This conversation was recorded with Hoda Katebi, the self-defined “sarcastic (& angry) Muslim-Iranian writer, photographer, and activist living in Chicago” behind the political fashion blog JooJoo Azad (“free bird” in Farsi) to be featured in The Funambulist 15 (Jan-Feb. 2018) Clothing Politics #2. In January 2017, a few days after the inauguration of the current U.S. President and the subsequent massive feminist protest, she wrote an article entitled “Please Keep Your American Flags Off My Hijab” about which we discuss in this interview, along with many other facets of her work with regards to clothing in relation to imperialism, capitalism ...

It has been a long time since as many people took to the streets in the cause of feminism as did for the Women’s March on Washington. Protesters wore the hand-knitted pussyhats in such large numbers that they colored the crowds pink. The hats became a striking visual signature feature of the protest against the Trump administration. They stand for a feminism that has majority appeal, albeit with questionable references.

Affidamento, or entrustment, is one of the most important and difficult practices enacted by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, founded in 1975. Rejecting a narrative of equality and sisterhood, the Milan group sees difference, or disparity, as one of the most generative qualities of the personal and political relationships between women. Looking to historical examples of relationships of affidamento, and discussing how entrustment operates in our own lives, this session explores how practices of writing and narration give form to these exchanges and open up new spaces for feminist politics in the everyday…

Hallie Ayres speaks to Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts. The conversation was scheduled following the opening of Aliza Shvarts: Purported at Art In General on February 20, 2020.

What would it be like if one day everyone you encountered said that they were you. Would you let them assume your identification, knowing that ultimately they can only be themselves. These questions are what Carroll provokes us with in All the Men Who Think They Can Be Me.

After the loss of a counter-model for capitalism—which socialism, in its real, existing form had presented until its collapse—alternative concepts for economic and social development face hard times at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the industrial nations, broadly discussed are only those “alternatives” that do not question the existing power relations of the capitalist system and representative democracies. Other socio-economic approaches are labeled utopian, devalued, and excluded from serious discussion if even considered at all. This edition of the republicart web journal presents transcriptions from 13 videos from Oliver Ressler’s thematic installation Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies focusing on diverse ...

Apocalypse After All? asks the American philosopher and theologian Catherine Keller. The revised manuscript of her lecture at the University of Zürich sets forth Keller’s “ecofeminist theopoetics” combining ecological and gender politics, process cosmology, post-structuralist philosophy and religious pluralism.

Descartes famously believed that animals were living machines; he was said to beat, torture, and vivisect dogs simply to demonstrate that they had no feelings. He interpreted the sounds emerging from the dog’s mouth as mere physical reactions, just the mechanical result of air passing through a windpipe, not indicative of emotional self-expression. According to Descartes and many of his followers, animals were inferior to humans because they lacked the capacity for language. While scientific evidence as well as popular opinion about the emotive actuality and potential of animals has proven that they have inner lives, most do not speak ...

This conversation with Stéphanie Dadour evolves around her doctoral dissertation that studies architectural theory and practice in the end of 20th-century North America. We explore a particular chapter of this dissertation to continue a series started with Olivia Ahn and Karen Tongson, about the gendered spatial paradigm constituted by the American suburbia. Citing the works of Mary McLeod, Beatriz Colomina, Joel Sanders and other feminist/queer thinkers and architects, we address architectural elements proper to this paradigm, such as the lawn, the curtain, or the window as instances of gendered apparatuses. We conclude the conversation by examining anthropometric studies, as well ...

This conversation with Liliana De Simone has for ambition to address the way architecture necessarily considers an idealized normalized body in order to conceive itself. Such a consideration almost always follows the dominant essentialization of bodies and this discussion addresses one in particular, gender. We first describe the canonical standardized bodies (often male) as defined by Le Corbusier, Neufert, and Dreyfuss. Then, we address more specifically the situation in South America (Colombia and Chile) and Liliana’s interest for urban policy making in this matter. We finish the conversation with the gender violence that resilience to catastrophes reasserts, in particular in the ...

What happens when feminist activism turns art making into social practice? What happens when feminist conversations, at once joyful, contentious, conflictual, and generative, are being cared for through curatorial practice that mobilizes the archives of ephemeral, art-enabled conversations? Feminist artists of the 1970s concerned with developing a radical critique of heteropatriarchy used dinner parties and conversations for artistic exploration. The Dinner Party by artist Judy Chicago is the best-known example harnessing the representational power of a dinner party. Much less known is The International Dinner Party by Suzanne Lacy, who invited “sisters” around the world to hold dinner parties simultaneously ...

Based on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” an array of theorists have developed approaches towards an aesthetics of production. The texts of this issue investigate how Benjamin’s arguments may serve as a ground for reflecting and theorizing current art practices. What are the consequences of political art’s function of “supplying the capitalist production apparatus, not changing it”? How can artistic methods subvert cooptation following Brecht and Tretyakov? Where are there new models of artists/intellectuals as producers and “specialists” rather than experts for the universal?