On Monday, fashion designer Miguel Adrover shared a post on Instagram with screenshots. It included an email in which Adrover's representative declined the offer to create a custom-made dress for Rosalía. The reason: "Miguel doesn't work with any artist who hasn't publicly supported Palestine." In the description of the post, Adrover specified that he had nothing personal against the artist; in fact, he celebrated his achievements and confessed his admiration (admiration we share). Although some have called Adrover an opportunist (criticizing someone mainstream as an attempt to place oneself in the media spotlight and gain personal gain), I am interested in the debate it opens: what is the point and why is it important to position oneself.
Since October 2023, several activists have attempted to explain why silence is a form of complicity with horror. There is a whole genealogy in this regard: from Hannah Arendt—who detected in Nazi extermination an absolute evil that was articulated through silent obedience, and which turned others, the exterminable, in beings deprived of humanity—, to the activists of Act Up —who, fighting against the stigma of AIDS, popularized the slogan Silence=Death, in which the equation was inverted with Action=Life—, passing through the unbeatable sentence of "Audre Lo a methodology that wanted to transform silence into language and mobilization–. Silence means complicity because the passivity with which it works is, paradoxically, an active form of acceptance of the state of things, and the power structures remain intact, precisely, thanks to silence.
Power, like the norm, often operates more through what it doesn't say than what it explicitly says: this is, in part, the philosophical thought of Michel Foucault, pointing out how power and the norm have permeated our bodies without us realizing it and how institutions (schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.) reproduce them without us even being aware of it. In other words: silence is full of discourse.
This is where the right comes in, and even the most cynical left – those who only take a position when it is in their interest and it generates profit, symbolic capital – accuse of wokism Those who endlessly insist on repeating the message, telling them: "it's harmless," "it's lazy," "we've already understood you," "art is art," "don't mix things up." On the right, there's little to say: we have opposing frames of thought. To those on the cynical left, I would say that we are well aware of the spiral of self-interest and personal defenses with which they operate: just as Rosalía remains silent so as not to lose what's at stake (her career is aimed at the United States, Israel's right-hand woman), those who normalize silence, hers or their own, also have something in common. How can they say that silence is neutral when theirs is laden with self-interest?
I have the feeling that it won't be long before Rosalía publicly expresses her support for Palestine. It won't be long before she does, or any other influential figure who hasn't yet done so. The point is that it won't be long before she does so because it won't be long before Palestine has disappeared. It won't be a gesture of courage, nor of conviction: it will be easy to support what doesn't exist. This is what the Egyptian writer Omar El Akkad wrote on Twitter in October 2023, with an accompanying video of a destroyed Gaza: "One day, when it is safe, when there are no personal inconveniences in calling things by their names, when it will be too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against it."
The night I read Miguel Adrover's post, I went to sleep wondering if Rosalía was mulling all this over, like me: what if, suddenly, the thought united us? What if the viral screenshot of the email had made her reflect? Would she suffer? Would she feel anguish? Was she considering taking a position? The question is whether it would still make any sense to do so. Now that "almost nothing" remains of Gaza, in Trump's words, the fact that someone with a conservative political profile like Macron says he will recognize the Palestinian state this September (with 90% of the Strip in ruins) is an indicator that perhaps it's too late: that the day is approaching when defending Palestine will be as easy, as obvious, as breathing. We'll have to see then, as Audre Lorde said, who regrets their silence.
