We have grown accustomed to occupying the streets almost permanently, always with a certain fear of reprisals — not so much out of personal fear, but because of the absence of a mass capable of sustaining mobilizations in a constant and decisive way. Faced with this reality, it is worth asking whether the time has come to transform protest, both in its essence and in its forms.

The street is, after all, a public space administered by municipalities and therefore controlled by them. It is true that, on occasion, we manage to wrest that control away for brief moments, but those moments are too fleeting to be truly transformative.

Social life unfolds and manifests itself in many other spaces, not only in the street. Students, through their strikes for Palestine, constantly remind us that protest can inhabit any place where life exists.

Museums, for example, are spaces of contained life — where we are offered a gaze into the past, the lucidity of the artist in his time, or the speculation of art merchants trading in the emotions of others. Yet these places should also become territories of everyday intervention for activists: spaces where present life breaks in, defying institutional stillness.

The stories told by their exhibited works must be rewritten so that current struggles for liberation may find within them a space to express themselves, to resonate, and to confront official memory. Only then will museums cease to be temples of the past and become living stages of the present.

We often hear that in Quebec or in Canada “communication has a certain form,” that “society feels and expresses itself in such and such a way,” as if within that conformist current there did not also live those of us who, tired of experiencing the suffering of others as our own, seek to intervene in society even without mastering French, English, Spanish, or any other socially acceptable language around us.

Solidarity cannot be limited to spoken language. Expression, action, and performance as acts of protest can say much more than the words one utters. There, in that untranslatable territory, protest regains its power — when gesture speaks for itself, when the body becomes discourse.

And perhaps, in that gesture, remains suspended an example of intervention — still in the air — that may inspire future generations to break the peace of rigid spaces, to infuse them with audacious life, and to ignite, between activists and temples of time, a conversation that never ceases to reinvent itself.

An Example That Has Not Happened — But Should Have

Context: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Exhibition: History Is Written by the Victors, by Kent Monkman

A group of activists enters the exhibition hall. They sit on the floor in a circle around a speaker who begins to read the following statement:

Speaker:

Today we gather here, before the work of artist Kent Monkman, to remind this country that although history may be painted by the victors, it is written in the blood of the First Nations of Canada and in the Indigenous blood of the Arab peoples of Palestine.
We honor and celebrate Monkman’s work because it forces us to confront an uncomfortable mirror.
We celebrate art that challenges and unsettles — art that refuses triviality, that provokes, questions, and awakens.
We celebrate the artists who have raised their voices for Palestine in this time of genocide:
those who have turned their concerts into soundtracks of resistance,
those who have photographed horror while risking their lives,
and above all, the Palestinian artists who paint their hopes on the fabric of their refugee tents in Gaza, seeking, if only for a moment, to escape death and despair.
That is why, here today, we denounce that last night the boats carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip were attacked by Israeli occupation forces.
On one of them were six Canadian citizens: Devoney Ellis, Mskwaasin Agnew, Sadie Mees, Nikita Stapleton, Nima Machouf, and Khurram Musti Khan.
At this moment, their condition and whereabouts remain unknown. We therefore demand that Canadian authorities act with the full force of their responsibilities to ensure their immediate repatriation, the severance of diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, and the urgent implementation of an arms embargo.
This act of piracy in the international waters of the Mediterranean cannot go unpunished — just as the crimes committed by this country called Canada against the First Nations must no longer remain unpunished.
Those crimes do not belong to the past; they continue today.
The works surrounding us remind us of the artificiality of states built upon the blood of other peoples.
Today, through this act, we honor that memory and reaffirm our solidarity.
Free Palestine. Land Back.

This example —imagined, yet necessary— is an invitation to rethink protest as an act that crosses the walls of art, language, and power.
A protest that does not seek permission, but resonance.