Based on Angela McRobbie’s book “Feminism and The Politics of Resilience. Essay on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare”. We, as the SIDE artistic collective in Slovenia (Samar Zughool, Sammar Al Kerawe, Safa Hasan, and Behnaz Aliesfahanipour), created a performative journey of cleansing shoes in different locations in Slovenia while decoding and reflecting on the process of social and individual communications that we initiated or encountered.

The process aimed at creating situations of various power dynamics that tackle and explore the absence of boundaries between individuation and collective pressure.

In this space, you see our road map of coding and decoding resilience through the following aspects:
– Systems, societies, politics, history and present; economy, gender, environment, coloniality and
neocolonialism
– Fears as parts of desires
– Desires part of fears
– Collective Pressures as part of an identity
– Individuation as part of the identity
– Slogans as the essence of activism for resilience.

The process lasted around six months and contained three stages with in-depth reflections in between and beforehand.

The first stage is “the veil of ignorance”, where we experienced the collective pressure in the series of performing the cleansing of shoes in various locations in Ljubljana.

The second stage is the “Shades of Accountability”, in this stage, through visual and performing arts, we explored the connection of resilience to political structures and the internalisation of privileges and oppression on the one hand and the essence of activism as a form of resilience in another.

The third stage is “Embodying Decoloniality” where we open the space for emancipatory communication through performing arts; we create a space to imagine and perform new meanings of communication above the oppressive structure of citizenship.

Thank you for exploring our “Decoding Resilience” road map.

Special Thanks to the talented photographer Jelena Radusinovic for taking our photos while we are performing in the streets. It was not easy as she had to do it under cover.
The SIDE Collective, cooking and cleaning politics, cultures, religions, and arts, is a collective that hacks, hijacks, and re-create cultural, artistic, religious, and political scenes from an intersectional feminist lens. Samar Zughool, Behnaz Aliesfahanipour, Safa Saad and Sammar Al Kerawe.