In this collaborative work, designer Gabriel A. Maher, designer and social worker Roberto Perez Gayo and multidisciplinary artist Carly Rose Bedford elaborate on the relationship of feminism to the collective regimes of enunciation that produce it.
How do you orient yourself within this word? How do you orient yourself in a language that precedes you?
If we look from this perspective to the word feminism we understand how, as a word, it can transform its own conditions, function as a disruptive agent and incite analysis of any condition or context it is placed within. Recognising it as a composite term, means to embrace its complexity. It houses a multiplicity of positions, approaches, interpretations, histories and subjectivities. All of these positions are there within the word.
Once I cross into that space,
how do/can/must/may/ought 'I'
move/relate/think/interact/feel?
And how would I describe it?
In order to achieve this, Maher, Perez and Rose speculate on how setting the listening conditions prior to the act of speech can generate new forms of community and collectivity. By approaching the word Feminism as a technology, they look towards how this process can generate self-reflection and invite the word feminism to listen to itself in a queer and intersectional feminist framework.
As much as a physical exhibition, this work exists as a methodology that attempts to reflect and act upon the collectivity that feminism as a word connotes. It contemplates collectivity, the act of listening and knowledge production. This process and outcome reflects dialogues of urgency or irreverence, analysis and reflection that cycled within a collective of people each unified by an investment in feminism.
“___________ ” is an invitation to explore how our individual positions and actions relate to the collective arrangements we belong to through the technology of the word and consequently, through the act of listening.
A network of 26 feminist voices transmit
Installation & performative action(s), Onomatopee 150.2 / NEST Project 2017, Eindhoven.
production design by Isabel Mager
Images: Kyle Tryhorn & Daantje Bons