#artofresistance — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #artofresistance, aggregated by home.social.
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কোন্ দেবতারে ভোট মোরা করি সমর্পণ?
https://shorturl.at/LV7dQ
#KonDevotareVote, #কোনদেবতারেভোট, #VedicSatire, #ReligiousSyncretism, #PoliticalSatire, #BengaliTheatre, #SatyaPir, #RigVeda, #VoteForWhichGod, #BulleshahInspired, #VoterDeletion, #VoteChori, #DigitalDisenfranchisement, #DemocracyUnderThreat, #ElectoralFraud, #RightToVote, #PeoplePower, #TheatreForChange, #ArtOfResistance, #SaveIndianDemocracy, -
Music:
Ferenc Snétberger, Solo Guitar Concert, JazzFest Budapest >
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZtRkXZwSbYFerenc Snétberger, Solo Guitar Concert, guest: Richard Bona >
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-CPSpb9luA&t=13sGuitarist/composer Ferenc Snétberger's music is inspired by the Roma tradition of his home country, Brazilian music and flamenco as well as classical guitar playing and jazz.
Snétberger Music Talent Centre
Snetberger founded a music school in Hungary for children. The school provides 60 students per year, 90 percent of whom are disadvantaged Roma kids, with a springboard into a musical career. >>
https://www.snetbergercenter.org/en
#music #guitar #AcousticGuitar #Roma #Sinti #WeRemember #ArtOfResistance #culture #MusicEducation -
One could read “double trouble” in this enormous example of graffiti, sprayed with bold precision on a walkway wall under an overpass in Vienna: both #FTP (fuck the police) and #ACAB (all cops are bastards/bad)—aka, cops always bring trouble, they don’t protect or defend people from it. And that’s a good and legit read, pointing in two acronyms or seven letters to the countless reasons why police must be abolished. Reform just paints a lighter shade of blue on the inherent brutality of policing.
Yet as a prefigurative-minded anarchist—and thus, it should go without saying, abolitionist—I feel it’s our task to always offer our own, nonhierarchical double trouble—the good kind of trouble aimed at shaking up this death machine of a social order via social critiques and social visions. That is, not merely asserting what we’re against (here, cops) but also, always, concurrently, proclaiming and especially experimenting with what we’re for (in this case, a world without police).
So in this #ArtOfResistance, I see the double trouble of a liberatory counternarrative: #FreeThePeople (FTP) and #AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful (ACAB). I see glimpses across this imperiled planet—of which we humans are only one small (yet too often dangerous) part/guest—of how forms of freedom and self-governance, even in what might seem modest ways, are put into practice every day, including and especially these days, in using solidarity as a weapon (our best one) against the occupying, often militarized police forces trying to control too many cities and lands around the globe.
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Rainy-day fun: Finish turning an old essay from an equally old anthology into a zine, email the PDF to a local copy shop always lively and crowded with fellow Jews (albeit unlike me, Hasidic ones), get the chatty person behind the counter to print out one copy on bright paper, commiserate with them after they accidentally stab their own finger with one of the two staples they were kindly adding to the zine’s spine, walk outside during a break in the weather yet with ominous clouds hovering above (doesn’t every day feel ominous of late, even if sunny?), and then with zine and phone camera in hand, wander around before the raindrops start again looking for imaginative spots to take photos of said zine, and then share a sampling of them here, noticing how the same exact zine looks slightly different shades of lime-ish green in different settings.
Which gets at some of what this new (one) zine of mine, “Reappropriate the Imagination!” gets at, even if in a dated way. The #ArtOfResistance is about seeing the world at cross-purposes, as social critics, and letting our flights of fancy take us to otherworldly places, as social visionaries—albeit in my case today, in the most modest of ways via a little zine that let me break free for an hour from the dreariness of these times.
And who knows? Maybe my art—writing—bound up in these 24 pages designed by me (with striking cover art by @synecdocheberlin), will get you thinking at cross-purposes about your own anarchist(ic) art practices and point you in visionary directions. For as fascism redraws everything in its own false and cruel image, rebellious art in the most expansive sense has an enormous role to play in pushing open windows to let in the light of truth and humanness, among so many others things that can crack the edifice that fascism stands on, reminding people of life-giving possibilities and their own creative agency to transform the social conditions.
Night and rain are falling in equal measure now, and I have unfun tasks to do. But there’s one more fun thing here: share the readable and print-ready versions (generously made into PDFs by @_hey_casandra_ from my layout).
DM me your email for the PDFs!
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Freedom for Western Sahara: Sahrawis Demand End of Moroccan Occupation at U.N. Human Rights Council
Fascinating artwork made of worn clothing by Sahrawi women challenging Moroccan narrative that all is ok in Western Sahara.
#womensart #ArtOfResistance #UNHumanRightsCouncil #colonialism
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/30/sahara_film_fest -
GOIN - Lady Guantanamo
Spray paint on verdigris copper plate
120 x 120 cm, n°1/1
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When freedom wears a uniform, who holds the keys?
A fallen icon doesn’t scream — it shames.
Justice, blindfolded. Liberty, gagged.
Empires don’t collapse — they kneel.
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#goinart #goin #artofgoin #kunst #art #streetart #urbanart #masterpiss #graffiti #urbanart #ladyliberty #LadyGuantanamo #PoliticalArt #FreedomInChains #ArtForChange #ProtestArt #ArtAndPolitics #SymbolOfFreedom #ArtOfResistance -
GOIN - Lady Guantanamo
Spray paint on verdigris copper plate
120 x 120 cm, n°1/1
•
When freedom wears a uniform, who holds the keys?
A fallen icon doesn’t scream — it shames.
Justice, blindfolded. Liberty, gagged.
Empires don’t collapse — they kneel.
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#goinart #goin #artofgoin #kunst #art #streetart #urbanart #masterpiss #graffiti #urbanart #ladyliberty #LadyGuantanamo #PoliticalArt #FreedomInChains #ArtForChange #ProtestArt #ArtAndPolitics #SymbolOfFreedom #ArtOfResistance -
Only 150 tickets available! So grab yours now & bring your people! All proceeds go to supporting The Remah for Moreton campaign. www.remahformoreton.com/art-of-resis... #Remah4Moreton #PeoplePower #ArtOfResistance #Palestine #BrisbaneEvents #HousingIsAHumanRight #Solidarity #AusPol
FUNDRAISER FOR REMAH NAJI: THE... -
Shout it from the rooftops, or at least paint it: “freedom to Palestine & destroy all prisons.”
#ArtOfResistance, or better yet, #ArtOfLiberation, as seen on a #FuckFascism stroll before sunset & Shabbat in Exarchia, Feb 7, because if nothing else, we should dream aloud, so others hear & join us.
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A few days ago, the good folks at @unicorn.riot (UR) asked me to comment on the use of Sieg Heil by Musk on the inauguration of the Trump regime. I did my best to cobble some words together—a few of which are pictured here as a pull quote from the UR article—while sitting at a outdoor cafe in the Exarchia neighborhood and trying to get over jet lag. I’m not sure if my brief reflections on the topic were as coherent or nuanced as they could or should be, but I’m grateful to UR for compelling me to think more deeply on both my own feelings about it (as a Jew) and my political takeaways (as an anarchist).
What’s hitting me now—among so much else—is that I don’t want to keep resharing the image of an arm gesture that oversaw the murder of millions—Jews, disabled people, queers, Roma, radicals, and other “categories” deemed impure to the National Socialist body politic. Instead, along the pull quote above, I’m sharing one of our gestures—the street #ArtOfResistance, staking out an anarchist(ic) “antifascist area” in Athens, and in all likelihood, having the organization to largely keep it that way (or battle hard to do so). But beyond merely the “anti-,” such public antifascist culture signals a desire for something much more crucial and life-giving: our aspirations for #AWorldWithoutFascism, how to prefigure as much of that as we can now, and what that could and should look like.
Or as the quote above reads,
“I saw in that salute not merely a culminating ‘hail to victory’ for christofascism but crucially the challenge to us—all of us who are on the side of life—to abandon any delusions we may still harbor that these sadistic victors will ‘play by the rules’ of state, capital, or national borders. We, too, need new playbooks of resistance and solidarity.”
For the article in full:
https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/elon-musk-gives-nazi-salute-during-his-trump-inauguration-speech/
(In the comments below, see the “raw” text I sent to UR, from which they excerpted bits and pieces, in case that interests you.)
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Repetition.
As incantation.
As invocation.
As prayer or blessing.As if two words, when repeated repeatedly, can conjure paths that would have led to a innumerably different present; can bring halt to the bloodlust of modern-day states and capital; can begin repair toward a wholly transformed future.
Repetition.
As ritual.
As communal.
As public or visible.As if two small words, when repeated repeatedly, can somehow be a container for the shards of loss; can somehow hold and honor the dead; can somehow extend sparks of solidarity when nothing seems capable of stopping genocide.
Repetition.
As rage.
As resistance.
As disobedience or disruption.As if two tiny words can move mountains when repeated relentlessly, righteously, across every surface of the seemingly entrenched social order; can upend systems of belief and power that make for murderous regimes; can offer the “anti-“ to their fascism.
“Tzedek tzedek tirdof” (Justice, justice you shall pursue)
This Torah line twice over repeats “justice” as reminder that it is far more than a mere word. It is an injunction, an ethical responsibility, an imperative practice. For in Torah scrolls, the loss of even one letter, it is taught, can destroy an entire world. Words matter; they can destroy and create, bring death or life.
May every wall be repetitiously repeatedly overwritten with two words that speak volumes about this brutal time that has shattered bodies and hearts—and aspirations that their weaponry can’t annihilate—until all walls crumble by our hands, and we find borderless, bountiful “free, free, freedom” awaiting with open arms.
(photos: small sample of #ArtOfResistance” using the same two words, as seen in various cities since October 2023 to now)
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Repetition.
As incantation.
As invocation.
As prayer or blessing.As if two words, when repeated repeatedly, can conjure paths that would have led to a innumerably different present; can bring halt to the bloodlust of modern-day states and capital; can begin repair toward a wholly transformed future.
Repetition.
As ritual.
As communal.
As public or visible.As if two small words, when repeated repeatedly, can somehow be a container for the shards of loss; can somehow hold and honor the dead; can somehow extend sparks of solidarity when nothing seems capable of stopping genocide.
Repetition.
As rage.
As resistance.
As disobedience or disruption.As if two tiny words can move mountains when repeated relentlessly, righteously, across every surface of the seemingly entrenched social order; can upend systems of belief and power that make for murderous regimes; can offer the “anti-“ to their fascism.
“Tzedek tzedek tirdof” (Justice, justice you shall pursue)
This Torah line twice over repeats “justice” as reminder that it is far more than a mere word. It is an injunction, an ethical responsibility, an imperative practice. For in Torah scrolls, the loss of even one letter, it is taught, can destroy an entire world. Words matter; they can destroy and create, bring death or life.
May every wall be repetitiously repeatedly overwritten with two words that speak volumes about this brutal time that has shattered bodies and hearts—and aspirations that their weaponry can’t annihilate—until all walls crumble by our hands, and we find borderless, bountiful “free, free, freedom” awaiting with open arms.
(photos: small sample of #ArtOfResistance” using the same two words, as seen in various cities since October 2023 to now)
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Mourning the martyrs, fighting for and with the living.
+ + +
Killed in Gaza / tuées a Gaza
“This dataset provides daily values for those killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023. There are currently 362 days of reports from 2023-10-07 to 2024-10-02.”
Source: data.techforpalestine.org
+ + +
Collaboration
@collages_feministes_montreal_
@collages_feminicides_montreal_+ + +
The unquiet dead. Fresh, lengthy wheatpaste on the busy shopping area of Rue Ste-Catherine O in Montreal, on the stolen lands of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, as seen on October 5, 2024.
+ + +
#RebelliousMourning
#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#UntilAllAreFree -
Mourning the martyrs, fighting for and with the living.
+ + +
Killed in Gaza / tuées a Gaza
“This dataset provides daily values for those killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023. There are currently 362 days of reports from 2023-10-07 to 2024-10-02.”
Source: data.techforpalestine.org
+ + +
Collaboration
@collages_feministes_montreal_
@collages_feminicides_montreal_+ + +
The unquiet dead. Fresh, lengthy wheatpaste on the busy shopping area of Rue Ste-Catherine O in Montreal, on the stolen lands of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, as seen on October 5, 2024.
+ + +
#RebelliousMourning
#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#UntilAllAreFree -
Vigil for Aaron Bushnell
and the 30,000+ People Killed in Gaza
Sunday, March 3, 6:30 p.m.Gather by the Craven Street Bridge on the Wilma Dykeman Greenway by the river in Asheville to share words and silence in remembrance. That’s the same, now-sacred spot that we held a Public Mourner’s Kaddish in the early days of the genocide against Palestinians, and more recently, a remembrance for Tortuguita on the one-year anniversary of their murder-by-cops in Weelaunee Forest.
We’ll set up a DIY altar and gather around it. Bring flowers, candles, art, banners, and other mementoes to add to it.
We’ll have a few printouts on hand of “Memories of Aaron Bushnell as Recounted by His Friends” for folks to read excerpts aloud, and hold space for sharing thoughts and feelings, other readings, and/or songs/music.
Come as you are; bring your full self. And wear a mask for the collective care of all.
— self-organized by some AVL anarchists,
in love and rage 🖤💔🪬🍉🔥#ArtOfRemembrance
#ArtOfResistance
#MourningOurDead
#FightingForTheLiving
#MendingTheWorld
#UntilAllAreFree -
If you missed the first one that some of us pulled together, don’t miss this second one. Art on its own can’t halt genocides, but it opens up heart space. And it can open up minds, whether via agitating them, educating them, or nudging them to join in self-organizing other forms of resistance. Plus it creates a visual landscape of rebelliousness and ungovernability, love and rage, helping to shatter the pervasive “normality” that fascism thrives on.
Let’s imagine, assert, and illustrate far different worlds! And also carve out spaces for ourselves to somatically, conversationally, and communally process the horror and heartache of genocide together.
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Radical Imagining for a Free Palestine:
Art-Making and DiscussionSunday, March 10
4–6 pm
@firestormcoop
1022 Haywood, AVLJoin crafty radicals for some hands-on art-making to visualize both our resistance to the genocide in Gaza and visions of freedom in solidarity with Palestinians. Share the fullness of your thoughts and feelings during a facilitated discussion about the role of art in social transformation, including here in Asheville. Gather with others as we continue to cultivate community and explore possibilities as counterweights to the bleakness of these times.
Various art supplies will be provided, but also feel free to bring your own crafting materials to use and/or share.
All ages welcome!
(Photo by @coreybriephoto, used with consent, of the first Radical Imagining for a Free Palestine)
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There is an art to resistance. An intentionality that strives to interrupt the ugliness of genocide and simultaneously enact beautiful alternatives through all sorts of do-it-ourselves direct actions, including art.
What difference does art make?
Like so many of our anarchic solidarity efforts, it may at best only slow the killing machine momentarily, not stop it. That palpable sense of the limitations of the massive resistance going on across the globe fills so many of us with deep wells of despair. Art can aid in nonetheless continually illustrating a social critique and social vision, drawing out paths from “the world that is” to “the world that could be.” Without that, we are truly lost. All is truly lost.
Moreover, when we engage in collaborative art-making, we also make rebellious room for sociality and connection on our autonomous terms—for communal grieving and rage, communal processing and even joy, or what someone recently called “tender heart spaces.” We find and (better) get to know each other as we hand-craft creations that speak to our solidarity and dreams. We revive ourselves a bit via the somatic aspects of art-making and delight in seeing what each other has made. And often from there, we go on to self-organize other forms of resistance or weave tighter bonds related to the resistance we’re already collectively involved in. Mostly, we are reminded that we do indeed have the power to imagine and craft other lifeways while we fight for life.
This Sunday, February 18, from 11 am to 1 pm, @shadow_patterns will bring a whole slew of art-making supplies to @firestorm as inspiration for “Radical Imagining for a Free Palestine”—such as the example pictured here from a recent community gathering in solidarity with Palestinians. Feel free to bring additional art materials to use/share. We’ll also chat about ideas related a creative commitment to resistance.
All ages welcome! Masks required (free ones available).
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My anarchic Palestinian solidarity lit tables may not be the most photogenic, but I’ve given away more free zines in person—from an ever-increasing batch of titles—in the past 50+ days than I have since the pandemic began. A lot! There’s an eagerness to learn; there’s an openness to ideas and alternatives.
Each time, as folks gladly, voluntarily, and appreciatively take zines, it underscores for me that paper—humble 8.5x11 copy paper—can be a powerful “weapon” in our arsenal of the #ArtOfResistance. The stuff of shifting hearts and minds, which in turn can shift practices, organizing, and actions.
Paper can also be a cruel weapon in the state’s arsenal. Repeatedly, the Israeli government has dropped zine-like flyers from planes that likely drop bombs too, with increasingly absurd and terrifying instructions to those on the ground in Gaza. The stuff of shifting humans from their homes or hospitals, with barely enough time for their hearts and minds to process the magnitude of loss, nor avoid genocide. Or there’s the paper used by other states to write orders for military hardware to ship to Israel, or the paper of politicians used for legislation to affirm hate and murder.
Paper matters, far more than beyond its weight. Indeed, maybe its lightness, its seeming insubstantiality, is deceptive.
Not that the countless zines I cart around and gift out—or the DIY library books a friend of mine just told me they tabled with and loaned out at a public, rad Jew Shabbat in solidarity with Palestine, or the paper that gets utilized for public screen-printing efforts to make rad, artsy posters for solidarity demos, or the tissue paper we cry into so as to mourn the dead well and better find resilience to continue our fight for the living—is enough to blanket this world with the kind of wholesale social transformation that’s necessary for any sort of liberatory path out of this bloodlust mess.
Yet maybe—just maybe—what we put on our paper does in fact “paper the way” toward far more than we can imagine, because we’re already imagining lives beyond their borders, their prisons, their statist murder machines.
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Mourning our dead—who herself did so much to mourn via her music against the often-murderous violence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, fascism, and more—as seen wheatpasted in a bunch of public places around so-called Asheville, NC.
There’s such strength in this image, with eyes so intent on seeing and confronting hard truths, underscoring her own lyric, “I’m proud to be a troublemaker.” And yet there’s a sorrow to this image, to those eyes, that almost unwittingly makes one start replaying other lyrics of hers, tape-loop style, in one’s head: “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.”
Others have already said this, but it hits me every time I see this outdoor “altar” to Sinéad O’Connor / Shuhada’ Sadaqat: she, like other brave feminist truth tellers and healers, should have been honored in life, not relegated to a social death during life, nor had life made so hard and repeatedly abusive that death came too early.
May her memory spark a blessed revolution.
(photo: black-and-white headshot of Sinéad facing directly at the camera, with eyes wide open and no smile on her face, pasted on a buffed-gray, formerly graffitied wall)
#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#MourningOurDead
#MendingTheWorld -
Are you an anarchist artist whose rebel creations are premised on an anarcha-feminist sensibility, ethic, and/or embodied practice? And one who is queer+trans friendly!? Do you make art that puts anarcha-feminist themes and visions out into the world? Are you someone whose #ArtOfResistance artwork is routinely made and used on the streets, for solidarity efforts, and/or for general educating, organizing, and agitating purposes?!
I’m looking for contributions (ASAP) to an “art section” in my next edited anthology, revolving around present-day ways that folx put anarcha-feminism into practice. The book’s title is still a work-in-process, and the whole project is a labor of love, not profit (indeed, any meager royalties will be passed along to anarcha-feminist projects). One of the last pieces is this art section—made up of up to a dozen anarcha artists, each sharing one B&W image of one of their artworks (I’ll then ask you to write a one- to two-paragraphs “caption” to go alongside it in the book).
If you want to run some of your artwork by me, please email it: cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com.
Deadline: by or before August 6.
(photo: sparkly sticker by @zola_mtl, as seen many moons ago on a #FuckPatriarchy walk on the stolen streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, in the times before this current pandemic.)
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No matter the region, still not 🖤’ing fascists.
That said, definitely ❤️‘ing the specificity of this southern-style antifascist sticker, harking to the history that shapes the white supremacy in these parts, and thus what resistance to it has, does, and could look like.
Hey, northerners, what would your/our version of this #ArtOfResistance be? Or for that matter, easterners and westerners?
(photo: three-arrow #FuckFascism design on a circular sticker with the words “Southern antifascist anti-Confederate” on it, as seen on a sunset ramble this eve through the stolen streets of Asheville, NC)
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The things we most dream of, care about, and strive toward can, as we know too well, take a long time to reach. And we only get remotely close when we join in that struggle, that world building, together with like-minded others.
It’s not even the big aspirations that are tough these days, though, when so many communal and ecological ties feel cut off from us—never mind a sense of futurity and thus possibility. Sometimes, even the simplest of things, like mail reaching me, can take a long time. And so sweet letters from faraway rebel pals—which could make the uphill battles feel a little less lonely, a lot less futile—aren’t in hand and can’t warm my heart.
I just dropped a postcard in the mail to a friend in prison, and as the mailbox clanked shut with a hollow, impersonal sound, I wondered if this missive would ever reach behind brutal lock and key, to its intended recipient, bringing a tiny bit of comfort that they are loved by many, that they aren’t forgotten, that maybe someday the bars will bend open and trees will surround my friend instead. Trees and flowers and friends.
Today, too, a long-delayed package found its way to me, filled with the #ArtOfResistance and #ArtOfFriendship. I’d forgotten about this gift, it had taken that long, until I saw the stack of zines and patch with the unmistakable art of @no_jail_no_juvi_, whose creations I’ve loved from the first time I walked by one of their eye-catching wheat pastes on a visit long ago to so-called Seattle. Amid the rampant gentrification and “progressive”-hipster wealth in that city, which even then had that many-times-over-destroyed-by-capitalism feel, their prints broke free somehow, with love and rage.
So I took their zine—a compilation of images of their street art from the past decade or so—and my fav image of theirs, #BooCapitalism, on a #FuckPrisons walk. And in honor of my friend and so many others kidnapped by the injustice system, whether in jails, juvie, detention, or other forms of carceral capture, I set @no_jail_no_juvi_’s work amid flowers and green leaves and sunshine—all glimpses of freedom that might be carried on the wind to them, even if it takes a while. #UntilAllAreFree.
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There’s something about anarchists and animals. We anarchists love us a good animal on our #ArtOfResistance artwork.
If you want to get your fellow anarchists to “ohhh” and “ahhh” over your latest T-shirt, bookfair poster, or tote bag design, or get loads of “likes” on your latest meme, just toss a critter on there—and the cuter and more expressive, the better. Or better yet, if a certain nonhuman species is causing what Green Anarchy magazine used to call “animal uprisings”—perhaps one of the few redeeming qualities of that periodical from back in the day—then borrow their likeness for your next illustration or tattoo, and you’re sure to bring a smile to any anarchist face. Orcas, for instance, are au courant these days, and for jolly good reasons.
On a snail’s pace of a #FuckCapitalism walk today—after waiting until the “unhealthy for sensitive people” air quality index dropped to merely “moderately” toxic to venture outdoors—I communed with chipmunks and squirrels, teenage geese, and turtles, large and small. Birds darted to and fro, as if wanting me to hear their songs up close and in stereo. And a wild bunny, with soft-looking charcoal-black fur, nibbled on bright-green grasses about six feet from my feet—after glancing up to make eye contact. People kept passing me, and even when I tried to say hello, no one replied, and most people didn’t even seem to register my presence.
Maybe that’s part of our anarchist love affair with animals. Many of them retain a far greater sociality than us humans, putting mutual aid into better practice, knowing they still need each other. And they wouldn’t so despoil their own ecosystem to the point, say, of making the air deathly dangerous.
Perhaps animals tickle our anarchist fancy so much because so many of us are both social and antisocial. We love many people but hate what certain human systems have done to this earth. We yearn for social fabrics of collective care, and busy ourselves trying to weave them, but hate how this social order rips so much apart.
(photos: stickers with, respectively, a snail and a cat hating on landlords, cops, and fascists, as seen on today’s walk on stolen Anishinaabeg lands)
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When I was gifted this sticker during the hectic yet beautiful Montreal Anarchist Bookfair back in May, I had little time to think about it, much less look at it. Along with other sweet anarcha-gifts, it was tossed into pile to take home, and later, tossed into a small ziplock bag of other stickers that then, unfortunately, got lost under a pile of papers, which in turn got tossed into a box that recently traveled to the US Midwest. It was only rediscovered a couple days ago when I wanted to take an alleged #ArtOfResistance stroll and rummaged around for companions.
Audrey Hepburn? I stared back at her confident (defiant?) gaze and couldn’t understand why someone had paired her with “antifa.” Maybe, I thought, it’s a meme I missed. Or some sort of irony? Or simply that whomever crafted this design just likes Hepburn as an actress? Or maybe some antifa dude wanted a pretty female face to draw attention to the message? (Yuck!) Perhaps, to be less skeptical, they wanted to show that folks other than cis-males can be antifascist?!
It’s then that I thought to do that most modern of things: an online search (versus the old-fashioned act of going to an actual library). Keywords: “Audrey Hepburn antifascism.” And I learned something, or was reminded of something: stickers can and sometimes should make us think! They can and sometimes should serve as the #ArtOfRemembrance, honoring our chosen rebellious ancestors. They can and sometimes do both, while also putting out a much-needed stances: #ResistFascism!
What I learned, moreover, was that as a teen in the Netherlands, Audrey did her part to resist Nazism: “I [gave] underground concerts to raise money for the Dutch Resistance movement. I danced at recitals, designing the dances myself. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother made the costumes. The recitals were given in houses with windows and doors closed, and no one knew they were going on. Afterwards, money was collected and given to the Dutch Underground.”
Be like Audrey—and stick firm to solidarity (and now, some public walls and street signs).
(sticker by Montréal Antifasciste)
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Housing isn’t affordable anywhere. And gentrification and displacement are phenomena everywhere. At least in what’s called North America.
So this graffiti could be anywhere and everywhere.
Yet there’s something particularly heartening when tagging takes on a homespun flair and speaks with a regional vernacular. As if spray paint, in its own humble way, can conjure a sense of place, a sense of home, that can’t be commodified. That in fact, is at cross-purposes with capitalism’s homogenizing logic, where the local vernaculars of how people have built housing for their own use and of their own crafting that fit the social and ecological contexts for millennia get demolished, and in their places rise up profit-based boxes of gray and glass condos.
So this graffiti, with its down-to-earthness, slang, and misspelling, captures something of the Midwest, including the rust-belt rage over the material abandonment and climate devastation that hit here many decades ago now. Rising rents and hipster art galleries and all the other trappings of this contemporary wave of theft and dispossession have come more slowly here in the flyover land. But make no mistake, it is here too—in this place being remade into a brutal copycat of the “property is theft” that is rearing its head anywhere and everywhere.
#MakeArtMakeTrouble
#ReappropriateOurWorld
#LandBack #HousingForAll
#CommonsNotCapitalism
#ArtOfResistance -
My longtime friend @spirochristoff sat down with me on a park bench this past winter, both of us bundled in coats and scarves, to chat about anarchism. It wasn’t all that cold outside. Still, it was March in Montreal—meaning there is often a long way to go before one reaches the possibility of warmth, (re)emergence, and blossoming.
Perhaps it was the perfect time for a conversation—or rather, interview for Stefan’s Free City Radio show—about trying anarchism for life, because we often have a long way to go, too, as warm-hearted rebels before the possibilities we offer up against this icy-cold social order start to (re)emerge and blossom.
Now Stefan’s labors have flowered into episode 169 of Free City Radio, recently broadcast on five stations in so-called Canada, and I’m delighted to share the link with you, if you feel so moved to listen.
https://soundcloud.com/freecityradio/169-cindy-milstein-try-anarchism-for-life
Ostensibly, the show was supposed to revolve around my latest book, #TryAnarchismForLife (@tangled_wilderness, with joyous cover design by @eff_charm using a circle A by @landonsheely). Yet one of the many things I appreciate about Stefan, who has been and remains anarchistically awesome for years, is that he curates all sorts of imaginative cultural spaces, leaping off the predictable (in this case, a straightforward book interview) to weave artful alternatives and dreamy otherworlds.
Not that this short radio chat does all that. Nonetheless, I like to think that our real-life friendship shines through and our shared commitment to not merely the #ArtOfResistance but also conversing and organizing as if social relations matter. As if promise and possibility and care matter.
One can only do that, I think, if one hangs onto prefigurative politics, which brings us full circle to my book—made up of picture-prose that look at some of the many beautiful dimensions of anarchism.
Which circles us to one of the artists in my book, @the_sabot_cats, who sent me these two photos of their circle A framed by their adorable graffiti!
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The world is on fire today, on this 54th anniversary of the starting spark of the Stonewall rebellion. It’s hard to see that as good, though.
Yes, Paris is caught up in flames of protest, but only because police murdered yet again—this time a teenager, Nael M, during a traffic stop.
And for sure, no light can be found in the Quebec fires, further dispossessing and displacing Indigenous communities from their unceded lands, or its resultant smoke, paying no heed to borders as it freely travels across unimaginably vast swathes of the United States, Canada, and Europe with toxic air.
Never mind how Christo-fascism has only been further fueled this past year by latching onto banning abortion and implementing all sorts of genocidal machinations aimed squarely at queer and trans people.
Just trying to take a walk to stir the embers of my imagination or merely as a form of mental health/wellness—my go-to for both—is now an exercise in burning my eyes and lungs, and breathing in the rancid odor of what smells like many, many, many houses on fire. Because our home, our ecosystem, this earth, is on fire.
But lest I wander completely down the path of dystopia, this Stonewall uprising day, I took a #BeGayDoCrime stroll in honor of all of those many moments—past, present, and future—when rebels danced around flames of their own self-organizing and direct actions—flames that illuminate other possible worlds with their brilliance. Per usual, the #ArtOfResistance didn’t disappoint, even if this afternoon, in the unhealthy smoky part of this planet where I was walking, it took the form of noticing a little anarchic sticker asserting “Trans resistance” with flames of its own.
And thus my heart felt just a bit warmer, a little less burned by despair.
#StonewallWasARiot
#HonoringOurAncestors
#FightingForTheLiving
#FireInOurHearts -
On many a #FuckCapitalism walk (or should I say #FuckYachts walks?) through the stolen streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, I’ve chanced on small, multicolored, clearly hand-crafted stickers—some torn and others faded from long exposure to the urban elements. I’ve always been drawn to them, both for their block-print style and #ArtOfResistance (or should I say #PodsOfResistance). And I’ve no idea if they preceded the now-famous orcas who are increasingly emboldened—as we ecological anarchists like to imagine—in their direct actions in defense of the earth.
Yet when I spy one of these stickers nowadays, I delight not only in what’s right in front of me. I feel deep, pure, utter, unabashed joy in conjuring up images in my mind’s eye of all the many, many anarchic artworks being made and shared on social media of rebellious orcas rising up to #MakeTotalDestroy, as it were, luxury boats. The orca memes, in fact, haven’t yet once failed to make me smile, make me laugh, and make me proud. (It is, after all, “pride month,” with pride being a riot.)
I say “proud” not because the orcas know that I and many others appreciate their (seeming) resistance. Rather, I feel proud of us humans—or at least those of us who are taking vicarious pleasure in the orcas’ self-organizing—because we’re able to break through our own sense of despair, our own increasing sense that nothing we do can stop the tsunamis of fascism and ecocide, and via our dreamy-humorous-playful memes, swim toward possibilities side by side, metaphorically, with the whales.
If some scientist finds out that the orcas’ aren’t proactively and strategically engaging in direct action, and thereby aspiring toward social and ecological transformation, who the hell and high water cares?! We’ll still have a boatload of anarchistic illustrations that can buoy us when needed—that is, when we feel the immense heaviness of these impossible times wash over us again and our hopes start to sink anew.
For now, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep riding the uplifting wave, thanks to the orca black bloc!
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So many ideas for various “picture-prose” pieces have been floating around in my head—and so many photos of the #ArtOfResistance have been filling up my phone. Yet there have been way too many “real life,” aka in-person, happenings to carve out the time-space to craft words for Mastodon—most of them sweet, even if overwhelming, like helping to co-organize this weekend’s huge #MontrealAnarchistBookfair.
So for now, I’m savoring the fact that social media isn’t lording over my “life” as much. Instead, I’m grateful for what has become so much more rare since pandemic times, and thus so much more precious: face-to-face human connections that also revolve around face-to-face anarchist connections, including friends old and new. And I hope to say hello to and swap stories with a whole lot more of you in person this weekend!
No doubt, this current moment will end. Such is the poignancy of all our anarchist time-spaces: we continually have to make and remake them, carrying memories and social relationships between them.
There will, alas, be a “downtime,” and my picture-prose pieces on social media will re-emerge—part of my own #ArtOfResilience to help get me through. To help me dream aloud when dreamy days feel further away, and mourn well and rebelliously too, since our grief is a carrier for what we love and fight for.
For now, here’s a tiny glimpse of a tiny sticker I saw outside a cooperative bar that lent its time-space to host a fundraiser the other night on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke for @stopcopcity. For it’s true: whether here in Montreal or amid @defendatlantaforest, the land already knows it is free. It just needs us humans, especially those who think they can play god with it, to let the land be free of colonialism and capitalism and so much else that separates us from ecological and egalitarian lives.
(Photo: Pink and blue sticker with the words “The land needs no ‘lords.’”)
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Gentrification ruins everything.
Or aspires to.
Among other thefts and displacement, it steals what is formerly subversive, transforms it into edgy-hip, then sanitizes and disappears the real deal to lure in the rich who want to feel “safe,” replacing it with a tamed, sanctioned, peppy-happy-vacuous stimulation.
I keep walking past this street art on the unceded lands of Tio’tia:ke in so-called Montreal. It’s in a neighborhood called “Little Italy” that now has few Italians, and a decreasing amount of graffiti and other rebel redecorating.
It pleases me to read it’s tag—“Oh no! Graffiti!”—against the grain, or maybe with the double meaning intended by its maker, @lost.claws (with their signature image of a skull, as if themselves either grieving all that’s being destroyed here, playing with the ephemerality of everything including art, or underscoring how human systems like capitalism kill off all that’s life-giving).
The tag could be directed at those who buff walls and think they can control them, either to keep those walls whitewashed or set up some fancy city-approved mural festival to deaden the wall with pretty, apolitical pictures. Or those who just paid a pretty price for a renovated apartment nearby and now feel “violated.” (Oh no, NOT graffiti!?!) Thus it could be a “fuck you” to capitalist upscaling, and what and who it dispossesses.
I prefer to read it from another angle, because I mourn the fact that on each return to this diasporic “home” of mine, there’s palpably less and less scrappy and/or militant and/or in-your-face and/or anarchistic street art, and more and more blank walls or wheat-pasted advertisements. To me, it cries out joyfully, “Oh no! Oh yes! It’s still possible to do graffiti! Hehe!”
There are always cracks in every wall. And some paint too.
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I rarely get to “catch someone in the act” when I see a rad wheat-pasted poster beautifying the landscape and thus share my appreciation in person, not just on social media.
Yet in this case, that takes on a whole new poignancy, as the city of Montreal has recently sent out notices to several anarchistic efforts to cease and desist from such activities, or get caught in legally unfriendly ways for doing this act.
Such crackdowns, or attempts at them, go hand in hand with skyrocketing rents and luxury development and all the other infrastructural trappings of gentrification—or what’s just plain-old-fashioned dispossession and displacement on these already-stolen lands. For what sticks together far more firmly than wheat paste to a wall is the blend of state and capitalism, with the not-so-secret ingredient of cops.
All the more reason that it’s wonderful to see a new anarchist event, a zine fair, in the midst of winter—creating more space for folks to gather, share subversive as well as liberatory literature, and sustain the fight, or at least the inspiration for it.
Zine Fair Anarchiste
Saturday, March 4, 2023
11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
La Ligne Verte, 2531 Ontario E
Metro Frontenac#WheatpasteNotPolice
#ArtOfResistance
#ZineFairAnarchiste
#AnarchistZineFair -
Pausing for a moment of queer joy.
This world is stone-cold hard. It’s too easy to sink into that grayness. To see nothing but what paves over all we love, all we desire and yearn for.
To always feel, as the hauntingly beautiful new album from @blackoxorkestar phrases it in a song that could make a rock cry, that “there’s something missing that could make us whole.”
Queer joy makes whole. Not always, and for many, not often. Or not often enough.
Yet it never abandons the desire for that nonbinary messy beautiful wholeness, complete with cracks still visible and honored.
And when those moments come, queer joy knows how to revel in them, dance with them, share them; squeeze out every ounce of delicious, self-generated, spontaneous, otherworldly time-spaces; dream forward about more euphoric moments.
So one has to pause each time, and leave a “note to self” etched across the barren landscape. As remembrance, as fuel and fire. As shared wink to others of what’s possible. As concrete evidence that those moments aren’t mere moments. They are the connective tissue of lives worth living.
#QueerAsFuck
#BeGayDoCrime
#BeGayDoJoy
#ArtOfRemembrance
#ArtOfResistance
#TryQueerAnarchismForLife(photo: purple circle A spray painted across a sidewalk leading into @defendatlantaforest, because #QueersNotCops, paused by in mid-October, and woven—through friendships new and older—into the queer-joy pause of the past few days in Oberlin and Cleveland, thanks to too many fabulous anarchists to name here)
