Images in Resistanze: Visual Practices and Aesthetic Methodologies in Nepal’s Youth Protests

Abstract

This article analyses the youth protests known as Revolution Z in Nepal (2025) from the perspective of visual studies and contemporary artistic practices, as an event in which political precariousness, youth agency and aesthetic creation intersect in a context of repression and digital censorship. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on visual studies and artistic practices, it examines how the protests were not only an act of resistance against corruption and authoritarianism, but also a laboratory for critical temporalities and political imagination. The work examines how the visualities generated during the uprising—photographs, videos, memes, live broadcasts—make a transition from the journalistic to the artistic, revealing their critical power even in their fragility and ephemeral circulation. It also explores the performative and ironic dimension of youth protest, with the incorporation of pop culture symbols and the re-signification of social media as spaces for collective creation. The main contribution of the study is to conceptualise the visual practices of the Z Revolution as aesthetic methods of resistance that articulate the documentary, the performative and the ironic—permeated by immediacy and media overabundance—showing how contemporary digital visual cultures allow younger generations to challenge dominant frameworks of representation by activating collective memories and projecting non-dystopian futures from the common ground and the precarious present.