Description
This book is a visual archive of a pivotal moment in Belarusian history. It documents the 2020–2021 protests while drawing parallels with the 2019–2020 Hong Kong movement.
Published in late 2024, just before Belarus’s 2025 elections, it highlights ongoing repression, with thousands of political prisoners and around a million people forced to flee. The author connects the protests in Belarus and Hong Kong as examples of modern resistance shaped by digital control and China’s geopolitical influence.
The seven chapters, illustrated with photographs from Belarus and Hong Kong, explore common tactics and symbols: gestures of unity, the symbolic use of colour, and objects such as umbrellas that represent protection and resilience. Artistic expressions, such as Hong Kong’s Lennon Walls and Belarusian courtyards, highlight grassroots creativity and the importance of ephemeral protest spaces. The leaderless, decentralised nature of both movements highlights their adaptability. Hong Kong’s “Be Water” strategy and Belarus’s horizontal organising emphasise collective action while evading authoritarian crackdowns.
The book also examines the exchange of repressive practices between the regimes in China and Belarus, focusing on the role of surveillance technologies. The combination of modern surveillance with traditional methods of intimidation points to the evolving challenges facing protest movements.
While neither movement achieved its immediate political goals, both left a lasting impact on cultural and societal transformation. “Descent into the Marsh” is a visual document of protest, highlighting the universal human quest for freedom and dignity. The book functions as an open archive, regularly updated with new media articles and reflections on ongoing struggles, providing a lasting record of unfinished events that remain unblocked and uncensored online.
Lesia Pcholka:
“Archives in Belarus are highly unstable: social media spaces are controlled, most independent Belarusian media websites are blocked, and all news posted on their sites disappear. We remember fragments, but we cannot find a source that describes the details. Symbols, slogans, gestures, colours—something will appear in this book. Articles about the protest that once appeared on the Facebook feed will have their own place on these pages. This book serves as a visual document of the protest movements in Hong Kong from 2019 to 2020 and in Belarus from 2020 to 2021. It’s a work in progress. New links will appear in the form of stickers, and the ones here may become obsolete. Because in 2024 nothing ended. In this book, I combine photos I took in Belarus in 2020a country I cannot yet return to—and photos from 2024 in Hong Kong, a place I could visit to find empty streets and an everyday life that bears only faint traces of the protest movement.”