From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism and the Interstitial Spaces of Creative Resistance and Rangoon, Burma, and Yangon, Myanmar

On February 1st, 2021, Myanmar was again plunged into political turmoil when the military overthrew a democratically elected government. This was the third coup in the country; violent seizures of power took place in 1962 and 1988. Military coups in Myanmar have mostly met with opposition in the form of student protests. In 2021 the army faced organised resistance on a previously unimaginable mass scale through a Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM). This campaign was notable for its use of digital platforms to rapidly muster and organise popular support in-country as well as internationally. While social media was central to the success of the contemporary movement, this paper argues that the Civil Disobedience Movement draws from tactics of resistance employed by Myanmar’s ‘fashionistas' of the 1970s and 1980s. The proposed contribution presents a comparison of ‘secret’ fashion photography of the late 1970s, collected in Lukas Burk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 - Fashion=Resistance (Burk, 2020) and the #100projectors campaign, a collective of video artists mounting an international campaign of guerrilla projections during the first months of 2021. Drawing from contemporary advertising concepts of ‘segmentation’ as well as ideas associated with ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism,’ this paper contextualizes both campaigns within Rangoon's history to find that contemporary creative resistance is rooted in a cosmopolitan past which makes possible a re-imagining of ‘the national space and its politics within which it is situated’ (Christensen, 556).