We Are Living
2026
White neon
147 x 300 x 5 cm
All images © Fábio Colaço
2026
White neon
147 x 300 x 5 cm
All images © Fábio Colaço
We Are Living (2026) originates from an anonymous graffiti
inscription found in a public space whose improvised hand-
drawn lettering has been transposed into the enduring medium
of white neon. By preserving the irregularities, hesitations, and
imperfections of the original inscription, the work extends the
lifespan of an otherwise ephemeral gesture, suspending it in a
luminous state that resists disappearance while retaining the
vulnerability of its original form.
The phrase suggests a profound asymmetry of experience: every catastrophe is lived differently depending on where one stands. An apocalypse is rarely universal; it is often someone else’s present reality while remaining another’s distant abstraction. At the same time, the work proposes that contemporary catastrophes are seldom inevitable. They emerge from political decisions, economic interests, and systems of power whose consequences are unevenly distributed across societies. In this sense, we are not only living through an apocalypse that belongs to someone else, but also through one conceived, shaped, or accelerated by others, whether governments, corporations, institutions, or ideological forces.
This translation from spray paint to neon creates a tension between urgency and permanence, between an impulsive act of public expression and its prolonged afterlife. The luminous inscription refuses both the disappearance typical of street interventions and the certainty of a fixed interpretation. Instead, it remains deliberately unstable, oscillating between empathy and detachment, witness and complicity, personal reflection and collective condition.
Situated between the visual language of protest and the seductive aesthetics of commercial signage, the work questions how contemporary societies coexist with the constant circulation of images of catastrophe while continuing to normalize the structures that produce them. Rather than announcing the end of the world, it proposes a more unsettling possibility: that the apocalypse is neither a singular event nor a distant future, but an ongoing condition authored through systems of power, experienced unequally, and lived, more often than not, as somebody else’s apocalypse.
The phrase suggests a profound asymmetry of experience: every catastrophe is lived differently depending on where one stands. An apocalypse is rarely universal; it is often someone else’s present reality while remaining another’s distant abstraction. At the same time, the work proposes that contemporary catastrophes are seldom inevitable. They emerge from political decisions, economic interests, and systems of power whose consequences are unevenly distributed across societies. In this sense, we are not only living through an apocalypse that belongs to someone else, but also through one conceived, shaped, or accelerated by others, whether governments, corporations, institutions, or ideological forces.
This translation from spray paint to neon creates a tension between urgency and permanence, between an impulsive act of public expression and its prolonged afterlife. The luminous inscription refuses both the disappearance typical of street interventions and the certainty of a fixed interpretation. Instead, it remains deliberately unstable, oscillating between empathy and detachment, witness and complicity, personal reflection and collective condition.
Situated between the visual language of protest and the seductive aesthetics of commercial signage, the work questions how contemporary societies coexist with the constant circulation of images of catastrophe while continuing to normalize the structures that produce them. Rather than announcing the end of the world, it proposes a more unsettling possibility: that the apocalypse is neither a singular event nor a distant future, but an ongoing condition authored through systems of power, experienced unequally, and lived, more often than not, as somebody else’s apocalypse.