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Palpite #2: Desire – Boredom – Desire
“And transformation happens somewhere in this mechanism, between the boredom that disorients what we know and the desire that sets us in motion until it makes us stop again.”
I've been thinking about revolution. It's difficult not to think about revolution these days; the word has been returning with an insistence that's hard to ignore. I've decided to embrace it and consider what sets it in motion: desire, I suppose. It is desire that consumes the present and demands transformation. But if desire has a strong relationship with transformation, it also has one with permanence. Desire compels us to remain stubbornly close to things just as much as it drives us away from them. It was while reflecting on this dimension of permanence in desire that I stumbled upon boredom. The very idea of revolution presupposes a passage through an earlier time, heavier and slower, in which apparently nothing, or very little, happens, and whose endurance depends on a primary will or need to stay. Here, I found similarities to what I observe in artistic practice. I became interested in exploring this possibility.
I have been visiting artists' studios and other workspaces for a long time, and what I see dispels any idea that places this work in the realm of magic, talent, or inspiration. The creative process is not subject to metaphysical and mysterious conditions and facts; rather, it depends on a routine of persistence that can very well distress even the most willing. Every day one returns to the same materials, to the gestures already known, to the colours, to the forms; experiments are repeated, solutions are sought, some are abandoned, others are recovered. There are days when things actually happen, and there are others when nothing happens, and the only thing to do is wait; these are days when time stretches out without anything apparently occupying it. We have all been through them. They are ordinary days in a work routine, in relationships, and in everything that is repeated over and over again. Therefore, we know how easy it is, when this happens, to prioritise distraction, seeking to fill the void, inventing occupations, making conversation, changing the subject, or anything else that gives us a sense of movement. We've all done it. But there are situations in which we persist and wait. The artist seems to prefer to persist; the artist waits.
The decision to stay suggests a link between boredom and desire, because we need to be truly attached to something to decide to stay with it, even when it seems to have nothing more to offer us. This commitment will sometimes manifest itself as a radical, almost ethical interest, and is therefore capable of surviving the lack of novelty and obliging us to continue in a situation. Many philosophers have explored the theme of boredom, but, incidentally, I am reminded of the image evoked by Walter Benjamin – in his text on the role of the narrator – of the bird that, without haste, incubates the egg. Benjamin's proposition is simple: a bird incubating an egg cannot hurry; it does not know exactly when the process it is engaged in will be completed; therefore, it must remain until a new action becomes obvious. The philosopher thus describes boredom as a disposition to accompany a process whose development we do not control and, in that same sense, as a disposition to develop a relationship with what we see and with which we exist; Boredom is presented to us as the possibility of an encounter that will occur through duration, proximity, and repetition, resulting from continuity and daily friction with the same things in the same place. It is necessary to stay and want to stay, because here, will is part of the possibility of revealing something, a desire to see. The thing will eventually reveal itself; one form will demand another, a gesture will lead to an unexpected result; and, in the discovery, it is possible that desire will emerge and the body will stir – muscles, tendons, intuition, all presence – moving from attention to action, from waiting to doing. This reveals the dual, mysterious nature of desire (in this case, as the driving force behind the work of art). Sometimes, it manifests itself in the logic of a frenzied force that goes from within to without, an urgency close to passion. This hunger does not tolerate waiting and it lives on haste and the will to dominate, pushing the artist into a struggle with matter. At other times, desire manifests itself as this tranquil waiting, as a gentle force. This silent persistence feeds on simple, routine work that cleans, prepares, organises, repeats, and finds its meaning in the very mechanics of permanence.
It is precisely from understanding this intimate system of the art studio that I find it interesting to return to revolution and rethink it. After all, and despite the difference in scale, macropolitics shares, I believe, the same dispositional structure as artistic creation: both depend on the capacity to suspend the weight of the inevitable. When we think of a revolution, we tend to make the same mistake as those who look at art expecting only a stroke of genius, focusing on the instant when an order is interrupted and reality changes shape. But, just as the work does not spring from nothing in the artist's mind, social transformation also does not spring from a bolt from the sky; before the flash of rupture, there will have been the more or less invisible time of accumulation, of restlessness, and of prolonged attention to what no longer served its purpose, and which only boredom allows us to inhabit. Let's say that a revolution only becomes thinkable when the imagination conceives that the present structures are casual and fortuitous, that things could be different from what they are. Such imagination requires time spent navigating the discontent that has led one to look at reality until its cracks are detected.
Indeed, it is precisely because I believe this that I distrust overly simplistic claims about the "transformative power" of art. I don't think a work of art can replace political action, nor that it can, by itself, resolve the world's conflicts. I believe its effectiveness is more subtle and, perhaps for that very reason, more persistent, insofar as it alters the realm of what seems possible to us, demonstrating the contingency of reality, helping us discover that what we considered inevitable may, after all, not be. Even so, I believe that suspending the inevitability of the world is only a first step in revolutionary or transformative action, and that the true challenge lies in inhabiting contingency. Discovering that things can be different from what they are doesn't mean knowing immediately what to do with that discovery; transformation is only consummated in the capacity to give continuity and form to the novelty. It's the beginning of a cycle, it seems to me. When this new stability consolidates, when the revolutionary path transforms into a new known, one cycle ends only to open again. The routine that initially embraced desire slowly transforms into a new conceptual order, and this is the moment when boredom gains space to return and remind us that nothing is definitively established, that not everything of value immediately presents itself as an interesting experience, that there are things that need time to interest us and others that we can only truly know after we stop expecting them to surprise us.
My guess is that all creative work and all imagination about the world lives off this pendulum-like movement. In it, boredom is the condition that allows us to experience the world as impermanent, in a form of radical attention and ethical commitment to things, a discreet form of love, if you prefer, from which desire suspends the rush to find an appropriate action for the circumstances. And transformation happens somewhere in this mechanism, between the boredom that disorients what we know and the desire that sets us in motion until it makes us stop again.
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05 Nov 2026
Digging up my way down, by Diana Geiroto, at Galeria Ocupa: A Glimmer of Hope
By Margarida Prata
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