This episode celebrates 10+ years of domestic workers organizing and campaigning in Spain, where congress finally approved legislation that grants domestic workers equal rights to other workers. Listen to the stories of Territorio Doméstico and Mujeres Unidas entre Tierras, two powerful collectives that have not just campaigned, but developed an incredible toolbox of mutual support, care, networking, migrant solidarity and celebration.
During ongoing protests in 2014 that escalated in a burning governance building for the first time I took part in interdisciplinary collaborations among different artistic disciplines mostly in public spaces. Thereby I experienced how art can be a tool for expressing resistance and solidarity while recipients are not a middle-class audience who pay tickets, actually this time the gaining ones of the artistic contribution have been the very people who have been addressed in the art piece itself, in this example: the unpaid workers which protested on the streets in front of the parliament in Sarajevo BiH 2014.
A Marseille, les premiers collages ont incité un groupe d’ami.es à créer leur propre mouvement de collage en septembre 2019 sur le principe de l’intersectionnalité. Nous sommes un collectif sans chef.fe et sans hiérarchie. Lorsque l’un.e de nous a une idée de phrase, on la propose au collectif qui la valide ou non.
L’intérêt de ce moyen d’action se trouve aussi dans la large audience qu’il peut toucher. La rue étant un lieu public, nos messages sont vus par des gens de classes sociales, de genres et d’âges différents ; ils peuvent atteindre tout le monde. De la femme victime de violence qui y trouve du soutien au vieux monsieur retraité qui ne comprend rien au féminisme et que notre message va peut-être faire réfléchir, nous nous trouvons face à toutes sortes de réactions.
During the communist era in Poland, art was part of the socialist party’s propaganda and free art was censored. However, artists created politically engaged art, openly provoking or hiding ‘politically incorrect’ content between the lines. The political role of art is very much needed again today. As an artist, I have always addressed political, social and religious themes in my work. Since I have become involved in activism, I am practically still doing the same thing – engaged art, only that it is shown on the street, seen by crowds and not by a narrow circle of people interested in art. As an artist, I see this as a challenge to myself and my work, to seek a definition of art.
During the discussion on May 24, 2022 we were gathering different local and translocal experiences with cross-movement alliances driven by queer-feminist initiatives.First, the activists from Bulgaria, Spain, Switzerland and France were bringing in reports on queer-feminist interventions in social struggles within their local contexts. We were talking about queer-feminist protest against neoliberal reforms of social services, as well as queer-feminist initiatives for social housing and opposition against nationalist, right wing politics. Second, we were getting to know the transnational feminist network “Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational” (EAST). We were learning more about EAST’s queer-feminist approach to connect social struggles of migrants, care workers, women and LGBTQI-communities on a transnational level.
READ MORE Video documentation of the discussion: Feminist cross-movement alliances
his episode features an extended conversation with feminist Johanna Bouchardeau, veteran activist of Longomaï and founding member of the feminist library and space Agate, armoise et salamandre – corps et politique in Fourcalquier. This is a storytelling kind of episode – tune into Johannas voice and enjoy stories of the founding of Longomaï in the 70s, how it linked the militant underground with local peasant struggles, the many dimensions of its internationalist work, feminist challenges and perspectives, and much more.
This episode features a conversation with Rosemary Rojas, from the Border Agricultural Workers Project and The Border Women’s Project in El Paso, Texas. Since 1994, the project has supported and assisted agricultural workers crossing the US/Mexico border and their families, and is part of La Via Campesina. We speak to Rosemary about workers and feminist struggles in the region, and the efforts to ensure safe working conditions during the pandemic.
In this episode we speak to Attila Szocs of Ecoruralis, a 14,000 member-strong peasant farmer organization in Romania that is part of La Via Campesina Europe. The first part of this episode explores the work of Ecoruralis at the community level: their seed house, peasant-to-peasant knowledge exchanges, local production and distribution networks, Ecoruralis’ approach to agroecology and organization, and the horizon for strengthening rural feminism.
This time-travel session takes us from desirable futures back to our complicated past, asking: How do we imagine transformation? Centering on a performative interview with Amaranta Herrero and Dimitris Papadopoulos, set in 2050, this session engages the playful and transdisciplinary method of the Future Archive project. Animating and complicating questions of what is desirable, this session encourages to go beyond strictly utopian and dystopian visions of the future, based on their own implicatedness in worlds and struggles.
The pandemic, like other unfolding and coming ecological crises, profoundly reshapes the terrain upon which social movements operate and emerge. We held a workshop in order to discuss different terrains of struggle over housing, reproductive rights, and ecology. Here we are allocating recordings of the talks and of the discussion on May 21st as well as further reflections on the workshop on May 22nd.
READ MORE Documentation: Learning and Struggling in Pandemic times