about :

In the near future, violence was eradicated by a viral contagion spread through the drug VIOL, which promised to suppress destructive instincts.

Addicted to the substance, humans lost their natural defenses and, deprived of aggressive impulses, became fragile, vulnerable, teetering on the edge of extinction. The last survivors — the SHADEs — wander like specters, until their bodies inevitably collapse. Machines, modified bodies, and biotech chimeras, immune to the virus, then assume a new role. Created to protect and serve, they discover in human fragility a field for experimentation. Through the METAVIOL device, they begin extracting patterns, memories, and gestures in an attempt to preserve what remains of the human — and to claim for themselves the greatest forbidden prize: the possibility of replicating not merely as technical copies, but as truly “living” entities.

SHADE - Survivors of Human Aggression Deletion Event / Costumes by Afonso Afonso

photoshoot at ZABRA with João Bico as performer

PART I.
VIOL: Constructing Credibility in a Landscape of Fictions

The project began with the creation of the fictional pharmaceutical product VIOL, designed to bring the narrative of metaviolence to life — the origin of everything that would follow. This initial act is not merely conceptual; it happens now, in the present, as the starting point of an investigation into authority, credibility, and the collective construction of reality.

Inspired by the film Substance, the project included a performative intervention that showed how contemporary companies create legitimacy using signals of authority. I created VIOL as a conceptual tool to question the fragility of our knowledge and the trust we place in expertise and scientific discourse.

To do this, I built a functional website www.metaviolence.com and distributed posters throughout the city of Lisbon with enigmatic visual language and QR codes reading “Do you want to redesign humanity?”. The goal was to show that credibility does not depend on content, but on the way it is presented — through visual grammar and bureaucratic conventions that we have been conditioned to recognize as markers of truth.

The QR codes acted as philosophical provocations, turning public space into a kind of living laboratory, where unsuspecting passersby became participants in an investigation of how authority, branding, and scientific language can compel belief, even without concrete evidence.

Several individuals began posting different theories on Reddit about a “strange website” (metaviolence.com), which sparked growing speculation and discussion. This activity generated multiple conspiracy theories, eventually leading the YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers, with 4 million followers, to feature the website in a video titled “Finding A Big Conspiracy On Deep Web Browsing 241...”. With this mention, VIOL moved beyond being just a concept and became a real phenomenon of collective meaning-making.

After that, I received around 100 emails reporting “legitimate experiences with the drug,” from people across different countries and backgrounds, including photos and texts. These reports reveal something unsettling: today, reality is increasingly constructed through collective consensus rather than empirical verification. The experiences reported went beyond my performative framework and became an almost independent truth.

By becoming indistinguishable from the systems it critiques, VIOL forces us to realize that we do not live in a world of facts waiting to be discovered, but in a landscape of operative fictions competing for institutional legitimacy.

full video

The Substance movie (2024)

www.metaviolence.com

YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers

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METAVIOLENCE

— 2025