Read It Slowly
On the scripts still being read and living otherwise
Before We Start
This catalog sits with what usually rushes past us. What follows is an invitation to read slowly.
The Script of Conquest and The Theater of Legitimacy
Juan López de Palacios Rubios, Spain, 1513
In 1513, jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios drafted El Requerimiento for the Spanish Crown—”The Requirement.”
A declaration read aloud by conquistadors to Indigenous peoples before claiming their land. Written in Spanish. Delivered to those who couldn’t understand it.
The document demanded that Indigenous peoples acknowledge the Church as ruler of the world and the Pope as its representative, along with the Spanish monarchs. It warned that refusal would result in war, enslavement, and the seizure of their possessions—and that any resulting deaths or losses would be considered their own fault.
Refusal justified conquest. Submission meant subjugation. Either way, the land was taken.
The Requerimiento wasn’t for the Indigenous people. It was for the Spanish themselves—a legal fiction to absolve guilt. A ritual that let them say: “We gave them a choice. We followed procedure. What happened next was their fault.”
“Requerimiento Lento” means “read it slowly.”
The slowness of the reading wasn’t mercy. It was mockery—power making the taking appear lawful.
The script is still being read.
Today, when bombs fall on hospitals and schools, officials cite international humanitarian law, claiming they gave warnings and that civilians were notified to evacuate. The implication: what happened after is not their responsibility.
Every day, when we’re given documents to sign: Terms of Service. Privacy Policy. User Agreement. We scroll to the bottom and click: “I Agree.”
And when our data is sold—when our photos may be used to train AI systems, when our location data can be tracked and monetized—the response is the same: “You agreed to the terms. You were notified. This is your responsibility.”
Different languages. Different scripts. International bodies and legal advisors. Terms of service and consent forms.
But the mechanism remains: The performance of legitimacy to justify what’s already decided.
The language of power is designed to be incomprehensible.
Not so we understand. So we accept.
The Massage
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage.
Not a typo. Massage.
The medium doesn’t just carry the message—it massages us. Shapes us. Alters how we perceive, think, and feel.
For McLuhan, what communication does to us matters more than the specific words being said. The content matters less than how we see it.
Television trains us to watch passively. From a distance. In our living rooms.
The internet fragments attention, scrolls endlessly, reduces everything to content.
And what happens when suffering becomes content?
When atrocity is streamed, captioned, and served between cat videos and advertisements?
The medium massages us into a particular relationship:
Visibility without consequence.
Empathy without cost.
We see everything, but nothing requires us to act. We feel something, but it costs us nothing.
Yesterday we ignored what we could not see; today we watch what we cannot bear—but keep scrolling.
A Voice Under the Railway Arch
But alongside that, I found something else.
In 1971, British composer Gavin Bryars was reviewing footage for a documentary about homeless people in London.
He found a recording of an elderly man singing to himself under a railway arch.
The man sang a short fragment of a hymn, over and over—a simple religious refrain about faith and love that never failed him.
His voice was fragile. Untrained. Slightly out of tune.
But there was something in it Bryars couldn’t shake.
He took that 13-second recording and looped it.
Then he began adding orchestration. Slowly. Strings. Brass. Full orchestra.
The arrangement grew richer, more complex, more beautiful.
But the man’s voice never changed. It stayed exactly as it was—fragile, unpolished, unhurried.
The orchestra didn’t correct him. It didn’t drown him out.
It held space for him.
Bryars didn’t edit the voice. Didn’t fix the tuning. Didn’t speed it up.
He gave the man time. Space. Dignity.
The voices society discards might be singing something true.
Beauty isn’t always polished. Sometimes it’s fragile. Off-key. Unfinished.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what makes it matter.
The man wasn’t performing for an audience. He sang as if only to himself.
And fifty years later, we’re still listening.
Living Grounded
There is an island in the Aegean Sea called Ikaria.
Named after Icarus—the boy who flew too close to the sun and fell.
But the people who live there now don’t fall. They don’t rush. They don’t burn out.
They also live a very long time.
Ikaria is a “Blue Zone”—one of the few places where people routinely live past 90, often past 100, in good health.
Scientists come looking for the secret.
But the people already know.
They wake when they wake. Eat when hungry. Work in gardens. Nap in the afternoon.
Icarus fell because he flew too fast, too high, too recklessly.
The people who live here keep their feet on the ground.
There’s no Requerimiento in Ikaria. No terms of service.
The Collection Continues
What this catalog gathers: fragments of the same architecture. The Requerimiento, the terms we scroll past, the suffering we watch but never bear—all designed to make us struggle on ground already chosen.
Alongside them, other scenes: a man singing under a railway arch, held in place by someone willing to listen. An island where people move at the rhythm a life can sustain.
To solve is to step outside—to read slowly when power wants us to scroll, to listen when the world demands we react. This catalog is an invitation to notice how the Requerimiento is still being read, how the massage still shapes us, and how, quietly, elsewhere, people are already living otherwise.