Session 3: Reproducing Community
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, 1973
December 7, 2020, Monday, 8am EST
Join through Zoom: Meeting ID 880 8691 3297
Guest Speakers: Carmelita Tropicana and Ela Troyano
Often collaboration and collaborative practices like teaching are not a supplement to but a foundation for feminist work. They are the means through which collective histories and memories are preserved, reproduced, and passed on. In this third seminar, we will explore expanded concepts of reproductive labor, care work, and intergenerational community. We will focus on reproduction as not only a biological, but also a linguistic, conceptual, imagistic, or bodily act.
Suggested Reading:
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, Proposal for an Exhibition Called CARE,” 1969.
Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” Borderlands/La Frontera: Towards a New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012): 99-120.
José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 8:2 (1996): 5-16.
Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. Shvarts received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Her artwork been shown at venues including the Tate Modern in London; Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague; the Athens Biennale; Universidad de los Andes in Bogota; SculptureCenter, Art in General, and Participant Inc in New York; LACE in Los Angeles; the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia; and Artspace in New Haven, CT. Her writing has been published in Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, TDR/The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail.