‘Art of the Possible’

towards an international antifascist feminist front

When: April 6-8, 2017
Where: Monument to Revolution, Dourou-Dourouti Square (next to Avdi Square), Kerameikos district, Athens

For three days, visitors to Sanja Ivekovic’s public art project for Documenta 14 Monument to Revolution in central Athens will encounter a collective oral document in which the contributors – women engaged in cultural or political critique, activism, art and poetry – respond to the imagining of an international antifascist feminist front. They speak in different languages – their mother tongues or the languages in which their thinking and acting is shape – and yet they speak in common, gathered in a joint speech-act against the political monsters that the oppression and misery of the present threaten to generate. Envisioned as a prefigurative political positioning, this gathering of voices foregrounds the need for a broad, coalitional feminism as a revolutionary political horizon capable of confronting the current neo-fascist offensive witnessed in many parts of the world.

The audio intervention is in dialogue with Sanja Iveković’s work Monument to Revolution which re-imagines Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Monument to the November Revolution). Built in Berlin in 1926 and demolished by the Nazis in the 1930s, the latter’s destruction represented the second death of the revolutionaries murdered in 1919 by the proto-Nazi Freikorps. As a document of its/our times, ‘Art of the Possible’: towards an international antifascist feminist front responds to the temporary re-materialisation of the base of monument intended to challenge the normalised amnesia surrounding female revolutionaries as well as insurrectionary histories in public space.

The audio document is inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s definition of transformative political praxis in terms of ‘the art of the possible’ (1898) about how ‘practical struggle become[s] what it must be: the realisation of our basic principles in the process of social life and the embodiment of our general principles in practical, everyday action. And only under these conditions do we fight in the sole permissible way for what is at any time ‘possible’.’ Following in her footsteps, the diverse array of theoretical reflections, thoughts, poems and songs received in response to the proposition of an international antifascist feminist front indicate a framework for interventions within our historically specific conditions of urgency without forgetting the vigilant solidarity underpinning the feminist struggle as such.

Contributors include: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan/RAWA (Afghanistan), Mujeres Públicas (activist art collective, Argentina), Elke Krasny (art theorist, Austria), Jaleh Mansoor (art historian, Canada), Cecilia Vicuña (artist and poet, Chile), Vesna Kesić (activist and writer, Croatia), Le Zbor (feminist choir, Croatia), Kuratorisk Aktion (Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen, CAMP founders, Denmark), Mare Tralla (artist and activist, Estonia/UK), Arahmaiani (artist and activist, Indonesia), Giovanna Zapperi (art historian, Italy/France), Isabell Lorey (political theorist, Germany), Athena Athanasiou (social anthropologist, Greece), Phoebe Giannisi (poet, Greece), To Mov/The Purple (feminist collective, Greece), The Organisation of United African Women (Migrant Women Association, Greece), Larissa Vergou (actress and elected councilor of Athens Municipality, Greece), Universal Jenny (poet/s, Greece), Dilar Dirik (writer and activist, Kurdish Women’s Movement), Sylvia Marcos (writer and activist, Mexico), Syreny.tv (Ewa Majewska & Aleka Polis, feminist network, Poland), Ana Teixeira Pinto with Alex Martinis Roe (writers and artists, Portugal/Australia/Germany), Gülsün Karamustafa (artist, Turkey), Esther Leslie (political and cultural theorist, UK), International Women’s Strike (USA), The National Women’s Liberation (USA), Bojana Pejić (art historian, Serbia), Shubigi Rao (artist and writer, Singapore), Nuria Enguita Mayo (art historian, Spain). The sound file was compiled by the feminist electronic musician and performer AGF (Germany/Finland).

The audio intervention is an initiative of art theorists and writers Angela Dimitrakaki and Antonia Majaca in collaboration with Sanja Iveković.

The same in Greek, in the Greek part of the website