SESSION: Creative Resistance: Responding to Protracted Violence Through Art
How do creative practices represent and interrogate both immediate and protracted forms of violence in the context of war and ecocide in different time periods, and different regions affected by conflict and environmental changes? What role do artistic interventions play in addressing the silences and erasures that result from historical and ongoing forms of violence? And how can artistic forms help us understand genealogies of modern slow violence?
This panel examines the intersections of theoretical frameworks and artistic practices to explore the long-term impacts of hostilities, displacement, and ecological degradation. Through an interdisciplinary approach, it considers how less visible, cumulative harms persist over time, and how creative methodologies engage with the lived realities of affected human and non-human communities. Our discussion seeks to move beyond dominant narrative structures by analysing alternative ways of representing the multiple temporalities of violence
Session Convenors:
Constance Uzwyshyn,University of Cambridge
Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk, University of Cambridge
Speakers:
Vera Jiaxin Gan, Pingshan Art Museum, China
Weaving the Forgotten: Fiber Art, Care, and Collective Making in Post-Industrial China
This paper examines how contemporary fibre-based participatory art visualises and materialises the quiet marginalisation of value experienced by retired women workers and homemakers in post-industrial China. These are forms of slow violence that remain under-represented over time, even by those who experienced or benefit from them. Through focused cases—Hu Yinping’s Xiao Fang (and its extended project, The Biggest Pink Hat) and Pingshan Art Museum (PAM)’s Art Weavers Co-Creation Drift Project —this paper situates fibre art within Rob Nixon’s framework of slow violence and the gender-sensitive broader history of textiles.
Originating from a benevolent fiction, Xiao Fang gathers retired women, represented by the artist’s mother, to knit and share handmade hats, easing the undervaluation of their labour and creating a wider social impact on care and trust. Similarly, PAM operates an ongoing community program where women across ages and occupations engage through weaving and storytelling, linking skill to social well-being.
Both projects mobilise fibre-based practices to engage people beyond the professional art world, reassert embodied knowledge, and challenge economic or aesthetic hierarchies. The inherent haptic and repetitive features of such practices encourage reflections on care, connection, and resistance within a societal context, holding together what accelerated economics and urbanisation allow to fray.
Drawing on embodiment theory and textile history, this paper analyses how such practices render structural marginalisation and slow violence visible, not by framing practitioners as victims, but through material reimagination. They restore and weave the texture of social relations against forgetting and neglect.
Amalia Caputo Dodge, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Bodies, Archives, and Extractivism in the work of three Venezuelan women artists: Erika Ordosgoitti, Angela Bonadies and Esperanza Mayobre
This contribution explores how the history of a displaced community, scattered by the wrongdoings of 26+ years of an authoritarian state (Chavez-Maduro regime) in Venezuela can be pieced together through the subjective fragments that the selected artists work with the body, archives and extractivism, as each speaks into forms of symbolic resistance and collective memory-building. In this context, the artist’s practice becomes a site of disobedience, self-affirmation, and recognition, offering critical access to a defining historical moment marked by loss in every possible way. In Venezuela, with the systematic erasure of physical and symbolic structures, institutions and any preservation policy whatsoever, the artist becomes a vital force in challenging the authoritative grip of a “new” type of archival artmaking, one that suits their agenda of resistance. Resistance becomes the body, the home, the city, the object, the archive, the artwork, as they implicitly embody places of violence. It is important to recontextualise the suffering and constant violence the country has endured over the past 27 years, as a point of departure, but also as a “thing” that is self-contained in each of their art practices. These three women artists’ works play a crucial role in denouncing the memory keeping of the democratic foundations in the collective memory by reinterpreting and reviving one generation after another, while also questioning the role of violence, the criminal policies, erasures of multiple kinds, and the creation of subjective memories in shaping our collective memory.
Caterina Martinelli, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History and University of ZurichToxic Spaces and Concrete Barriers: Tracing Urban Trauma Through Mauro Staccioli’s Works, 1968-1970
Toxic Spaces and Concrete Barriers: Tracing Urban Trauma Through Mauro Staccioli’s Works, 1968-1970
In La vita agra (1962) Luciano Bianciardi recounts how amidst Italy’s economic boom, 1960s Milan was a harsh metropolis, marked by solitary crowds, “angry fumigation”, and relentless urban expansion swallowing countryside and marginalizing the working class.
It was in response to this environment that between 1968 and 1970 Mauro Staccioli (1936-2018) created two sculpture series: “Muri”, where concrete wall-like structures crowned with spikes and shards referenced the erasure of the countryside, and “Tubi”, which used industrial piping to evoke the toxic emissions of industrialization. In sharp contrast to Staccioli’s rural upbringing, the geometries and raw materials that contributed to and defined his violent sculptural vocabulary sought to make the urban alienation and atmospheric toxicity of Milan’s industrialized environment tangible.
Long studied for their formal minimalism, this paper reassesses Staccioli’s abstract sculptures by foregrounding their ecocritical dimension, specifically demonstrating how the sculptor’s use of concrete and iron, and engagement with urban iconography, provided a critique of material and environmental violence. In mapping this interplay between materiality and environmental change, we find Staccioli interrogating the genealogy of the “traumatised city” and the normalisation of structural violence, which gestured towards a collective sense of displacement and alienation.
By employing Serenella Iovino’s ecocritical methodology of “cognitive justice”, this paper reads Staccioli’s work as both witness to and an intervention in the “slow violence” inscribed in Milan’s landscapes. In this way, we can better understand how abstract sculpture operates as creative resistance, making visible forms of ecological degradation, shaping and constraining collective urban life.
Manar Abo Touk, Concordia University
Against Spectacle: Syrian Artists and the Ethics of Anti-Violent Image-Making
This paper examines how contemporary Syrian artists resist the visual economies of violence that have come to define the global circulation of the 2011 Syrian revolution and its proxy war. Through the practices of Khaled Barakeh, Xece/Khadija Baker, and Randa Madah, I explore how artists reimagine witnessing and protest through material restraint, fragmentation, and absence. These artists reject sensational and documentary forms that reproduce suffering as spectacle; instead, they cultivate an anti-violent image-making approach – a mode of ethical resistance that privileges care, slowness, and poetic opacity over exposure and trauma.
Drawing on Max Weiss’s “slow witnessing” and Jill Bennett’s concept of empathic vision, I argue that these works create spaces of dignity and reflection amid the ruins of visibility. Barakeh’s displacement of protest images, Baker’s multidisciplinary map installations, and Madah’s dreamlike domestic scenes all recast violence as an affective residue rather than a spectacle to be consumed. Together, they offer a counter-aesthetic to the visual politics of war, asking how art can bear witness without reproducing harm.
Through a close reading of these practices, this paper situates Syrian contemporary art within broader debates on ethics, resistance, and decolonial visuality, emphasising how artists from conditions of protracted conflict mobilise tenderness as a radical form of protest.