Ana Vaseva

Most activist movements are in danger of becoming trends. We must learn fragile resistance.

Ana Vaseva is a Bulgarian video artist and photographer.

A few months ago somebody told me "We are making a film about the activists and activism in Bulgaria", "What do you mean?" – I replied – "Well, you know, about things that happen in the public space and that are visible".

I want to start with this question – is activism and activist art something that is necessarily visible, and visible in a way that it becomes widely known? Yes, when it concerns actions that are connected with popularizing a notion. But can activism be also not so visible, even almost invisible?

Of course first we have to define what we mean by activism: in common usage, it probably means something like action, which has impact in the social space, striving to induce a change. This is a very general definition, but perhaps it will be functional for my purposes here.

But then the next question comes - what kind of activity? For example I have recently seen many examples of young people promoting Bulgarian "cultural specificities" – meaning traditional dances, rituals etc. They say that they fight to affirm our cultural uniqueness and identity (to induce change in the national consciousness, that is supposedly not sufficiently patriotic anymore) – but then it means that they are fighting to make the exotic cultural identity rigid. I take this as an aggressive act towards me. This so called "traditional Bulgarian culture" as invented in the 19th century, implies archaic cultural and political models, which are gender discriminative, religiously imposing, patriarchal, machist etc. When we speak about activism let’s keep in mind that activism isn't valuable just in itself – it gets its value from its content.

So, the question is: has an action to be visible, to be widely public (in order to induce a change, to have impact, let's say)? If so, then we have always the same problem – when something becomes successful it is immediately appropriated by the market. The punk movement, for example, originally shouting against the social injustice, is now a trend, a mass fashion tendency of clothing and hair styles, which has nothing to do with the original punk movement, though its popularity has its foundation there. (This is so typical – the riot is accepted and welcomed by many people, and then the people who are themselves the targets of this riot managed to use its power for their own financial gains.)

The ecological movement in Bulgaria is another example: it is so popular now that everybody is "ecologist". You can see building companies with names "Greenbuild" or something like that - and they are not green at all.

Most of the activist movements are in danger of becoming mere trends.

So a possible strategy is to try to be effective but keep a shape that cannot be appropriated. In resisting the principles of the neoliberal capitalist market we should aim at something I call fragile resistance.

In general what I mean by fragile resistance is a resistance that is opposing the principles of the neoliberal free market and it manages to remain fragile – a characteristic that is usually lost in the process of resisting: a resistance to the free market which is not a re-appropriating of its means.

The market is aggressive, brutal, harassing, obliterating – and usually, in order to fight it, the strategies themselves become brutal, one-sided, violent (and there is the danger to become as rigid and undemocratic as the "capitalist" society itself).

Sometimes those aggressive strategies work, sometimes they are the only way, but then what is lost is exactly that which is the opposite of the "market" – the soft, the vague, the unclear, the subversive, the difficult … the fragile – can something survive without being transformed, neglected and excluded and yet remain fragile? I suggest that it could be done by creating and asserting spaces of fragile resistance, defending and multiplying them.

The principles that this fragile resistance supposes are:

- being flexible – changing strategies, not allowing oneself to be appropriated by the market, or by another manipulative system, that would use what is created for its own economy.

- helping/giving a chance to those who are usually discarded by the market – those who are not easy to sell. If you are not part of the market and you are not under the patronage of a strong cultural institution you have almost no chances for surviving – that is why we have to strive to open the spaces for those who do not wish either to be sold to the open market nor to the big institutions.

- searching for ways of occupying spaces and opening them, making them possible for fragility, for difficultness. The free market has the possibility of unlimited occupation of spaces, so what this resistance has inevitably to do is to re-occupy spaces, to fill them with all their unclearness, difficultness and subversiveness. One of the ways of course is squatting (which is not very popular in Bulgaria).

My city is occupied by the neoliberal free market, by concrete, by the destroying of the public space, by lack of air and green etc. by the big bright signs.

It is occupied silently because there is no public reaction against this – not in the media, not in "public opinion" (whatever that animal might be). So, one of the many possible strategies against that is to silently re-occupy the spaces to fill the space with presence, silent but persistent, to multiply those presences, those places, open for possibility and for difficultness, those anti-market spaces.

- being difficult – one of the principles of the free market is "take it easy" – be easily graspable, easily consumable etc. – so, if you want to resist, you should be difficult.

In conclusion, I would suggest that for fighting the principles of the neoliberal free market that kills the possibility for real creative force, we have to create and maintain spaces of fragile resistance. That would help us to remain as complicated, difficult, stubborn and unsaleable as we are and as we want to persist in being

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