SOFT RESISTANCE

About The Entry

This project explores how the simple act of drying clothes becomes a quiet form of resistance within modern urban space. Through field photography, neighbourhood observation and gesture-based typography, I trace how everyday life adapts, negotiates, and reclaims the small corners left by the city. The final textile-based publication reflects this softness, carrying daily movements back into material form.

Modern urban policies often remove or limit the informal spaces where everyday activities once took place. As these public and semi-public spaces shrink, residents lose the basic areas they once relied on for drying clothes. People turn to the remaining gaps—fences, alley walls, temporary lines—not by choice, but because modernisation leaves no other option.

Seeing this resourcefulness across different cities made me turn back to my ow nneighbourhood, where I began closely observing how elders hang their laundry—how they choose a spot, pull the rope, test the tension, and quietly reshape the space around them.

The more I watched, the more I realised that people hang their laundry this way because thecity gives them no real space to do it. What looks ordinary is actually a small response to how the city controls everyday life.

As I kept watching, my focus gradually shifted from the laundry to the hands—the throws, pulls and knots that shaped the rope in the air, Each gesture began to look like a line drawn in space, and this became the starting point for my typographic experiments.

The alphabet is derived from the physical gestures of drying each letter shaped by a throw, a pull, a knot, or a moment of slack in the rope.

I chose to present the final publication in the form of a cloth book, which directly corresponds to the material properties of clothes drying. Each page is printed on the fabric and hung on a metal hanger, making this book as soft, movable, and not completely fixed as clothing.

This form takes the work back to its original starting point: exploring how everyday actions quietly reclaim space and how softness becomes a form of resistance.