12th of March
I finished watching the film No Other Land and it’s raining outside. It is a documentary on the destruction of the occupied West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta. The documentary—a collaboration between Palestinian Basel Andra and Israeli Yuval Abraham—was conspicuously awarded an Oscar earlier this year. It depicts the undying strength and perseverance of the resistance movement in the face of Israeli military units and settlers who casually murder civilians, demolish educational and domestic infrastructure, and pour cement into wells. It’s raining outside and I feel tired and suddenly so sad.  I spent months avoiding feeling the weight of the world and my news feed.  I chose to enjoy my privilege and laugh, drink, and dance in the collapsing world.  I align my avoidance with the distraction from grief, the heavy claustrophobic feelings of sorrow and helplessness. It is much easier to look away or trace the blurry contours of destruction and death. To look directly would mean to deeply consider the millions of individuals casually murdered, amputated, raped, missing, or living under unjust and violent regimes and slip into the valley I have been avoiding. Empathy fatigues.
The objectives of the film are to fracture empathy fatigue by depicting the complexities and rewards of multi-ethnic allyships and resistance. Although residents of Masafer Yatta have stated the film is important to platform and personalize the war, No Other Land has been criticized by the pro-Palestinian movement Boycott Divest Sanction as a film that promotes normalization of the occupation, represents an Israeli voice, and optically formalizes the apartheid state. The directors are accused of accepting an award by the blatantly hypocritical and bullying empire of America, which finances the genocide and mutilates people and lands to access the valuables hidden in the folds of landscapes so violently fought over. However, by publicly denouncing the film due to the inherent need to radicalize the narrative of resistance, BDS disregards a locally produced chronicle and attempts to monopolize the sculpting of dissident imagery.
 
18th of January
I go to a literary evening with Nicholas Schultz presenting his new book Land Sickness to examine the emotional and political fatigue he defines through “the new ecological class.” Land Sickness is an auto-fiction travelogue describing the planetary interconnection and agony through a series of personal climate-related decisions of mobility and consumption facing those privileged with a choice; flight or bus? Veggies wrapped in plastic? Vegan or dairy? “It seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. ” The author describes the relatable anxiety of helplessness. In the discussion following the book presentation, he spoke of the forlorn aesthetics of the Green Party and the climate protests, criticizing the lack of visually informed and emotively charged resistance collectivities and their weak use of symbols. He addresses the ongoing discourse regarding leftist movements’ apparent incapability of injecting hope and action to fracture the fatigue of helplessness through evocative aesthetic narrative. I ask what he thinks of direct action as a form of resistance, and the sweet Danish sociologist predictably and proudly refers to his undying belief in democracy and political methods. How Scandinavian of him.  Schultz states this very seriously, as if a reality existed in which current infrastructures could solve the well-documented and studied wars, ongoing genocide, mundane inequalities, extractivist mechanisms, and the climate collapse knowingly driven by just a few massive corporations interlacing moral and economic dependency and decay. The democracy he believes in is what we are witnessing—a subjugation to a grid of suffering imposed through an undying belief in diplomacy and the phantasma of politics.
I feel fatigue in my bones and a fog in my brain. I feel saliva thicken in my mouth. I feel disgusting, as if a mirror has been placed in front of my face and I am a brat that does nothing, nothing at all. I want to rip out my eyes and peel off my idiotic white skin. Later on my friends and I refer to the lack of visual and ideological narratives to represent the left in inspiring, productive, and revolutionary ways. Luigi Mangionni, a young man who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of the biggest insurance company in the US, with a 3D printed gun in December 2024, is mentioned as the only recent example of inspirational and sexy leftist resistance. One of the only images of resistance that trended in a generative way and gave disillusioned leftist communities the feeling of possible change and action that transcends veganism and infographics; “Don’t forget Congo!”, is an image showing a zoomed-in photo of Luigi’s six-pack and the text UTOPIAN LANDSCAPES. This meme functions as an image of resistance and hope because it is reflective of the memetic hive mind and connotative forms of communication: those rooted in emotion, belief, and experiential associations. Unlike denotative systems—which rely on literal meaning, objective framing, and the strict logic of alphabetic code—connotative communication spreads through affect, intuition, and shared cultural subtext. It doesn’t explain; it evokes. Similarly, long-form student protests in Serbia against their authoritarian, autocratic, and corrupt president, Vučić, are effective as triggers of hope, because of their use of symbols, DIY flags, collectivity, horizontality, and youth as connotative forms of expression and mass action. Unlike a different set of protests in Serbia and the Balkans protesting the construction of a lithium mine, which proved to be less viral due to their smaller size, shorter longevity, and lack of visceral honesty and associative strength. Objecting to lithium mines in our European backyard of western Serbia, thus preferring extractivist infrastructure to be located in the jungles of the Congo in Africa, doesn’t resonate because interlinking moralism and political solutionism is a flaccid agenda of resistance . The Serbian students protesting their government on a delusional and systemic rather than representative level is simply a more potent and resonant cause, avoiding the hypocrisy that has consumed the web that held the radical left.
Utopian Landscapes,Anonymous meme, IG account dank.lloyd.wright
 
25th of February
I go to a conference called Tactics&Practice#16: Are You a Software Update? organized by the Ljubljana-based institute Aksioma to find out more about optical collectivity, evocative imagery, and AI-generated imaginariums of dystopian landscapes. Lesia Kulchynska, a visual studies researcher and independent curator who aligns online political recruitment strategies to classical advertisement models, posited in her lecture that image production and the production of violence coincide. She speaks of Ukrainian car arsonists drafted online, where regular individuals are hired as contractors to make a video or image of a burning car. The contractors are encouraged to set a car on fire and film it—even if a vehicle had already been torched, the gig-workers are told to reignite the scorched metal shells and set them ablaze again. “The job is to produce an image of violence and create media content, not the act of violence itself.” The media content functions as an advertisement image, aiming to evoke your desire to be part of a fictional, already existing collectivity, striving to outline the future as a fact and shape what is to come. “Pain is a marketing goldmine,” and political recruitors as advertisers don’t need to explain the benefits of an action, but rather “locate the source of the pain.”
The Lure of War, Lesia Kulchynska, Aksiomascreenshot of Tactics&Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?25.2, Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
The Tactics&Practice conference concluded with Donatella Della Ratta, a media theorist specialized in Arabic-language media, whose striking performance addressed the AI-assisted conjurations of future realities. Similarly to potent advertisement mechanisms, the future can be rendered and thus rework the present through the synthetic realism of AI-generated urbanities. Curiously, the conference took place one day before the official Donald Trump Instagram account posted a bizarre, AI-generated video of Palestine as a utopia of “consumption and technology.” The short-form video showed Gaza specifically as a renovated Riviera of hotels and shopping centers centered around a huge golden statue of Trump, while Donald in the flesh and Netanyahu are rendered by the pool drinking cocktails as money rains from the sky. Donatella could not have possibly known that only a few hours after her lecture concluded this viral reel would be published, clearly demonstrating the reality of her words. Using AI-generated vivid imagery functions as “a vision so seamless, it no longer feels like a possibility but an inevitability.” She tells us that by looking at and consuming the images of these mutated landscapes and societies, we assimilate them in silence through our eyes and the optical unconscious—“a future that has not yet arrived but has already been seen.”
 
28th of February 
I go to the opening of a Jan Krmelj new theatre production, O.I.L., to see an alternative present that has not yet fully arrived in the form of a three-hour-long theatre play. Through a disembodied narrator, a journalist, and five members of an activist collective describing their backgrounds, past direct actions, and a geopolitical podcast series that was interrupted by an abrupt flood, the play constructs a parallel reality that seems so real, the viewers’ optical unconscious fully accepts it. The method of reality construction the director uses is devised theatre or collective creation, where the actors build on personal, real, and emotive life experiences throughout rehearsals to develop storylines and characters. The narrative is anchored around a mix of fictional and real events and is closely knit with the multiple media used. Actors film each other and a miniature replica of the stage throughout the performance, exchanging the camera that streams the zoomed-in perspective onto a projection behind them. Framed up close, a small tank of water and spilled ink become a slowly spreading oil spill, and miniature cars sprinkled with baki ng soda become a snowy parking lot in a Russian city built around an oil refinery. The radical collective walks the line between activism, vandalism, and art; Spotify is hacked to play a single audio, government parties’ sites are manipulated, algorithms are adjusted and steered, a fake political party is constructed online that grows a public backing, and the United Nations Climate Change internal conference is infiltrated and compromised. The mode of communication in O.I.L. is connotative on multiple levels, using parallel visual and sonic methods to construct an evocative and alternate state, where the conditions of reality can be adjusted. Although Krmelj’s work is generative in cultivating the possibility of cyber direct actions as scaffolding for the fictional left, the seemingly inevitable dystopic narrative is still the informing anchor of his current work.
NAFTA, Jan Krmeljphoto: Dorian Šilec Petek28.2, Mini teater, Ljubljana
 
24th of April
While listening to the discussion around the book Land Sickness, watching the lectures of Tactics&Practice and to a lesser degree during the film No Other Land and the theatre play O.I.L. I couldn’t help but wonder why contemporary cultural producers rely exclusively on carefully layered critique of the system and opposition. What would happen if the narrative was flipped from criticizing dystopian realities to optically and conceptually building appealing utopian possibilities? Although all the cultural events I attended so far in 2025 attempt to construct and address a still-forming fictional leftist collectivity, they don’t go far enough. While these authors integrate familiar hooks and symbols, their communication often falls short—audiences are fatigued by dark analytical critiques, sweeping moralism, and the constant invocation of political solutions. We—the weepy bourgeois as well as the disenfranchised—are already (intimately) familiar with viral genocide, humanitarian and environmental catastrophes, and the extraction mechanisms pillaging our landscapes. We are also familiar with the ineffectiveness of existing political parties—whether through complicity or paralysis. Alternative methods of imagined leftist resistance movements must transcend critique as a means to an end by co-opting the reality-sculpting techniques of the radical right: persuasive visuals of collectivity, strategic virality, digital recruitment models, and AI-generated speculative futures. Such systems of communication have proven to be extremely efficient in the post-internet era of primarily image-based communication and utilize virality, propagative efficiency, mass appeal, and pain relocation. We—members of the fictional left—know it’s time to change the rules and inverse the narrative to grow alternative imaginariums of realities we want to live. This can be done by working towards pushing the memetic infrastructure that already exists past its aesthetic overload to a productive level of community simulation. Communities that will blossom in realities that will be seen, imagined, felt, and ingrained into our optical unconscious as powerfully as today’s dystopias. The seeds are already planted across the globe. All we need to do is to help them grow.
 
This text was originally published in Slovenian on Disenz.net
 
Klara Debeljak is a researcher and artist working at the intersection of writing, design, and video. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions across Europe and West Africa, including UNFAIR (Amsterdam) and the Dakar OFF Biennale. Her texts have been published in Designers Write, Nero Editions, Kajet, and Disenz, and have been translated into Italian and French. She received the Designers Write award for her essay Theory of the Chrono-Ghettos. Since 2021, she has been a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, and in 2024 she began a two-year residency at Švicarija in Ljubljana, where she is developing a project on digital gentrification and speculative infrastructures.