The Diaphorist Manifesto

Minimalism Without Borders, Meaning Without Mastery

We are the Diaphorists.
We move through difference without division.
We speak in forms that are silent, open, and alive.
We create not to reduce, but to receive.

1. No One Culture Is The Centre.

We reject the aesthetic empires of the past.
Minimalism does not belong to any nation, any school, any singular lineage.
Its power lies not in erasure, but in invitation.
We gather from everywhere—without conquest, without apology.

2. Difference Is The Medium.

We are not afraid of contradiction.
We do not seek purity.
We hold the tension between traditions, the shimmer between meanings.
Like threads in a weave, like tides in confluence—difference strengthens the field.

3. The Frame Must Be Porous.

Our works bleed into the world.
We leave space for the breath of the viewer, for the presence of the environment.
Let the canvas be raw. Let the edge be soft. Let the frame invite the hand.
We do not display; we host.

4. The Sacred Is Without Ornament.

We know that the quietest marks carry the deepest weight.
We honour the object, the emptiness, the gesture.
We honour the stone and the thread, the ash and the light.
We make altars of attention, not shrines to ego.

5. Participation Is Meaning.

A work is never finished.
We ask the viewer to complete it. To question it. To enter it.
A shelf is a space for offering. A gap is a space for interpretation.
Diaphorist Minimalism is not consumed—it is lived with.

6. We Inherit Everything, But Imitate Nothing.

We work with the wisdom of Wabi-Sabi, the precision of Islamic geometry, the meditative absence of Zen, the vibrancy of postcolonial survival.
But we are not a collage.
We are a communion.
We are a conversation unfolding in stillness.

7. Art Is A Field, Not A Fortress.

We do not create monuments.
We create thresholds.
What matters is not what is said, but what is made possible.

8. Minimalism Must Now Decentre Itself.

Modernist minimalism sought the essence.
We seek the entanglement.
The unknown. The in-between.
The diaphoros.

*To be a Diaphorist is not to speak for all, but to listen through all.

To create without dominance.
To dwell in difference—not as rupture, but as relationship.*

We leave the canvas open.
We leave the frame unfinished.
We leave the space sacred.