Letter from the Editor – Issue 19

As I read these essays in their draft stages, I kept returning to the idea of belief, not as something held, but as something made. Belief is an act: it is constructed, performed, and inevitably risked. In this issue of Cornelia, belief surfaces in spiritual movements and speculative technologies, in national imaginaries and feminist improvisations, in aesthetic practices that honor tradition while nudging it forward. Across these contexts, the thread is a kind of performative sincerity, a belief that must be enacted to be real. 

But performance cuts both ways. To make belief, one must first make believe, that is, assert one's faith against the grain of what is. This act of imaginative insistence in the face of the overawing reality of reality is not naïve; it's necessary. Yet this same process of performing belief can just as easily slide into its opposite: pretense. The performance becomes hollow, the gesture routinized. What once invited conviction now risks becoming camouflage for power. 

The worst actors in public life seem uncannily fluent in this ambiguity. Their beliefs are less ideological than operational, less convictions than scripts. They perform certainty not to inspire belief but to obscure accountability. Whether it’s the dead-eyed choreography of contemporary politics or the faux-skepticism of liberal media outlets finally acknowledging genocide in Gaza, the line between sincerity and simulation is not merely blurred, it has become instrumental to the shell game of the real, a mechanism for the permanent deferral of accountability. 

And yet, what unites the works in this issue is not resignation to that blurring, but an embrace of art’s ability to dwell within it, to expose the instability of belief without giving up on it. In Christopher Michael’s visit to Lily Dale, belief is extended not as dogma but as invitation. In Byron Fong’s account of SEQUENCEBREAK//, glitch and breakdown offer new textures of engagement. In John Santomieri’s writing on Steina, natural imagery becomes a perceptual system rather than a backdrop. And in Shalaka Jadhav’s interview with Pantayo, tradition is not reenacted but reassembled. Each of these projects acknowledges the fragility of belief and insists, nevertheless, on its possibility. 

Speaking of belief, readers may know that the guiding theme for this year’s exhibition series at BICA has been I WANT TO BELIEVE. On October 25th, we’ll be hosting our second annual gala under that same title—a night dedicated to celebrating the communities, artists, and ideas that sustain all our work, including the work we put into this magazine. We hope you’ll join us for an evening of art, joy, and collective commitment to imagining what else might still be possible. 

Nando Alvarez-Perez Editor-in-Chief 

Published by

The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art

Editor-in-Chief

Nando Alvarez-Perez

Executive Director

Emily Ebba Reynolds

Copy Editor

Emily E. Mangione

Design

Mark Yappueying

Production Assistant & Photo Editor

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Contributing Writers
Byron Fong

Christopher Michael

Shalaka Jadhav

John Santomieri 

Lina Stenman