The “Shades of Accountability” was a two-day socio-artistic workshop.

“It is a safe and open space for people who would like to take an artistic journey of exploring and symbolising the fluid dialogue of inner resilience between the collective pressure and the individuation set of desires.”

Behind the workshop:

We are (Samar Zughool, Behnaz Aliesfahanipour, Sammar Al Kerawe, and Safa Saad), from the SIDE sociopolitical-artistic collective.

Last year, we started our artistic research program, “Decoding Resilience”, which aims to decode the journey of resilience by unpacking and politicising social communication in the multilayers of the self in communal, interpersonal and individual contexts.

Between January and April, we conducted the first stage of our artistic research. We symbolised the collective pressure on us as being sometimes identified or sometimes labelled as women and migrants, exploring one question, what does it take to adhere to the collective pressure and get perceived as a good migrant?

In our search, we went for street performances, where we started performing cleaning the shoes of random individuals. During this process, we encountered social communication within the context of power dynamics in relationships.

In our group and self-reflections, we politicised the incidents we encountered, the terminologies, reactions and expressions, and our inner feelings and thoughts on this journey.

The politicisation of social communication took us to different dimensions, from the streets of Koper to the British Museum in London to a wider context of international and geopolitics within the context of time as fluid.

Now we are opening the space for more people to join us in the second stage of decoding resilience, “The Shades of Accountability”.

In this stage, we aim to invite people willing to participate in a community-building process to explore and artistically symbolise the politicisation of inner resilience and inner dialogues between the collective pressure as the “cups in the heads” and the individuation set of desires.

As a socio-political-artistic collective, we take the responsibility to create a space for socialising, sharing, and critically thinking of decoloniality as a personalised form of resilience within a space with zero tolerance for xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, speciesism, antisemitism, fatphobia, Muslim-phobia or any other forms of discrimination or hate speech. Further, our journey is protecting all forms of privacy; all participants shall re-assure other people’s privacy protection.

On the 23rd of May, we held the “Decoding Resilience” exhibition, where we share the general frame of embodying decoloniality as a way to decode and politicise social communication in our journey of unlearning resilience.