Photo credit: Arup Majumdar

Artefacts of Resistance

is a project based around a digital archive of recent protests in India. The protests against the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act/National Registry of Citizens (2019) and the (now withdrawn) Farmers Bill (2020) are some of the largest mobilisations witnessed in India since colonial times. Along with garnering global support these protestors have also earned the wrath of an unforgiving and vindictive government. The purpose of this project is to document the social history of the two protest movements from a bottom-up and participatory perspective.

Resistance movements across the globe highlight spatial occupation as an important praxis to exert rights to the city. However, neoliberal and nationalist states increasingly criminalise rights of assembly and expression and coercively stifle dissent. The key question this project seeks to explore is ‘how can archives become a place of solidarity for local(ised) acts of resistance against global(ised) forms of oppression?’’