EVERYDAY RESISTANCE: EDITORIAL
©Ale Zapata & Christos Kyritopoulos Ninas
-by Barbora Horská (Curator/Editor-in-chief of Improper Dose)
Care, healing, resistance—the immediate eyeroll trigger for anyone positioned anywhere near the contemporary Western art world, myself very much included. With the normalization of AI-generated texts even inside the cultural field, these originally radical ideas, now completely stripped of meaning, only continue to pollute otherwise valuable discourse of deconstructing conservative and classist ideas of loving and organizing. A valid question would be to ask why add to it, then, and my personal answer is that, regardless of trending, we all deal with inner and outer resistance every single day, whether we like it or not, so why not add off-scene perspectives into the discussion so often monopolized by elite institutions?
Fighting against oppression or keeping unhealthy desires at bay, resistance can be a positive force. It can also hinder our growth or progress if we are resisting a needed change or facing uncomfortable emotions. Somehow automatically, when thinking about this edition’s direction, I focused only on the kind of resistance one wishes to invoke and needs to practice daily, or does so unconsciously by following an inner compass despite what is presented by the outside world as the ‘correct’ thing to do. Instead of big resistance movements, I wanted those smaller, individual ways of building resilience within ourselves to lead, because only with that ability—or so I believe—we have a chance of keeping any movement alive long enough to bring about a tangible societal change. The ‘everyday’ here is an invitation to notice where in our lives we possess power to choose differently from what has been normalized in our relationships and workplaces—like choosing the discomfort of relational repair over (self)abandonment or pushing against the AI-first business model forced by Silicon Valley onto every industry. Sometimes the cost is convenience, other times it’s an inner fight against intergenerational traumas or never-ending layers of systemic discrimination, so this is in no way a call to force perfection or shame anyone.
As Luna Al-Mousli says in the opening essay: “Everyday resistance is not universal, not for sale, and never comfortable.” This sentiment is interwoven into the following pages through the viewpoints of local and international artists, writers, and cultural workers who share their personal experiences, coping strategies, and examples of successful long-term grassroots initiatives that, if not always thriving, keep surviving despite the odds of the systems designed to fail even our most basic needs.
