From the Lindaluz Carrillo exhibition at Revolt Gallery Taos, New Mexico

RESISTING COMPLACENCY

“Creative Maladjustment”: Refusing to Adjust to Injustice

It takes courage to stand in front of a room full of psychologists and praise “maladjustment.” But that is precisely what Martin Luther King, Jr., did in 1967 when he delivered a keynote address at the American Psychological Association. On the one hand, King praised psychologists for fighting “destructive maladjustment” that could result in “neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.” But he also insisted there was something positive in maladjustment, something psychologists tend to overlook. 

“There are some things concerning which” he said, “we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of goodwill.” He mentioned racism, bigotry, economic inequality, and violence as realities “to which we should never be adjusted.”  He declared, “Our world is in dire need of a new organization, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment,” and he called on his hearers to become like the prophet Amos, like Thomas Jefferson, and like Abraham Lincoln, all of whom, he said, were creatively maladjusted to the injustices of their day. “Through such creative maladjustment,” King concluded, “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

Find the full article with practical application of this idea here.

Excerpt from Dr. King's address to the American Psychological Association here.

POWER OF THE POWERLESS

Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless is eerily relevant today

When Czech political dissident, playwright and poet Václav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in October 1978, he was not offering a manifesto in any conventional political sense. Nor was he outlining a program for opposition or regime change.

Instead, he set out to analyse a distinctive form of domination that did not rely primarily on terror, spectacle or charismatic authority, but on routine compliance and the internalisation of untruth.

His central claim was disarmingly simple.

Systems of coercive power endure not only because of police power or elite control, but because ordinary people participate in them by acting as if they believe what they know to be false. They live, as Havel put it, “within a lie”.

His most famous example was of the greengrocer who displays the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” – not to express revolutionary zeal but to signal conformity. The sign communicates obedience and a willingness to perform the expected ritual – thus helping to sustain a system whose strength lies in habituation. What matters is not belief, but participation. The slogan functions less as political content than as a social password, marking the bearer as safe and nonthreatening.

full article here.

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For a succinct piece on Havel's message, read Havel on the responsibility of resistance for all which speaks to our responsibility as individuals to live in truth regardless of external pressures.

Read Václav Havel's famous essay "The Power of the Powerless".

Follow with The Greengrocer’s Dilemma: Václav Havel’s Guide to Surviving a World of Lies

DEDICATIONS TO FUTURE HISTORY

Forgotten Futures /// (4/7) /// Silent Requiem

Hidden deep in the forests of northwestern Bosnia, on the slopes of Mount Grmeč, lies a striking monument, powerful, enigmatic, and tragically forgotten. Built in 1979, the Grmeč Memorial Complex was dedicated to the Yugoslav Partisan fighters of World War II.

This is not a conventional monument. It was conceived as an immersive space, a place where history is not only told, but felt. Two white marble semi-spheres, each 15 meters high, rise like a blossoming flower; a symbol of freedom in the making. At the center stood a model of the surrounding terrain, illuminated from above by natural light pouring through a zenithal opening, evoking the secret partisan hospital once hidden in the mountain.

All around, forest paths wind through the trees, connecting concrete structures that once marked the hospital’s various buildings : kitchens, operating rooms, dormitories. The explanatory plaques have either disappeared or been vandalized, and nature has gradually reclaimed what was once a space of transmission and remembrance.

During the socialist era, Grmeč drew thousands of visitors, students, veterans, families from across the country. The nearby Grmeč Hotel stood as a symbol of a time when memory was shared, collectively lived and honored.

But memories, like societies, evolve.

With the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the site was left behind, swept away by political upheavals, conflicts, and multiple layers of loss. Today, no signs point to it from the main road. The ceremonies have ended.

Silence has settled in.

Grmeč has become a paradoxical place: it was meant to embody unity, courage, and collective memory, yet today it stands in the shadows, caught between ruin and rebirth, between remembrance and forgetting.

And yet, this silence is not empty. It invites reflection. Because collective memory is never fixed ; it is shaped, challenged, and transformed.

What we choose to pass on, or not, speaks as much about the present as it does about the past. Grmeč reminds us that remembrance is a fragile gesture, sometimes painful, but always essential.

And in this place, lost in the heart of the forest, the weight and depth of Balkan history quietly surface, shaped by struggle, wounds, silences, but also by sincere acts of remembrance. A plural memory, sometimes fragmented, always full of meaning, if we are willing to stop and listen.

LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF TYRANNY

The Palestinian Film That’s Also Funny

The Time That Remains (2009) is an autobiographical and historical film about a Palestinian family living under Israeli rule, but the comedic style makes it feel fictional, almost fantastical. And there’s a reason why director Elia Suleiman chose this style…

ROOTED IN PLACE

صَبْر – “Patience” as Resistance

“We are eating patience with its thorns,” says a man in the northern Gaza Strip, as he cuts into a pad of sabr صبر—the Arabic name for the prickly pear cactus, which also translates to “patience.” This moment, recorded by the photojournalist Mahmoud Awadia and uploaded to social media in February 2024, captures the cruel realities faced by thousands of Palestinians who have refused to leave their homes despite the forced removal and displacement; the deliberate starvation and imposed famine; and the continued aerial bombardment of residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and farmlands since the Israeli Zionist military invasion of Gaza in October 2023. Over a year into this ongoing genocide, domicide, and ecocide, what little remains of previously thriving cactus populations—alongside other local herbs and weeds—has now become a critical source of nutrients.

It is not a coincidence that these prickly pear cacti grow throughout Palestine. For centuries, Opuntia ficus-indica, the most common prickly pear cactus species in the Mediterranean, was planted by Palestinians as hedges to demarcate village boundaries and agricultural fields. With its high tolerance to drought and extreme heat, these fruit-bearing plants can grow and regrow in the most challenging of environments. This is due in large part to a photosynthetic adaptation found in only 6 percent of the world’s vascular plant species, evolved to survive in arid conditions. While most plants draw in carbon during the day, these plants, in order to conserve water, draw in carbon at night, when temperatures are cooler. At its most biological level, the cactus employs a form of patience as a means of survival.

full article here.

ART UNDER TOTALITARIANISM

Ai Weiwei: The Man Who Turned Art Into Defiance

Ai Weiwei is one of the most recognisable artists in the world, but his story reaches far beyond contemporary art. Architect, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, blogger and outspoken critic of power, he turned artistic creation into a lifelong act of resistance. From his years in New York and the shock of Tiananmen to his return to China, the Olympic turning point, and the deep mark left by his father’s persecution under Mao, this documentary traces the making of a man for whom art, memory and rebellion became inseparable.

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“I’m like a shattered mirror,” the artist Ai Weiwei tells W one morning in a cozy corner of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he’s mounting his first U.S. retrospective in over a decade. “A mirror can see a perfect image, but once you shatter it, the pieces reflect reality, with all its cracks.” …

Find the full W Magazine article here.

PUSSY POWER

Pussy Riot: Can You Fight With Paper Planes

In 2011 Alyokhina joined the feminist-activist art collective Pussy Riot. At the time, the then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had announced that he would again be running for president in the upcoming Russian elections in March 2012. Rooted in punk, humour, poetry and pure rage, Pussy Riot has become known for their famous spontaneous and courageous actions challenging the Russian regime. In 2012, they staged their first action on Moscow’s Red Square, performing a song that mocked Putin. Using colourful clothes, disguises and protest songs in their face-off with the Russian authorities, the collected actions of Pussy Riot stand out as some of the most powerful political art of the 21st century.

Find an inspiring TED talk by her band mate and artistic collaborator Nadya Tolokonnikova here.

GUERILLA ART

“Love is in the Air”

In 2003, amidst the escalating tensions surrounding the construction of the West Bank Wall, Banksy unveiled Love Is in the Air on a wall in Beit Sahour, a town near Bethlehem. The imagery of Love is in the Air first appeared on the side of a garage in Beit Sahour, a Palestinian town east of Bethlehem, close to the Israeli West Bank Barrier. A 708 kilometre wall controlled by a series of checkpoints and observation towers, the Israeli West Bank Barrier separates Israel from the West Bank territories of Palestine.

The location of Love is in the Air, however—a town called Beit Sahour, just east of Bethlehem—holds deeper significance still. In Christian tradition, it is said to be the site of the Annunciation to the shepherds, which told them of the birth of Jesus. Interestingly, the pose of Banksy’s protagonist is perhaps reminiscent of the angel statue outside the town’s Shepherds’ Fields Chapel, whose arm similarly reaches into the distance. In Love is in the Air, Banksy makes a case for ongoing hope in a region that once bore tales of miracles and salvation, his protagonist pointing eternally towards the future.

full article here.

PROOF OF HOPE!

You Think You're Powerless. Here's The Proof You're Wrong | Barry’s Economics

“Learned Helplessness” vs “Learned Control”

We feel powerless against systems and problems this big. But is that emotion or fact? The answer is neurological. And then becomes Political. Here I look at the science of learned helplessness, social tipping points, and why your brain is catastrophically underestimating the power of what you can actually do.

THE ART OF DEFIANCE

DEFY: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes

The title of Sah’s book stopped me in my tracks—that one word, “DEFY,” in all caps. I could not help but wonder: What is coming next? Before the main text of the book, Sah dedicates a full page to framing a crucial redefinition of the word “defy.” Rather than the traditional definition—“to confront with assured power of resistance,” according to Merriam-Webster—she gives her own definition, and repeats it throughout the book: “To act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.” 

Everything in DEFY is predicated on this definition.

The opposing term to “defiance,” as Sah uses it, is “compliance”—comply/defy; compliance/defiance. Sah’s thesis is that we often find ourselves in situations with social pressure to comply, even when compliance may require us to suppress our own interests or values, in minor and major ways. “We are so conditioned to comply,” she writes, “that we might not even realize that the moment calls for defiance until it is too late” (xix). Sah continues, “my research has shown me, again and again, that what someone believes their values to be is quite different from how they actually behave,” and that “it is in fact incredibly difficult for most people to defy an order, even an unspoken one—from an authority, a peer, or even a stranger” (xxii)…

An excellent conversation between Dr. Sah and Brad Carr here.

STITCHING MEMORIES OF PLACE

This is Our Land

Through embroidered maps, families in the Sierra Tarahumara keep their homeland alive. In Chihuahua City, Mexico, Rarámuri families from Coloradas de la Virgen keep their home in the Sierra Tarahumara alive through ritual, memory, and thread. This episode follows their narrative embroidery, showing how, amid violence and displacement, storytelling turns into a form of remembrance, resistance, and survival.

Film documentary here.

RE-MEMBERING AS RESISTANCE

Art Against Erasure

The Amplification Project’s Digital Archive of Forced Migration

Art is an expression against disappearance. Over the past decade, as the number of people forced to flee has increased, so too has the number of artists narrating and bearing witness to forced migration and refugee experiences that would otherwise go unseen.1 The art of forced displacement might also be conceptualized as a collective narrative and record of witness. It renders visible and testifies to complex histories and contemporary phenomena, including the legacies of colonialism, nation-state operations, climate-related disasters, and geopolitical conflicts…

full piece here.