Sowing Our Resistance

Institutional, economic, and environmental violence reflect ambitions of control, exploitation, and the exhaustion of bodies, territories, and imaginations. At a time when the predatory logic inherent in the neoliberal model and the hate speech that accompanies it continue to intensify, it is essential to offer a firm refusal. However, the possibilities of being heard remain limited when citizens are relegated to the status of mere spectators.

How can we regenerate the desire for connection and action when our era produces competition and norms, and feeds self-isolation and harmful affects, starting with anger, resentment, and fear? Where can we find the resources to emerge from the night? Struggles, in what they carry of the collective, attention to others, joy, and desires for emancipation, seem capable of opening saving breaches that let light pass through once more, both within ourselves and in the structures of the established order. Even if sporadic, minority-led, or modest, acts of resistance help to rehumanize our presence in the world and the meaning of our interactions. As they multiply and connect with each other, they can transform into irresistible movements in which knowledge, hopes, and experiences circulate, and where other forms of relationship and cooperation are shared.

While struggle can be inscribed in demands and power dynamics, it is also embodied in transgression, in the attention paid to vulnerability, in the recognition of one's own privileges, in the deconstruction of toxic narratives, or in stories shared and passed down. Empathy, attention, imagination, and care then become subversive forces, capable of fueling profound individual, collective, societal, and environmental transformations. It remains to invent the paths, practices, and horizons to begin this collective rebirth.

Through the presentation of the work of fifteen artists, the exhibition Sowing Our Resistance celebrates these actions that sow the seeds of a joyful dissidence in service of other ways of inhabiting the Earth, attentive to the living and to otherness. Even more, it is an invitation to gather to invent, together, the world we wish to see happen.