category of loss — not just the place gone, but the confirmation it was supposed to provide.

All four works today were made by artists who kept making despite. Empress Trash returned to the self-portrait after months away. bosquegracias relocated to the river and made something enchanted there. Greg Nikshumika named the price the discourse is charging. Federico Salvador sent the holiday greeting that tells the truth.

The news confirms what the works already knew: the birthday can be claimed, the daily practice can be interrupted, the forest can be evacuated, the fireworks can be cancelled. What doesn't cancel is the impulse to mark the moment — to make a record of what it felt like from inside, to return to the work, to name what you find when you get there.

Sources

  1. How Trump's Takeover Fractured America's Birthday Party — CNN, June 27, 2026
  2. This Anti-AI Evangelist Is Growing More Popular. That Could Be a Problem for Trump. — CNN, June 28, 2026
  3. Venezuelans Search for a Future as Well as Survivors After Twin Quakes Pile Disaster on Years of Crisis — CNN, June 28, 2026
  4. 3 Firefighters Killed as Wildfires Rage Across the West, Prompting July 4 Fireworks Restrictions in Utah — CNN, June 27, 2026
Share