Our session invites seminar participants to engage in critical dialogue on how contemporary art and performance can be used to oppose the global surge of far-right movements and authoritarian regimes. In the face of rapacious wars and threats to bodily autonomy spawned by strongmen and their supporters, leftist progressive citizens have banded together to create collectives that provide mutual aid and spaces to voice their collective traumas and imagine democratic alternatives to the present. We are particularly interested in the work of artist and activist collectives that use aesthetic strategies to critique and combat fascism in their communities and broader geographic region. Our own research has chronicled choreographic assemblies performed by demonstrators in the streets of Chile; DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that redistribute cryptocurrency earnings to Planned Parenthood in the US; and “anti-totalitarian” art book libraries in the heart of Lviv curated by a Ukrainian art collective. (See, for example, the feminist performances of Chile’s Colectivo Lastesis, the interventions of Unicorn DAO, and the catalogues and critical art texts of Ukraine’s ist publishing). In the face of authoritarian regimes, war and threats to bodily autonomy, these groups have formed their own (often transnational) artistic commons that signal meaningful counterpoints to authoritarian power. Their countering manifestations of resistance point to the range of textual and embodied forms that collective resistance can take in the age of autocracy. We are keen to use the ACLA seminar to dialogue about how these and many other groups persist and find the courage (and bandwidth) to reckon with imperial histories and patriarchal violence and re-imagine democratic futures, sovereign and free. 

We invite examinations of a range of groups and movements--from commons that are essential to their communities to those collectives that are transnational and globally networked.  Questions as part of our critical examination include:

• How are artists, activists, and other creatives "meeting the moment" to collaboratively critique authoritarian structures of power through their demonstrations, performances, art actions, publications, etc.?
• How might groups, collectives, or movements use aesthetic strategies to not only survive and persist in the present but imagine democratic and sovereign futures?
• What frameworks (theoretical or methodological) can be used to evaluate collaborative aesthetic strategies that resist subjugation to authoritarian power and perform democratic ways of being together? 

Suggested topics include anti-authoritarian aesthetics in the domains of performance, art-activism, visual culture, media art, conceptual art, literature, public media.