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 that think they can be me.

Aboroginal Women’s Presence Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist and writer with 12 years experience in Aboriginal and independent media. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland looking at media représentations of violence against Aboriginal women.

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 ...

Episode 15: Attention The two days Symposium “Women in Space” at the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel thematized the roles of scale, space and power in envisioning women in the art system: space is an issue for everyone, yet, it has specific resonance for those who make exhibitions and run institutions, and for women in general. How we move through space, how we claim it, how we narrate and thematize it, how we fund it, how we labor in it, how we construct and deconstruct it. In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Mareike Dittmer, ...

Episode 19: Big Bang (Disputaziuns Susch, The Magicians of the Mountains) The first episode in a series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Aleksandra Mir imagining an artist and a scientist sitting on a train where a conversation ensues about objective realities, space exploration, negative space and belief. Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around ...

Feminism today often feels bipolar. Focusing only on recent actions and reactions in the United States, it seems clear that, on the one hand, activist feminist movements such as MeToo and Time’s Up have helped spark a revolution in awareness about sexual harassment, sexual assault, and the larger forces of misogyny that have been long central to the consolidation of white patriarchal power. During Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about his alleged sexual assault of her in high school did not cancel his confirmation, but her testimony, broadcast live and in full, helped ignite more ...

In this text, Maite Garbayo-Maeztu seeks to think some of the first performances taking place in the 1970s in Spain, along with occupations of the street by feminist activism at the time. Artists like Dorothèe Selz, Fina Miralles, Àngels Ribé and Olga L. Pijoan would use veils, occultations and alterations that invited viewers to go beyond visuality.

In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word “power”? And then, just when you thought that you finally got the hang of how the power structures around you function, they seem to be coming undone. But are they really coming undone, or is the current that’s pushing and pulling at them not much more than a massage, a way to keep them up to date that stays only on the surface and is not able to touch the center. What is feminism, precisely? What are feminisms today? To answer these questions and myriad others, the next two issues ...

Previously in e-flux journal, we asked: In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word “power”? And then, just when you thought that you finally got the hang of how the power structures around you function, they seem to be coming undone … What is feminism, precisely? What are feminisms today? To examine these questions and myriad others, the previous and present issues of e-flux journal have been dedicated to feminism(s). It has been a particular pleasure to embark on an exploration and an unfolding of the many complex realities and iterations that feminisms can accommodate. Not one feminism, ...

Episode 16: Environments The two days Symposium “Women in Space” at the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel thematized the roles of scale, space and power in envisioning women in the art system: Space is an issue for everyone, yet, it has specific resonance for those who make exhibitions and run institutions, and for women in general. How we move through space, how we claim it, how we narrate and thematize it, how we fund it, how we labor in it, how we construct and deconstruct it. In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Raffael Dörig, ...

This conversation with Sara Farris was recorded on August 7, 2017 to be featured as a transcript in the 13th issue of The Funambulist Magazine (Sept-Oct. 2017), Queers, Feminists & Interiors. It attempts to link the work she presents in her book, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, 2017) with the violence against women that femonationalist discourses deliberately ignore (as these violences are exercised through what we could call “a universalist patriarchy”): domestic violence. The conversation first presents the political concept of femonationalism in the context of Europe, and then proceeds to describe the several dimensions ...

It’s been a rough news week. Between Thursday’s testimonies of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Kavanaugh’s near appointment to the Supreme Court Friday, many of us are exhausted. We would like a win for women. Sometimes the quickest way to achieve that is to do it yourself. As such, this episode of Explain Me celebrates women who have made waves in the world of art and activism, through a series of interviews with four major figures—Mia Pearlman (Make NY True Blue), Jenny Dubnau (ASAP), Nancy Kleaver (PARADE), and Mira Schor (Selected writing). In the first half of ...

Episode 4: Fear Selina Grüter & Michèle Graf, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Hannah Weinberger in conversation with Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Promise No Promises is a podcasts series produced by the Women’s Center for Excellence, a research project between the Art Institute and the Instituto Susch—a joint venture with Grażyna Kulczyk and Art Stations Foundation CH. The Women’s Center for Excellence is conceived as a think tank tasked to assess, develop, and propose new social languages and methods to understand the role of women in the arts, culture, science, and technology, as well as in all knowledge areas that are interconnected with the field ...

A reading event with artist A.L. Steiner and collaborator/translator Noura Wedell with a discussion on the legacy of Françoise d’Eaubonne’s activist work and original ecofeminist writing as part of an inquiry into its current-day viability as a call to action, and a recourse to mutation. During the development of French second-wave Eurocentric feminism arose the writings of Françoise d’Eaubonne, who coined the term ‘ecofeminism’ in 1974 as part of her 274-page tract Le Féminisme ou la mort. (Feminism or death.). Unsurprisingly, although regretfully, this critical text – along with the breadth of her prolific writings – has yet to receive English ...

The first episode of Promise No Promises! Feminism Under Corona is a continuation of a conversation with artist Ran Zhang about the effects and consequences of Covid-19 in a reality that is also mutating despite the confinement of our bodies being locked at home. “The first conversation I had about Covid-19 with the artist Ran Zhang took place in Paris at the end of January 2020, on the occasion of her exhibition Resolution of Traits at the independent art space L’ahah. The virus that had caused a new disease, first in Wuhan and China, was now appearing in France and by ...

The title of the third episode Radical Sociability from the Feminism Under Corona series refers to a recent lecture by artist, curator, writer and radio producer Lou Drago in which they were unfolding the complexity of the relationship between identity politics and the current and growing division of the Left. As a way of overcoming the divisive effects of identitarianism, they propose “to enact an intersectional affinity-based politics.” In order to avoid the dynamics of the current “cancel culture,” so present and constant in social networks, Lou Drago’s proposal is based on calling-in rather than calling-out. This conversation between Lou ...

The fifth episode is based on a conversation with interdisciplinary artist Melanie Jame Wolf, whose work critically circulates within the flow of immaterial capital by using the performative condition and potential of our identities. The conversation between Sonia Fernández Pan and Melanie Jame Wolf incorporated some of the many elephants in the (art) room, such as social class, age, or “undisciplined” bodies in the field of performance, dance, and choreography. It was also an opportunity to talk about social networks and the inevitable perverse functioning of symbolic capital in and through them. As Melanie Jame Wolf points out, contemporary social ...

This episode is based on a conversation with Ana Garzón Sabogal, who lives and works in Colombia. In her practice she is operating with the close encounter between art, collaborative learning, activism, and free culture, and is member of Más Arte Más Acción, together with Alejandra Rojas Giraldo. Their practice includes a feminism which stems from the critical conscience and from the understanding of feminist practices as depending on the material conditions of each context, of each community and of each person. The same applies to the political question of language, because of the enormous need to learn, to know, ...

The second episode entitled The Monogamy of the System is a continous exchange with author and activist Brigitte Vasallo about the consequences and instrumentalization of the pandemic by governments, corporations and people in power. In order to shake up some common considerations about love and monogamy, this conversation aims to expand their meaning beyond the commonplace and romantic ideas which seem to be even more predominant in the current situation of personal and political isolations.

This sixth episode There is more than one community is based on a conversation with Australian-born and New York-based writer and scholar McKenzie Wark, who is known for her writings on critical theory and new media. Her latest book Reverse Cowgirl has been published by Semiotext(e) in 2020. Somehow, reading books starts always in reverse. We turn them over with our hands, looking for answers in advance on the back cover. However, Reverse Cowgirl is not a book made to satisfy questions, not even those of the author herself regarding her own biography. The conversation with McKenzie Wark does not provide ...

In this conversation, Mimi Zeiger and I examine a problem internal to the architectural world, yet that can be found in various forms in other disciplines. The “politics of simulacra” consists in a discursive use of consensual notions to describe practices that do not fully engage with the problems that they claim to address. In this regard, curating exhibitions or publications celebrating “women in architecture” often falls short of making a deep feminist argument. Similarly, the recent sum of energy spent around questions of “participation,” “openness,” “horizontality,” are interesting in what they suggest but too often do not make the ...

The importance of women’s rights have sprung up in movements across the globe in the past few years, exacerbated by increasing social, environmental, technological and political polarities. Feminisms is the sixth in a series of online publications published by L’Internationale Online. This publication examines how women, or those who identify as female have been addressing not only inequalities – in reproductive rights, sexual rights, and in the right to equal pay – but also how plural feminisms have been and are being consistently re-thought, and how art museums can work with and respond to issues surrounding women’s rights. Feminisms play a crucial ...

Episode 2: Gossip Camille Aleña, Stefanie Hessler, Elise Lammer, Nora Berman (from the audience) in conversation with Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Promise No Promises is a podcasts series produced by the Women’s Center for Excellence, a research project between the Art Institute and the Instituto Susch—a joint venture with Grażyna Kulczyk and Art Stations Foundation CH. The Women’s Center for Excellence is conceived as a think tank tasked to assess, develop, and propose new social languages and methods to understand the role of women in the arts, culture, science, and technology, as well as in all knowledge areas that are interconnected with the ...

The Taylorist tools of our modern homes, from the lawnmower to the microwave, are engineered for solo users. These tools complement our growth-oriented consumerist culture and gendered performance of the nuclear family. Honey I’m Home! questions domestic rituals by altering the props which support them. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for example, is a fictional, provocative prototype for collectivising domestic labour. As an alternative to the capitalist assumption that housework is most efficient when performed individually, the GDP is a device best used by three people.

The multi-layered research and exhibition project Women on Aeroplanes seeks to change the parameters of how we see and listen to the achievements and practices of women in a multitude of moments, being part of a transatlantic and transnational history, with a focus on the struggles for independence and their after effects. The transition from mobilizing all possible forces to win a battle and its hangover, the disenchantment of not being part of any negotiation concerning the future, seems to crystalise a history lesson about power politics. The disappearance of women in politics after their strong visibility during the times ...