Coming Monday, 14 April 2025, at 17:00, the first lecture of the series ‚Resisting current barbarisms’ will take place, which is organised by the GTAS for the summer semester. We have invited Karolina Gembara to introduce the Archive for Public Protest in Warsaw.
Karolina Gembara is a photographer and researcher whose work revolves around themes such as home, belonging, migration, changing landscapes, and identities. Her recent focus has been on the political situation in her home country. She uses photography as both a tool and a pretext for collaboration, fostering creative processes. In 2013, she published her debut book "Fitting Rooms," which examines the role of women in her generation. Between 2009 and 2016, Karolina was based in India, where she produced her second book "When We Lie Down, Grasses Grow From Us," exploring the migratory experience (published by GOST Books in 2019). In recent years, she has initiated and completed several participatory projects involving refugees in her home country. Karolina collaborates with the Archive of Public Protest and is a member of Sputnik Photos. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation, which centres around the subjective narratives of historical migrations.
The Archive for Public Protest brings together visual traces of social activism, grassroots initiatives opposing not just political decisions but also breaches of democratic norms and human rights. It is a collection of images that constitutes a warning against rising right wing populism and discrimination in the broadest sense of the term: xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and also the climate crisis. In establishing the Archive, its creators wish to prolong the life of their images, which are connected with specific events, and whose existence ends with their publication in the press. The APP gathers together photographs in a single, easily accessible collection, which will remain accessible to researchers, artists and activists. Additionally, use of the Archive’s resources will be open to all users who express a desire to communicate the values with which its creators identify.
In times of polarisation, deep political divisions, environmental crises, and declining trust in democracy, multiple forms of resistance to today’s “barbaric” political and economic forces are not only necessary but imperative (Stengers, 2015). We cannot sit back and watch the rise of far-right ideologies, wars that destabilise regions, the spread of hoaxes and fake news, while billionaires manipulate social media platforms—promoting extreme dichotomies and eroding the very possibility of dialectical discussions, the cornerstone of democratic societies. Meanwhile, the far and extreme right cloaks itself in the rhetoric of anti-establishment resistance, co-opting the language of marginality to advance exclusionary agendas. How did we get here? How do we face and confront these challenges? Rather than waiting for catastrophe, we must actively shape new futures by resisting the barbarism of everyday life, a concept that, as Isabelle Stengers (2015) argues, requires both resistance and the simultaneous imagination of other ways of living.
Architecture, as both a manifestation of social values and an instrument of power, can either reinforce dominant ideologies or serve as a form of resistance. However, the idea is not to simply to oppose and resist destructive dominant systems but to compose new alliances, practices and forms of being together.
The lecture series ‚Resisting Current Barbarisms‘ invites you to engage in open debates, drawing on feminist theories, climate justice, hacker movements, activisms, and care as forms of resistance. Together, we will critically examine the relationships between power, identity, and the built environment; envision alternative futures; and develop strategies for collective organisation and resistance.
The event will be held in English and can be accessed via the following link. You are warmly invited!