Organising: Feminist Duration Reading Group

(in english language)

Nothing Worthwhile is Done Alone: On Friendship and Feminist Organising*

Feminist Duration Reading Group  

Concept: Sabrina Fuller and Helena Reckitt

Editing and Composition: Sabrina Fuller

Contributors: Joan Anim-Addo, Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari, Rosie Cooper, Kezia Davies, Flora Dunster, Haley Ha, Taey Iohe, Alexandra Kokoli, Lucy Lopez, Laura Malacart, Kim McAleese, Gabby Moser, Sara Paiola, Helena Reckitt, Sasha Roseneil, Ehryn Torrell

Women tend to take special care of their relationships with one another. Yet until the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s few accounts of friendship’s importance for women existed. Building on this revaluation of women’s affectionate bonds, this podcast explores friendship as a vital force in feminist organising, community-building, and practices of mutual care.

Through the voices of seventeen contributors, and the texts and projects they cite, a polyphonic account of friendship as a political practice emerges.  Contributors explore friendship as a plural space of interaction through which women have found mediation between themselves and the public domain.  They reflect on how bonds of friendship nurture acts of alliance, resistance, and reciprocity, in which participants both listen and feel heard, see and are seen.

Friendship operates as a key principal within the Feminist Duration Reading Group. Befriending earlier periods of feminist activity and feminisms outside the dominant canon, the group fosters a mood of intimate exchange where references and citations became shared resources.

Recorded at the end of year marked by Covid-19, during which many people have felt isolated and anxious, “Nothing worth doing is done alone” reconsiders the importance of sharing and holding space, collective thinking and reading. It also celebrates the sheer pleasure of being together.

Contributors include regular FDRG participants and collaborators as well as people who have hosted recent meetings within institutional and domestic settings. Also featured are excerpts from recordings of FDRG sessions at the South London Gallery and Hypatia Trust in Penzance.

The FDRG is grateful to Delpha Hudson for her recording of “Feminist Readings” which she organised at Hypatia Trust in January 2019

*the podcast’s name comes from “Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” a 2019 interview with Mariame Kaba by Eve L Ewing, referenced in the contribution by Lucy Lopez

www.feministduration.com/

References: www.sabrinafuller.com/nothing-worthwhile-is-done-alone 

“See U th3re - dialogues between windows” is a five-part exhibition and podcast series and a cooperation project between the KVHBF Vitrinen in Hamburg-Harburg train station and "It takes place between glass and windows", a project by Anne Meerpohl in the showcase in the entrance area of HFBK Hamburg.
In five dialogical exhibitions, ten artistic positions meet not only each other but also meet the respective characteristics of the exhibition locations. At the beginning there was an open call, which asked to question, challenge and rethink the showcases and the logic of representation and visibility inscribed in them with regard to feminism, care and friendship. Ten artistic positions were then invited to a speed dating, during which the couples formed who now exhibit together.

Despite their current use as exhibition spaces, the showcases we work with generally represent content that is neither feminist nor testifies to care and friendship. They reproduce certain (stereotypical) body images, concepts of artists and identity, work and community images. How and what kind of presence can we give ourselves in the showcases that does not follow the same logic? So what frame of reference can and must we create for ourselves? Which transformation processes can we initiate, which ones can we follow?

As the artists occupy the showcases with their perspectives on these issues, they are for the time being literally a showcase into a future, carried by hope and longing for change, for artistic alliances.

Relationships are created through glass, behind windows, between showcases.

The five exhibitions are accompanied by five podcast episodes that bridge the distance between the HFBK and the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (public transport U3 and S3 approx. 30 minutes) and take on their own approach towards visibility, friendship, feminism, organization and care.

More informationen: kvhbf.de/program/=vitrinen/30…ge-zwischen-fenstern
www.hfbk-hamburg.de/de/aktuelles/see-U-th3re/