Embodied Creative Disobedience: archiving* Global Strategies of Speculative Resistance**
An interactive and multi-platform art project, initiated by Hamdel Futurist Collaborative, reimagines the archive not as a static repository, but as a living, participatory space of collective care, solidarity, and shared memory. At its core is an open-access collectively developed archive of more than 10,000 performances, rituals, and political protest artworks created in solidarity with the intersectional feminist movement in Iran. Through this archive, the project foregrounds how acts of creative disobedience emerge from specific local creative disobedience strategies and embodied practices of resistance. At the same time, it traces how these reiterative gestures move across borders and diasporas, carrying strategies of speculative resistance and world-making into transnational solidarities.
Spanning a web-based interface, XR installation, and live algorithmic performance, the work invites audiences to move beyond passive viewing and engage as ethical participants, co-authors, and stewards of memory. These immersive encounters reveal how embodied creative disobedience persists and retains sociopolitical power across digital infrastructures, particularly under conditions of surveillance, censorship, and displacement.
By framing creative disobedience as both archive and strategy, the project raises urgent questions: How can participatory archives nurture transnational solidarities? In what ways does feminist visual culture function as both testimony and protest? And how might immersive technologies help transform acts of disobedience into shared tools for survival, connection, and collective imagination.
*The term “archive” is intentionally not capitalized here. It signals a break from traditional archiving practices, marking our methodology as participatory, embodied, and resistant to static or institutional models of memory-keeping.
** Speculative resistance turns protest into possibility — a practice of imagining and rehearsing the futures we seek to build.