The Utmost Joys of Living

Mia Navarro

One of the biggest inflictions imposed on humanity in the age of modernity is the denial to feel in response to contemporary violence and injustice. The positioning of human beings in modern society has been marked by cultures of relentless capitalist productivity, transactional social behavior, and relationships under hierarchies of power. The modern human is repressed of their own humanity by mere existence within these systems. Passivity has become a form of survival in today’s world. When people do not allow themselves to feel, it is often not by choice, but in desperation to remove themselves from pain, discomfort, truth, and, ultimately, death. 

In this series, I try to make people feel, be in tune with their interior feelings, and be open to an exchange with the people and the world around them through color, texture, style, composition, and mixed media. Each of the works engage with different concepts that are widely deemed valuable to humans, such as memory, reciprocal love, destiny, defiance, and self-acceptance. When everything else falls, we always have our senses, our ability to garner compassion for one another, and each other. Humans are not solitary animals, but social organisms that survived through the resilience of our communities and the use of our senses to communicate feelings that are mutual and universal. Our individual reception of universal feelings also has the capability of carrying completely different meanings when we allow ourselves to have agency with them. 

We do not need to accept the cruelty and suffering of the anthropocentric world. We can always say otherwise through resistance. We are not apathetic, static robots. We are dynamic. We are diverse. We are human. When everything else falls, we will always have each other and our shared senses.