Reclaiming resistance in an age of surveillance and authoritarianism https://diem25.org/reclaiming-resistance-in-an-age-of-surveillance-and-authoritarianism/ on 26 March 2025
There is ...an urgency to understand what comes after and alongside the movements and the protests that can help break away from the endless cycle of oppressive State-sponsored institutional tactics. What kinds of political and cultural practices, actions, and organising locate temporary moments of a kind of ‘making visible’, systems of domination? What particular formations and forms of organising have changed in New York, Serbia, Berlin, and India that are addressing the entangled histories of the far right – both in its historical forms and new structures of fascism? What kind of organising is needed to problematise the institution of art, culture, education, and politics?
What does breaking away from operating within the dynamics of these systems look, and feel like? How do we move away from identitarian politics and present the potential for renewed thinking about our futures?
The intention must be to find new ways around collectivity and community. A vocabulary outside of its mass co-option of the language of resistance.
...Many of the answers lie in the histories of cultural production that privilege documentation of vulnerable histories, and have the potential of being erased, lost, and designated to the realm of marginal-centre binaries – from participatory filmmaking including citizen cinema to radical publishing, exhibition-making, and autonomous collectives that refuse to be legible to state-sanctioned systems to even the simple act of making a reel to tell us a story or writing a statement as political prisoners.