Visit the F.A.M. website here.
Feminism Art Maintenance group explores different perspectives on womxn’s organising, maintenance and radical care, from mothering to cultural production to industrial action.
F.A.M. is a research group bringing together artists, poets, filmmakers, academics, curators and other cultural workers committed to collective forms of organising. We work at various scales within the context of ongoing political struggles, with community or wxmen’s organisations, as part of film collectives, embedded in feminist libraries, or in the making of new (feminist) institutions. We attend to the ongoing, recurring, repetitive, and cyclic, heard in the different currents we are moving within.
We see an urgency to build solidarity across different local struggles and artistic endeavours; experimenting with ways to gather, to hold space, to listen, and build alliances. Our first gathering was initiated by Petra Bauer and began with Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles and its lingering questions about reproductive work. Over these initial days we shared practices, exhibitions, films and perspectives on ‘housework’, shifting the focus away from domestic contexts – from the video activism of “Les Insoumuses” (Defiant Muses) in 1970s France to “all about my mother” and the mixing of familial and institutional practices/metaphors at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.
In our semi-public and closed meet-ups we have discussed in-process artwork/research/practices and tested tools for gathering: Who is hosting? Who is cooking? Around the kitchen table, we share something of our lives and the possibility to embed care as a value and meaningful practice into other organisational and institutional contexts. The website, developed with Maeve Redmond and Jamie Sterling, is intended as a library-of-sorts where you can find articles, films, images and other materials related to this research and upcoming public activity.
F.A.M. is Petra Bauer, Binna Choi, Marius Dybwad Brandrud, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Frances Stacey, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha, Marina Vishmidt. Contributors to date include: Marwa Arsanios, Yin Aiwen, Akwugo Emejulu, Léuli Eshrāghi, iLiana Fokianaki, Mijke van der Drift, Caroline Gausden, Malin Huber, Petra Hultman, Annette Krauss, Rosanna Mercado-Rojas, Olivia Plender, Jenny Richards, Elena Sorokina. Project partners include: Bureau of Care, Cove Park, The Institut Français/Lara Szabo Greisma and Marie Proffit, Kvinnocenter i Tensta-Hjulsta.
F.A.M. is funded by Vetenskapsrådet / The Swedish Research Council and hosted by the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.