Noel Caban 

The work is not the CV.

It does not bow to polish or ask permission to exist.

 

We are taught to sand edges, to practice legibility, to rehearse relevance.

As if the work were a product and the self a small company tasked with staying visible.

 

Perfection is obedience wearing the mask of care. 

Growth becomes the clock.

Innovation, its leash.

The market names the hunger, and it sells it back to us as opportunity. ​

 

Visibility becomes a sorting ritual: seen, funded, softened, or quietly erased.

 

Precarity teaches us to bargain with risk, to make dissent digestible,

to caption our wounds, and package refusal so it fits inside the frame.

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But the work does not need to circulate to be alive. 

It does not owe coherence to institutions of attention.

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It is allowed to stall, to repeat itself, turn inward, illegible to power.

Real work resists usefulness. Lingering where metrics fail.

It grows teeth in the dark. Unfunded, unsponsored, unimproved.

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Art is not what trends. It is what refuses to be optimized. 

 

c. 2026  #reflection #practice #teaching #gratitude #expression