Cover art “community is resistance”

by Panos @notdirtynapkins

“community is resistance” is a digital collage that juxtaposes a historic Palestinian photograph of The Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, sourced from the New York Public Library Digital Collections archives—with intrusive capitalist symbols of the Western world fading in the background. The image explores rogue archives as a visual act of resistance that recontextualizes imagery to reclaim Palestinian memory from institutional and colonial erasure. This work confronts the colonial impulse to sanitize and flatten lived experiences, especially of dispossessed peoples. By disrupting visual hierarchies, the piece asserts that memory is not neutral. In the wake of ongoing settler-colonial and genocidal violence, this artwork insists on preserving what dominant archives attempt to delete: survival and collective resistance. “community is resistance” becomes a counter-archive, housed in community, protest, and visual reappropriation.