Reclaiming Resilience was published by La Casa Encendida in Madrid. This reader wraps up a research and exhibiton projects curated by the Lithuanian aristtic duo Pakui Hardware. The book critically explores the term of resilience with authors invited by us and the four artists alike. With contributions by Mark Neocleous, Serene J. Khader, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lisa Parola, Sara Garzón and Rose Vidal.

Resilience has become a buzzword of the last couple of decades. The deepening climate crisis, social, economic and, finally, territorial insecurities, have put resilience on the top list as a form of coping with the permanent emergency. The concept was quickly coopted by the neoliberal regime, in which resilience was transformed into a personal quality, a specific trait of character. According to a philosopher Mark Neocleous, such framing of this notion has a deeply political agenda – to put the responsibility on individuals in dealing with shocks in systems (ecological, political, financial): it wants us to learn to become resilient, to learn emergency planning, rather than changing the dysfunctional or crumbling systems themselves. This way, the poor, the non-normative or the colonized people are expected to be resilient to the unjust conditions instead of fixing those circumstances in the first place.