Art historian and co-founder of Niche Berlin Stefanie Gerke is sadly accustomed to seeing discursive events headed by solely men. In this thinkpiece she makes the case against all male panels. It could make a big difference to the way we think about many things. Last week TU Berlin Urban Design student and graduate of Metropolitan Culture Andrea Protschky joined Stadtkuratorin for the International Festival on Feminism and Public Space. She responds to the different viewpoints that were presented with her own realisations.
In hysterical times like these, we need to challenge our presumptions. At the Festival on Feminism and Public Space from May 4th-7th in Hamburg, international artists, performers, theoreticians and activists questioned current public narratives of migration, gender roles and material reproduction conditions. As part of the project Stadtkuratorin, the event took place at the art university HFBK and the dance and performance platform Kampnagel. This article in the New York Times documents a variety of viewpoints of women working in architecture. It's so important to hear from the people who truly experience gender in their workplace, to come to understand what prejudices exist in spatial practices.
A great article by Debbie Cameron in her blog "language: a feminist guide" reflecting upon the death of Zaha Hadid and the use of the word "female" in this matter. We have also come up against this lexical problem in L'Espace Féminin. Our personal approach has been to stick with "woman/women" in spite of the grammatical clumsiness of the phrasing. With this, we wish commit to a social frame of reference, and not a biological one.
We stumbled upon an initiative that we feel has many echoes with our own: Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons.
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