Strategies of Invisibility (For Repressive Times)

LUIS OTHONIEL ROSA
COMMISSIONED AND EDITED BY WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY FELIPE GUERRA ARJONA

WAI Architecture Think Tank: How to loudread anti-colonial strategies and manifestoes when silence is demanded from us? How can opacity allow us to bypass the algorithms of surveillance that collect everything in the data centers of this era of digitized doxxing and robotized policing? What are some of the strategies of anonymity necessary to challenge unforeseen (extra-)institutional scrutiny and persecution. We all recognize The Funambulist’s challenges to colonial narratives, but can a well-known publication also provide practical strategies for resistance against the backlash that follows anti-colonial work?

In this essay, “Strategies of Invisibility,” Luis Othoniel Rosa explores the radical potential of anonymity as both a survival tactic and a mode of subversion. If coloniality thrives on forced visibility—tracking, categorizing, and disciplining dissent—then opacity becomes a form of counter-power. Rosa examines two examples, the Pomaranczowa Alternatywa (Alternativa Naranja) made up of orange Smurfs in Poland, and the Clown Police during the Puerto Rican protests to explore how we might exploit the gaps in digital surveillance, corporate-state repression, tricking algorithms and slipping through the cracks of institutional control. This is not just about hiding, and not to be confused with the opportunistic cowardice displayed by architects, professors, and administrators in the face of historical injustice, but about reclaiming power in a world designed to strip it away. By refusing the demand for legibility, authorship, and individualized discourses of freedom, we open space for fugitive thought, collective action, and ungovernable solidarity.

Guest-editing this piece, we see it as an urgent intervention in The Funambulist’s ongoing project. The magazine has long provided the theoretical tools to dismantle oppressive systems; now, we must also share the tools to outmaneuver them. The essay is a provocation—a call to rethink how we move, communicate, and resist when the stakes are high, and the watchers are everywhere.

We live in an era when power is shifting its relation with words. We could say that Western power, in recent centuries, moves like a pendulum between liberal moments followed by fascist or proto-fascist moments. Both sides of that pendulum are deeply capitalist. In “liberal” periods, economic inequality grows so much that it generates massive popular resentment against the oligarchies. That is when fascism emerges as a “solution,” feeding on that popular resentment and channeling it into its characteristic racial, sexual, and class hatred. In our neoliberal present, the pendulum is swinging clearly; from the 1990s to the 2010s, we experienced a period of unprecedented wealth transfer from the working class to the oligarchies of the “1%,” perhaps the moment of greatest economic inequality in human history. Then, from the 2010s to the present, we see the emergence of global fascist movements that take advantage of this popular resentment over the impoverishment of the working class to fuel their hatred against migrants, women, and any racialized population that is convenient. As we are very well aware, both from historical records and from what we are experiencing right now, liberal institutions are completely incapable of stopping the advance of fascism. Fascism is immune to liberal courts, and Donald Trump is the perfect and irrefutable example of that immunity and impunity. But what interests us in this short essay is to think about how our strategies for confronting power through words, expression, and truth must be readjusted to these changing times in the era of capital.