The Creation of Beauty Is An Act of Resistance

Day 3 11am 2 hours English

In the last few years, a global backlash has been seen against peaceful protests and shrinking civic space especially across the global south. From clamping down farmer’s protest in India and Pakistan to targeting activists and political workers for protesting against corruption in South East Asia, the civic spaces are experiencing high risk of far-right dominating public spaces, legislation and overall, social fabric.

As our civic spaces shrink, Fearless Collective looks at the artistic interventions not just as aesthetic additives but as deeply strategic tools to shift public opinion, create space for debate and bring visibility to the most invisible elements/factors. Through this workshop, we propose to enable all the activists and feminists to decolonize their approaches to protest and lean upon the intergenerational legacies of indigenous and traditional protest that are embedded in Art, Song, Culture and the body – the most accessible to all.

We will be remembering and returning to our poets, muralists, street theater performers who have made the streets their stages and museums. Through this workshop, we aim to explore the embodied affirmative activism that can be strategized to be used in our region as well as learn tools and techniques collectively, using collaborative approach to form collective political protest interventions by the end of the workshop.

We aim to understand the challenges that feminist activists are facing to express themselves in spaces of protest now. Also see how creativity and an affirmative way of thought can be a vehicle for narrative change from hopelessness in movements towards more affirmative, embodied actions and strategies in the face of shrinking civic space. We also will be focusing on doing a collective exercise of imagining fearless feminist futures in times of crises. Through this workshop, we aim to pose collective creative strategizing on how we use art to occupy, reclaim and thrive in public spaces