ARMORS OF TENDERNESS

Armor of Tenderness is an experimental 3D animation project and augmented reality (AR) experience, conceived as an audiovisual essay. Through conceptual speculation, the project poses an urgent question at the intersection of contemporary technopolitics and the humanitarian crisis: What would a feminist, decolonial, anti-fascist, and queer refuge look like? The work intentionally situates itself in the irreducible tension between the softness of affections and the structural hardness of armor. This dichotomy is not resolved; it is deepened to propose a new technology of shelter marked by imagination, communities, and affections. The work is inspired by the aesthetic complexity of microscopic protist organisms (such as Polycystina radiolarians and coccolithophores) that live in a perfect network of interdependence, mutuality, and absence of centralized hierarchies. By observing these structures, the project envisions shelters that emerge symbolically from the soft, the symbiotic, and the relational, as opposed to rigidity and imposition. Here, refuge is theorized as a sympoietic process (doing-with, to quote Haraway) that unfolds in contemporary hyperrealities, challenging the logic of private property and hegemonic representation. A symbolic, fluid, rhizomatic structure is proposed, one that is cultivated, contaminated, and intertwined, abandoning the illusion of a stable center. Form does not pre-exist; it emerges from the intra-action (Barad) of dissident bodies, experiences, and technologies. In contrast to the dominant imaginary—marked by control, strict delimitation, and separation—this audiovisual piece becomes a poetic manifesto. Armaduras de Ternura dreams of habitats without owners, without a center, without a single form, porous and vulnerable structures that, precisely because of their tenderness and openness, are inherently anti-fascist and queer. It is a speculation on the possibility of building protection not through military strength or exclusion, but through imagination, reciprocity, care, and the multiplicity of affections.