Erika Katalina Pasztor, who participated in HACK.Fem.EAST with the project Network of Thoughts [NoT], wrote a very interesting report of the exhibition. We consider these impressions and suggestions an important starting point for a collective reflection on our experience and we hope many more writings like this will follow.
Thank you very much, Erika!
Tatiana Bazzichelli and Gaia Novati
Dear hackfemeasts,
Let me add some personal note, before we sink irreversibly into our regular lives.
Miss Information is an art project within the exhibition HACK.Fem.EAST in Berlin. Stickers all over the city encourage citizens to call a telephone number for Miss Information. As you might expect from the name, this is not your regular information number – instead you are connected with previous callers. Sometimes all you get is confusion, but you might also get a recommendation for a great place to have breakfast in Berlin, or find out why the sun is yellow…
Listen in on the calls:
Read more about Miss Information, a creation by Telekommunisten.
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
http://www.wooloo.org/festival/
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.
Interview with Gaia Novati, co-organizer of HACK.Fem.EAST.
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.
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.
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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