Love, an act of defiance

In recent years the world has faced ongoing catastrophes. Termed ‘the age of crisis’, these poly-crises have laid bare the inadequacies of institutional systems in the arts.^[1] The current moment echoes with the crises of forced migration, neo-colonial practices, growing extremism, class inequality, rapid technological change, heteronormative structures, and environmental degradation, exposing the deep-rooted inequities in our societal frameworks.^[2] Precarious labour conditions, rigid institutional hierarchies, and relentless productivity demands shape the arts industry, leaving little room for slowness, feeling, or reflection. Within this context, love as praxis offers a radical alternative, proposing that art organisations could be sites of hope, connection, and healing.

In response to the isolating effects of hypernormalisation, creatives are turning toward practices that imagine new modes of being.^[3] In a collection of short stories Space Crone (2023), Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that “our civilisation is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.” She proposes a yin utopia “dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclic, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold” as a counterbalance to the extractive, hyper-individualistic forces that shape contemporary life.^[4] This vision requires a fundamental reconfiguration of power, shifting from control to collaboration.

The feminist theorist Sara Ahmed challenges institutional hostility in her text the Feminist Ear (2023). The namesake of an alternative form of listening, for those who disrupt normative structures. Ahmed highlights that those who complain, who speak out against injustice, are often cast as strangers, outsiders, or troublemakers. Her recommendation, listen harder: “we are louder not only when we are heard together, but when we hear together.”^[5] Love as listening. Love as solidarity. Ahmed explores this further in her text The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004):

“Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.”^[6]

Similarly, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s critique of white feminism underscores the necessity of decolonial love, one that centres sovereignty rather than assimilation or inclusion. As she explains, “In Indigenous cultural domains relationality means that one experiences the self as part of others and others as part of the self; this is learnt through reciprocity, obligation, shared experiences, coexistence, cooperation and social memory.”^[7] This understanding of relationality challenges western individualism and highlights how Indigenous frameworks of care and connection resist colonial structures of exclusion and hierarchy.

To imagine love as praxis within institutional frameworks requires a radical reorientation of values, one that prioritises relationships over hierarchy, and sustenance over spectacle. Arts organisations, often shaped by colonial legacies and neoliberal imperatives, tend to reward speed, output, and visibility. But what if they were restructured to hold space for slowness, for listening, for collective authorship?

Love as an act of defiance is the quiet, daily insistence on kinship, care, and mutual support in a world that prioritises efficiency and individualism. It is the refusal to accept the status quo, the ongoing work of building structures that sustain rather than exploit. As Le Guin reminds us, “it does not have to be this way.”^[8] Love is radical, a slow soft form of defiance that disrupts power through empathy, emotion, listening and an openness to others.