Rebel Aesthetics

Abstract

This article examines how visual artists contribute to popular politics, emergent subjectivities, and collective histories of resistance. Through artistic interventions in urban space, artists disrupt, reconfigure, and reimagine the dominant spatial order. Such struggles over public space and political and cultural expression are especially contentious in places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where militarization and government surveillance coincide with heritage tourism. Youth have been particularly effective in maintaining a dissident presence in the city, in large part due to their ability to produce spatial networks linking ephemeral spaces of direct actions and protest art with more territorialized spaces like social centers. This article specifically considers how visual artists active in social movements use their public art to signal popular resistance to state violence and corruption, make contemporary Indigenous peoples visible in urban space, and transform spaces of tourism, consumption, and militarism into “counterspaces” guided by alternative logics of sociality, politics, and temporality. They do so through a set of collective space-making practices and sensibilities I call rebel aesthetics.