On 9 June (from 20.00) the networkers of HACK.Fem.EAST, Tatiana Bazzichelli and Gaia Novati, will present the exhibition to the participants of the New Life Berlin Festival (dk/de), with a psychogeographic guide held at the outset of the project.
With Creative Cocktails and Walking Aperitivo.
Introduction: Katerina Valdivia Bruch.
Electro / Spoken Word Performance by Lady Gaby.

Registration at: info@hackfemeast.org
Where: Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien Berlin, Mariannenplatz 2, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.
Starting time: 20.00h. Ending: 23.00h
More info: http://www.hackfemeast.org – http://www.kunstraumkreuzberg.de
http://www.wooloo.org/festival/

– elektronische Mailinglisten und Frauennetzwerke

by Valie Djordjevic

Schon vor dem Web 2.0 gab es virtuelle Gemeinschaften, manche davon schon ziemlich lange. Seit Mitte der 90er Jahre vernetzen sich Künstlerinnen und Medienarbeiterinnen über Mailinglisten. Obwohl diese nichts weiter sind als ein ziemlich simples Stück Software, das elektronische Nachrichten an eine Gruppe von Leuten weiterschickt, können die Teilnehmer, die manchmal über den ganzen Globus verteilt sind, Netzwerke formen, die über die virtuelle Welt hinaus Bestand haben.

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by Mare Tralla

Faces mailing-list, initiated in 1996-1997 by Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wolgemuth aimed to connect women who were globally active in the areas of culture, new media, arts and technology. It grew out of several face-to-face meetings in Europe, including Rotterdam, Bilbao, Liverpool, St.Petersburg.

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…and other histories of feminism

by Marina Grzinic

The grammar of rights and the grammar of feminism clearly show that to implement social change, contemplation is not enouh. Cognitive and immaterial labor produces other types of class and hierarchical relationships today. The word emancipation in EU is of tricky nature, since it allows for the emancipation of middle class and upper class women, while on all the others are being imposed reinforced and meticulously hidden new enslavement conditions by the labor market. The EU has established a whole migratory class of helping, cleaning, and serving women, immigrants not only from outside the EU but from within the EU, namely from states that are seen as peripheral and underdeveloped. Besides sex work, and less politically correct (naming of) direct, brutal, and forced prostitution, a category of new slaves is arising in Europe. Migratory women without permits and legal status work in households in the western worlds of the EU and allow the emancipation of women in such households. In other words, emancipation for some, is a direct enslavement for others, both relations have to be seen through mechanisms of decomposition and recomposition of post-Fordist changes of labor and the brutal prevention of legal access to labor markets.

What is needed is a political action that is not based solely on imagination but on almost material incorporation of very real histories, present practices, experiences, and political theoretical elaborations of changed conditions of production of knowledge, labour, and feminism/migration.

Feminism has developed empowering feminist figurations from Haraway cyborg, to nomads etc., which are imagined as new agents and actors within possible socialist feminist frameworks of emancipation. But in the former Eastern European context we had real feminist politics that need to be interpreted. The ex-Yugoslav politics need not be imagined for they are supported by facts, documents, politics, and practices that are constantly being overlooked. We have to be less imaginative and more politically susceptible in recognizing the material power of these histories and the present.

See Marina Gržinic and Aina Smid’s work Obsession at HACK.Fem.EAST

The video work Obsession by Grzinic and Smid, is presented as an installation that have as its central core the text by Natasa Velikonja, Ljubljana,  “Europe is boring,” the text is published in Reartikulacija, the (online) critical journal platform edited by Grzinic and 3 other members part of the art scene in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Read here the text in English.

Exhibition, performances, a reader

by Humour Works

City of Women fees are low. No one is regularly employed; we all work on a basis of a temporary project contract. There are four of us throughout the year doing the job for seven.

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by Joanne Richardson

I left Bucharest when I was 9. My parents were political refugees of the Ceausescu regime. I came back to Romania after 20 years to discover a “postcommunnist” atmosphere that sings praises to the market and condemns any critique of global capitalism as “Stalinist.” Concepts like the commons, the collective, and activism are dismissed because of the disrepute of their communist past. When activism becomes outlawed on the level of thought, passivity is legitimated as an everyday reality.

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Download of the day – the HACK.Fem.EAST.Zine!
If you didn’t catch this in the Tagesspiegel /Taz last week, here it is as a fresh little pdf.

HACK.Fem.EAST.Zine (german)

A handful of the exhibitors and participants at HACK.Fem.EAST have contributed with some great texts:

Joanne Richardson – Video als Intervention
Marina Grzinic – Das Hacken der Geschlechtsdifferenz
Jasmina Tesanovic – Computer und Empfängnisverhütung
Mare Tralla – Faces – Ein weiterer lokaler Ort
Humourworks.org – Humour Works
Valie Djordjevic – Old Girls Network – Elektronische Mailinglisten und Frauennetzwerke

All over Berlin, these stickers are becoming more and more prevalent, inviting you to call 030-2000-9039 for Miss Information. From the project page:

“Miss Information” presents herself as an Information Service, affixing stickers out of context to other media, posters, signs, walls, anywhere where information may be sought, creating the impression in callers that if they call her, she will inform them about the item of their interest.

(…) when the next callers call Miss Information, they are connected directly to the last callers, and then are called themselves when the following callers call, and so on. The information, naturally, being transformed as it passes from person to person.

At HACK.Fem.EAST you can visit the Miss, pick up a bunch of stickers, and listen to the confusion and connections that arise. Here’s a taste:

And don’t be shy, call right now, the number is a local Berlin number, no other costs apply.

030 – 2000 9039 (+49-30-20009039 from abroad)

More about Miss Information and her Telekommunisten

Janez Jansa has put up a nice slideshow of his presentation of SS-XXX – Die Frau Helga – The Borghild Project Reconstruction from saturday at HACK.Fem.EAST. Be sure to pump up the volume – but maybe not if you’re at work…

To the slidehow