April Interview-Makhzin
Finding Resonances with Carla Lonzi
Federica Bueti in conversation with Giovanna Zapperi
Federica Bueti interviews Giovanna Zapperi on Carla Lonzi’s groundbreaking and under-acknowledged feminist contribution to writing and art criticism.
“Lonzi experimented with ways of writing ‘differently’ in the context of 1960s-1970s Italian culture, when the country’s social structures were shaken by a growing political contestation—from the workers strikes in the 1960s, to the 1968 revolts, and the autonomous movements that emerged throughout the 1970s—and, of course, a mass feminist movement. She wanted to undo the roles linked to her oppression, while constantly trying to articulate her subjective experience within a collective endeavor.”
–Giovanna Zapperi
Every month, Makhzin publishes interviews reflecting on its yearly theme. The interviews around this year’s issue, Feminisms, invites writers and artists to explore influential feminist figures, feminist publishing practices, past feminist movements as they inform the present, feminist and queer writing, and contemporary feminist thought and debates.
Federica Bueti is a writer, art critic, and editor based in Berlin. She is editor of …ment, a journal for contemporary culture, art and politics. Her current research focuses on the feminist politics of writing. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, among others frieze, X-TRA, art-agenda, CARLA, Flash Art. She is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, London.
Giovanna Zapperi is a Paris-based art historian who received her doctorate from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. In 2013–14, she was a fellow at the French Academy in Rome where she began working on her current book manuscript on the criticism and art historical work of radical Italian feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–82).
April Interview-Makhzin
Activated Negativity: An Interview with Marina Vishmidt With Julia Calver and Mira
In this interview, Julia Calver and Mira Mattar talk to Marina Vishmidt about the significance of gender abolition and what role the concept of a “subject” can play in the revolutionary feminist transformation of social relations.
Abolition of gender, in much contemporary theory, is envisioned as a crucial part of a general movement towards the dismantling of the capitalist relation wherein gender is a primary tool of domination. In this interview Julia Calver and Mira Mattar talk to Marina Vishmidt about the significance of gender abolition and what role the concept of a “subject” can play in the revolutionary feminist transformation of social relations.
Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer and editor occupied mainly with questions around art, labour, materiality, feminism and value. She is the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, forthcoming) and A-Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Textem and Mute, 2016). She holds an MA from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and a PhD from the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London.
Julia Calver is an artist and writer based in London. She curated Bad Omens, an evening of readings for Lit Crawl London, 2015, and co-curated Nearly and Nervous Nearly and Now an event about artists’ writing in the UK and Scandinavia, Gothenburg. In 2015 she was IASPIS fellow at Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, Sweden and artist in residence at NLHspace, Copenhagen, culminating in the solo show, The Briar Behind Glass.
Mira Mattar writes fiction and prose poetry. She is a contributing editor at Mute and co-runs a small press. She recently edited You Must Make Your Death Public: A collection of texts and media on the work of Chris Kraus, and co-edited Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis. She lives in south east London. Some of her work can be found at her-mouth.tumblr.com.
Reading Group with Dima Hamadeh
The Making of Nationalism and Female Agency
Every 3 weeks starting April 2016, 98weeks project space
This reading group addresses the question: how did nationhood become gendered throughout modernity, and how is female agency perceived within the nationalistic structure of thought?
Inspired by the iconic images of female fighters from the Algerian Independence war to the more recent images of Rojava militants, this reading group explores literary and theoretical texts that shed light on the constituents of the nationalist’s gaze and the paternalistic moralization behind it. More importantly, it addresses how the notion of patriotism has been instrumental in women’s internalization of the gender hierarchy. Beginning with an excerpt of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, where the critique of the modern nation-state is rarely scrutinized, the readings will feature Qasim Amin, commonly celebrated as the first Arab feminist, novelists Assia Djebar and Radwa Ashur in addition to readings in history, national studies and gender.
If interested, please send an email to info [at] 98weeks.net.
Talk by Núria Güell
Ethics of Consequences in Contextual Artistic Practices
April 23, 7pm, 98weeks project space
By presenting recent projects, Núria Güell will show the different phases of design, development, production and dissemination of her work in specific socio-political and economical contexts, seeking to modify the micro-political level of reality.
Núria asks if it is possible to subvert art’s autonomy, opening up a discussion on the delicate line between the ethics of intentions and the ethics of consequences in contextual art practices.
Her artistic practice analyses how power affects subjectivity. The resources she uses in her work flirt with established powers, different institutional partners and the privileges they grant, in addition to her white, Spanish, European woman privileges. These tactics, diluted into her own life, intend to disrupt power relations and seek the redistribution of joy.
After a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (Spain), Núria Güell continues her studies at the Cátedra Arte de Conducta in Havana (Cuba), under the direction of Tania Bruguera. Her work has been exhibited in biennials and museums in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and United States. She also collaborates with various self-managed social centers.
