this piggy bank will open its eyes
oppression enforces forgetting. resistance itself is art. make something.
most people do not notice it.
most people pass by without seeing.
but not you.
pentax 6x7 / kodak portra 800
you have found it. or perhaps, it has found you.
it sits on a shelf in an antique store. the store is dimly lit. or maybe that’s just how it feels. fluorescent lights hum overhead—erratic, uneven. distracting from the low volume music. there are other objects here. strange dolls. rusted tins. a jar of something unrecognizable. but the piggy bank is different.
it is meant to be still. but it looks like it could move, if it wanted to. its wheels are dusty. not unused. just waiting.
you were supposed to walk past it. most people do. but you didn’t. and now, it has seen you. so. what will you make?
"the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." — milan kundera
fascism does not begin with fire. it does not announce itself with grand speeches. it does not arrive dressed in symbols you recognize. no.
it starts with a rearrangement.
a book moved to a higher shelf. a painting quietly taken down. a song no longer played. a film no longer screened.
"every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. and that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. history has stopped." — george orwell
art is not banned. not yet.
it is simply made to be less visible. then less necessary. then less made. and people will be told that this is fine. they will be told that these things do not matter.
that beauty is impractical. that poetry is indulgent. that creation is a distraction. and somewhere, someone will believe it.
"the city, however, does not tell its past. it contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls." — italo calvino
the world remembers. even when people do not. even when the books are rewritten. even when the paintings are taken down. even when the songs are no longer sung.
but there must be someone to keep the stories alive. someone to remember. someone to resist the forgetting. and if you are still reading this, that someone is you.
so make something they will fear.
make something unreasonable. something they do not know what to do with.
paint something too strange. write something too honest. compose something that does not resolve. build something that unnerves. because nothing unsettles the oppressor more than art that does not obey.
they do not know what to do with a poem that refuses to mean one thing. they do not know what to do with a sculpture that serves no function. they do not know what to do with a piggy bank on wheels. and they hate that. they want clean lines. safe choices. art that does not ask questions.
so, ask. loudly. repeatedly. without apology. ask until the weight of the answers collapses their carefully arranged world.
if you can resist in art, resist.
if you can put words to the unspeakable, do it. if you can shape sound into something unbearable, play it. if you can set brush to canvas, make it loud. and if you cannot— if they take your tools, your voice, your ability— then become the art yourself.
because once they stop our vision, they stop our voice. and once they stop our voice, they stop our passion. and once they stop our passion— they stop us.
and we must not let them.
but you are not still. you are not waiting.
the piggy bank is.
make something.
see more of my work here.