To Create is to Resist!!! To Resist is to Create!

I believe that.  Resistance may not achieve its current goals but creates movements.  Creative activity gets the word out and gives sustenance.  Here’s a fine example of political street art on rue de Belleville below Pyrénées in Paris 20e.

The tweezers holding an eyeball refer to the woman in the painting, Fiorina Jacob Lignier, a 20-year-old philosophy student who lost her left eye in one of the demonstrations.  Peacefully demonstrating with friends, police struck her with a gas canister.  The quotation says, literally, “Injustice bursts the eyes” but the phrase is idiomatic and means “Injustice is obvious.”

The phrase is followed by “Thank you to the street medics” and the quotation that heads up this post, “To create is to resist!!! To resist is to create!” from Lucie Aubrac. Aubrac was a member of the French resistance during WWII.  The German resistance movement, The White Rose, is named at the bottom and symbolized by the rose in the left corner.  Naomi Klein is quoted, some lilies are featured, and the vest also says “C.N.R.,” the National Council of the Resistance, associating Lignier not only with heroes of the German resistance but with French ones as well.

It’s a powerful work.  I had planned to add some other street art to this post.  But this one, really, stands on its own.  It’s by C. Agustin, March 15, 2019 (c).

Turns out, though, that Lignier is associated with France Identitaire (Identitarian France) in Amiens and, after the incident, planned to run for office on a ticket with Renaud Camus, originator of the idea of the Great Replacement, that the French are being replaced by people perceived as non French and as taking over. It is an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim organization (inspiration for the U.S. organization Identity Evropa, now known as AIM, the American Identity Movement).  She later was taken off the ticket after being seen in a photograph, taken in her teen years, kneeling before a Swastika drawn in the sand at a beach.

Zig. Zag. Hard to know where things are going.  I’ve given up finding the right title for this post.