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marthe prins
OK, So... Guess What..?!
OK, So... Guess What..?!
like many, I’ve experienced the days that followed the publishing of the NRC article with an intensity for which I’ve yet to find words. speaking with and listening to many of my peers, friends, students and colleagues has made evident that time and space are needed for healing, care and other such work.
with Ok, So.. Guess What?! I invite students and teachers, artists, alumni, curators —well indeed, all art-workers— to strike.
to lay down the work in order to do the work. To collectivise, to share and to shape resources.
to, in the words of Donna Haraway, “stay with the trouble.”
to make physical, to gossip and to heal.
to navigate together what is needed to change a prevailing culture in which sexism, sexual abuse, rape, mental abuse, labor exploitation and other forms of violence, are tolerated —at times even glorified— within and by the structures that make up our cultural institutions.
RE
really?
NON
NON
RE
UN
UN
act
when gossips gather
gossip
gossip
gossip
gossip*
gossip
gossip
*"deriving from the Old English terms God and sibb (akin), ‘gossip’ originally meant ‘godparent,’ one who stands in a spiritual relation to the child to be baptized. In time, however, the term was used with a broader meaning. In early modern England the word ‘gossip’ referred to companions in childbirth not limited to the midwife. It also became a term for women friends, with no necessary derogatory connotations."
Silvia Federici Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women
"Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated. “Sad politics “ is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.
Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us."
“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.”
Mary Beard
“the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
Bell Hooks
"Words are useful for upending the world in that they are cheap, ordinary, portable, and generous and they don’t mess us up too badly if we use them wrong, not like if we use matches or a machete wrong, but poetry is made up of figures and figurations and syntaxes as much as it is made up of words. We can make a poetry without language because language as the rehearsal material of poetry has made the way for another poetry, that of objects, actions, and environments."
"There is a lot of meaning-space inside a “no” spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry’s no can protect a potential yes—or more precisely, poetry’s no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah’s multiple variations."
"It was an unusual way of doing politics there were friendships,
loves, gossip, tears, flowers..."
"For the joy of being together, they didn't have to agree"
"It was about opening up the notion that there
was a particular perspective"
gossip
gossip
gossip
gossip*
gossip
gossip
when gossips gather
“When rigidity and suspicion take over, joy dies out.”
Nick Montgomery Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times
heal
lay down the work in order to do the work
make physical, to gossip and to heal
a healing act of ‘making-with’