Collecting Artivist Experiences on the Ground, Building New Archives for an Alternative History from below in Post-2011 Swana Region

This paper reflects on the meaning of doing research in times of change in contemporary SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region and on how to make elastic the category of “primary source” in order to write an alternative history from below.

Within the project MEGAMAPS – Mapping Emerging Gender Artivism in the Mediterranean Arab Public Space, and grounded at the intersection between History, Visual Arts and the Arab cultural studies field, this paper will analyse different forms of artivism as part of a transnational cultural and socio-political phenomenon, which after 2010-2011 uprisings can be interpreted as a new territory of socio-political transformations and as a new field of research aimed to understand what has been produced and stilli s produced today by the revolutionary potential of 2011 mass mobilizations.

By situating artivism within the political disenchantment experienced in the wake of the failure of social movements vis à vis the authoritarian politics, theoretically, the paper aims to explore the revolutionary potential of apparently non-political forms of artistic activism (underground independent artistic festivals, comics, performing arts, street art) in order to understand if and to what extent artivism could be understood as a “counter public”, a space of resistance and proactive citizenry which can contribute in constructing a new counter-hegemonic culture, where the revolutionary values of the 2011 are safeguarded, re-signified and transmitted to new generations.

Methodologically, the paper aims to share ideas on a new collaborative methodology which combines Social History, Visual and Performative Arts, Cultural Studies with participant observation and hence, after the collection and elaboration of the experiences on the ground, allows to produce new collaborative knowledge on wider historical, socio-political and artistic phenomena in order to build new historical, but also artistic and performative archives for an alternative history from below in the SWANA region.