Museum of Resistance and Resilience

How Our Conversation Began

During the interview, I asked Abigail if she viewed her work with ART/EMIS as resistant and resilient, or if she even considered her work a form of protest at all. She paused for a few moments before telling me that she had never even framed her work in that way before because she always felt that no matter what topics she explored, her work would naturally be resistant because of the nature of working within intersectionality. When she is working, she lets her projects flow freely to fill spaces instead of forcing them to fit within certain categories, alternatively allowing the ways that her medium and content naturally intertwine to shape her work. Digging deeper into the forces that drove her work to have an impact on the USC community, she realized that while the content of her projects revolved around a social issue, the medium she used to convey that content determined a specific effect on audiences and thus the greater community. She realized that the medium of art, whether it is theater, film, photography, or a combination of multiple forms, has to be resistant and resilient for its content to transform audience perception – these mediums must be resilient against different viewer expectations and preferences to still be understandable, and they must be able to resist and withstand attempts to sabotage the message from groups with differing opinions. Below is an excerpt from our conversation on the inherently interlaced nature of art and transformative protest.

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