This event explores relations between independent, minoritarian, activist, or artivist archives and institutions, foregrounding the practices and labour involved in building connections and enabling knowledge exchange in order to preserve and animate important collections. Inspired by the Mexican artist and archivist Mónica Mayer's strategic, playful and subversive practice of "lubricating the system", the event considers ways of infiltrating institutions when necessary, forming partnerships at times, while also keeping critical distance and independence. Speakers from Sarajevo, Mexico City and Ljubljana will introduce individual projects as comparative case studies, opening up a broader discussion.
Artist Mónica Mayer, co-curator of the exhibition and archivist of the Pinto mi Raya archive in Mexico City, will share some examples of her decade-long feminist practice of caring for archival materials through performative acts of "lubricating the system". Andreja Dugandžić of Crvena, a cultural and educational organisation which created the digital archive of Anti-fascist struggle of women in BiH and Yugoslavia, will present the exhibition Polet žena, included as a permanent display at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. The local dialogue then brings together artists, NGOs and institutions that have worked on preserving contemporary art and activist archives. Confirmed participants include the Bring in Take out Living Archive (Katja Kobolt, Dunja Kukovec), the Slovene Dance Archive (Rok Vevar and Jasmina Založnik, also the City of Women co-director), the Lesbian Quarter (Suzana Tratnik) in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary History Celje (Urška Repar) and the Ljubljana City Museum (Corinne Brenko), Raz_Ume (Teja Merhar) and the Network Museum of MSUM (Ida Hirschenfelder).
The event is taking place in the framework of the exhibition Archival Chain Reactions, which emerged from a collaborative project dedicated to connecting and activating important yet precarious archives of feminist art. By addressing the historical erasure of women and gender-nonconforming, queer feminist artists, the project aims to counter the threat of disappearing feminist archives and emphasises the necessity of networking and exchange among archives in different global contexts. It brings together Pinto mi Raya (Mexico City), an archive built by artists Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma; the project re.act.feminism (Berlin), traveling as a living performance archive across Europe since 2008; and City of Women (Ljubljana), with its significant but dispersed archive accumulated over 31 years of festival and programe activities.
Made in collaboration with Moderna galerija Ljubljana and Goethe-Institut Ljubljana.
This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
