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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Lagos: Search, Research Research always makes life complicated. We might end up knowing too much, getting lost in accumulated information, stories, details, in between perspectives that all fall apart. How do we begin such a process and how do we navigate it, how do we move within? How do we set the premises? What do we do next? What to do with a discovery we don’t want to make? Which form, format should it take? All these questions will stay with us and transform through issue 2 of the Women on Aeroplanes Inflight Magazine. And yes, as many an- swers turn ...

My life is a collage, with time cutting and ar- ranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting, wrote Eileen Agar, photographer and painter, associated with the Surrealist movement who, like Colette Omogbai, attended the Slade School of Fine Art—almost exactly 40 years earlier, be- tween 1925 and 1926. The repetition of a certain phrasing in connection with Colette Omogbai, a pioneering Nigerian painter, “who identified as a Surrealist,” sent us looking into histories of surrealisms. The plural here is important, be- cause there are indeed many invocations and ...

The idea of making use of spaces, transforming existing ones, creating new ones, making a living and a change, very much carries through the following pages. The importance to have, maintain, and organise places, frameworks, and opportunities that allow a continuity to negotiate and fight over common grounds. Making spaces vibratory. To imagine a restaurant or a nightclub in Manchester or London in the 1930s as a business proposition but at the same time as a safe space in which to conspire to liberate Africa; to imagine a restaurant as an art gallery—while working as a waitress—and proceeding to turn ...

Feminist Pedagogies Working Group The work group was triggered by the desire to articulate and create space for a queer and feminist perspective on learning and teaching inside and outside of the art academy. It builds on and responds to the Critical Practices: Education from Arts and Artists Conference at Valand Academy (October 2015) and the Meaning Making Meaning exhibition at A-venue (March 2016) in Gothenburg. All students and staff at Valand Academy were invited to join this open work group. Over the past year we held lunchtime meetings, dinners at homes, met in bars or over skype, in our studios and ...

Anicka discusses with gallerist Stefania Bortolami, collector Cristina Delgado, curator Ruba Katrib, critic Andrew Russeth, and artist Amy Sillman the viability of female networks and bottom-line economics for women in the contemporary-art world. First of a three-part series.

A new episode on the viabilities of female networks with a discussion between Juliana Huxtable, Park McArthur, Keren Cytter, Rebecca Quaytman and Rachel Harrison. We discuss gendered formalism, entitlement and much more… [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/241042184″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]

Episode 12: Margins 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 Elfi Turpin, ...

For this episode of our Criticism in Conversation series, a writer and collaborative performer, Jacob Wren, speaks with artist Dayna Danger, about the line between empowerment and objectification and the meaning of community in both their work. Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish artist whose images highlight and queer power dynamics, kinship, representation, and sexuality. Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature, including 2014’s Polyamorous Love Song and this year’s Authenticity is a Feeling, a hybrid of history, performance theory, and memoir. Together they cover a lot of ground, from personal narratives and community relationships to speaking against silence and apathy. We also ...

Episode 8: Networks This episode is based on the Symposium on feminism, witches, art and pedagogy, around the exhibition of Doris Stauffer at Centre culturel Suisse in Paris in April 2019. The guests speakers are Bice Curiger, Mara Züst and Simone Koller, moderated by Claire Hoffmann.

Although the history of photography and the history of photo and artists’ books is widely documented, collected, exhibited, and discussed, the legacy of women using photography in print is underdocumented, cursory, fragmentary and too often, inaccurate. Women were always at the forefront of innovation and the political debate on photography, despite the harsh conditions in which they often lived and worked, but their voices and their historical contribution are still marginalised. As the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin asked, what are the implications of this rejection and what elements of these practices do we need to reevaluate? And why does ...