Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections 2019048049, 2019048050, 9781138579736, 9781138579743, 9780429507830

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TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS, TRANSVERSAL POLITICS AND ART

This book explores the critical signifcance of the visual arts to transnational feminist thought and activism. This frst volume in Marsha Meskimmon’s powerful and timely Trilogy focuses on some of the central political challenges of our era, including war, migration, ecological destruction, sexual violence and the return of neo-nationalisms. It argues that transnational feminisms and the arts can play a pivotal role in forging the solidarities and epistemic communities needed to create social, economic and ecological justice on a world scale. Transnational feminisms and the arts provide a vital space for knowing, imagining and inhabiting – earth-wide and otherwise. The chapters in this book each take their lead from a current matter of political signifcance that is central to transnational feminist activist organizing and has been explored through the arts in ways that permit dialogues across geopolitical borders to take place. Including examples of artwork in full colour, this is essential reading for students and researchers in art history, theory and practice, visual culture studies, feminism and gender studies, political theory and cultural geography. The Transnational Feminisms and the Arts Trilogy Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Horizontal Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies Transnational Feminisms and Posthuman Aesthetics: Resonance and Riffing Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Art History and Theory, and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University. She is the author of a number of books on feminisms and the arts, including Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010) and Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003).

TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS, TRANSVERSAL POLITICS AND ART Entanglements and Intersections

Marsha Meskimmon

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Marsha Meskimmon The right of Marsha Meskimmon to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meskimmon, Marsha, author. Title: Transnational feminisms, transversal politics and art / Marsha Meskimmon. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: volume 1. Entanglements and intersections Identifers: LCCN 2019048049 (print) | LCCN 2019048050 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138579736 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138579743 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429507830 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and art. Classifcation: LCC N72.F45 M48 2020 (print) | LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048049 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048050 ISBN: 978-1-138-57973-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-57974-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50783-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of fgures and plates Acknowledgements

vi ix

Introduction: knowing, imagining and inhabiting – earth-wide and otherwise

1

1

Post-truth, compelling fction

16

2

Citizens, migrants and worldmaking denizens

45

3

Critical ecofeminism and ecological thinking

71

4

Sexual violence, structural silence and transversal solidarity

100

5

Imagining peace: art, politics and irenic attention

123

Concluding . . . contingent thoughts

152

Bibliography Index

155 167

FIGURES AND PLATES

Figures 1.1 Sue Williamson, Tony Yengeni – wet bag torture – Jeff Benzien from Truth Games, 1998 1.2 Sue Williamson, Nkosinathi Biko – false medical certifcate – Dr Benjamin Tucker from Truth Games, 1998 1.3 Sue Williamson, Amina and Luiza Cachalia from There’s something I must tell you, 2013 1.4 Nilima Sheikh, Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, installation at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 1.5 Nilima Sheikh, Family from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17 1.6 Nilima Sheikh, Chenab 5 from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17 1.7 Nilima Sheikh, Shadow and Stars from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17 2.1 Paris Match (cover) 1955 2.2 Zoulika Bouabdellah, still from Dansons (Let’s Dance), single-channel video, 2003 2.3 Monica Ross, Anniversary – an act of memory, Act 38 (10 December 2011) group recitation, performed for We Are All Equal, an event in honour of International Human Rights Day, with the Sheffeld Socialist Choir and Northern Refugee Centre, Nelson Mandela Room, Sheffeld Town Hall, presented by Site Gallery, Sheffeld 2.4 Nadia Myre, Indian Act (detail), 2000–3 2.5 Nadia Myre, For Those Who Can Not Speak: The Land, The Water, The Animals, The Future Generations, 2013

23 24 26 31 34 36 38 46 47

54 57 59

Figures and plates

2.6 3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with The Power of Place, Biddy Mason: Time and Place (detail), 1989 Joan Brassil, How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? 1976, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78 Joan Brassil, Have You Metamorphosed Lately? 1977, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78 Joan Brassil, Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? 1978, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78 Yhonnie Scarce, Death Zephyr, 2016–17 Yhonnie Scarce, Blue Danube (large bomb), 2015 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Blood), 1992 Joanna Hoffmann, still from the immersive installation [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo, Art Laboratory Berlin, 2015 Joan Brassil, Consider the Fungi at the Interface, 1986, from the Trilogy Energy as a Delicate Contract, 1981–86 Lorna Simpson, Untitled, in ‘Racism is the Issue’, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, issue 15, 1982 Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Art installation Thinking of you, 2015 Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Participants donating clothes for the art installation Thinking of you, 2015 Suzanne Lacy, still from the performance De tu Puño y Letra, 2014–15 Suzanne Lacy, still from the performance De tu Puño y Letra, 2014–15 Yoko Ono, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, 2007 Yoko Ono, Wish Tree for Washington, DC, 2007 Yoko Ono, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, 2007

vii

64

75 76 77 80 81 86 89 92 101 107 108 111 115 125 128 143

Colour plates 1 2 3 4 5

Sue Williamson, Brigalia and Busiswa Bam from There’s something I must tell you, 2013 Nilima Sheikh, Chenab 5 from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17 Nilima Sheikh, Shadow and Stars from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17 Zoulika Bouabdellah, still from Dansons (Let’s Dance), single-channel video, 2003 Monica Ross, Anniversary – an act of memory, Act 01 (07 December 2008) solo recitation, performed as part of Ours By Right, an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, presented by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and The British Library as part of

viii Figures and plates

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

the exhibition Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights, British Library, London Nadia Myre, Indian Act, 2000–3 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, with The Power of Place, Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1989 Joan Brassil, How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? 1976, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78 Yhonnie Scarce, Blue Danube (large bomb), 2015 Joan Brassil, Have You Metamorphosed Lately? 1977, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Golden), 1995 Joan Brassil, Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? 1978, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78 Joanna Hoffmann, still from the immersive installation [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo, Art Laboratory Berlin, 2015 Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Art installation Thinking of you, 2015 Suzanne Lacy, still from the performance De tu Puño y Letra, 2014–15 Yoko Ono, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, 2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With any long-term project, there are many colleagues, collaborators and fellow travellers who offer remarkable insights and critical support at key moments, and there are many people I would like to thank for helping me to bring the present volume to fruition. As a start, many of the artists whose work inspired this volume further engaged with drafts of the chapters and/or provided works for reproduction; heartfelt thanks to Sue Williamson, Nilima Sheikh,Zoulika Bouabdellah, Nadia Myre,Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Joanna Hoffmann, Suzanne Lacy and Lucy Lippard. Special thanks to Alketa Xhafa Mripa for allowing us to use a detail of her installation, Thinking of you, on the cover of the volume. Not for the frst time, the family of Monica Ross have supported my work with amazing images from the artist’s performances and I want to thank them again for their help here. And fnally, I have been in contact with the family of Joan Brassil a number of times over many years and they have been unstinting in their generosity and kindness to me – I am truly in their debt. A number of museums and galleries were also extremely helpful with the project, and I am grateful to them, particularly, Gallery Mur, THIS IS NO FANTASY, Reykjavik Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation took particular time with this volume and helped to ensure that the most appropriate images were able to be placed within its pages, and I appreciate the attention they paid to the project. Thanks also to Galerie Lelong for facilitating copyright permissions. My editors at Routledge, Natalie Foster and Jen Vennall, have been wonderful and have shared my enthusiasm for undertaking the Trilogy since its inception. I look forward to continuing to work with them for the next two volumes. I would also like to thank the insightful readers of the initial proposal, as the project was made much better in response to their generous critical comments.

x

Acknowledgements

My community of scholarly friends and colleagues cannot be thanked enough for their encouragement and engagement with this project at a number of key stages. Colleagues here at Loughborough, especially Marion Arnold, Hilary Robinson, Rachael Grew and Ruth Kinna, have made me think more critically about position, power and activism in the academy; astute doctoral students Marlous van Boldrick and Hazel McMichael have acted as interlocutors; and many conversations across times and spaces with Martin L. Davies, Alpesh Patel, Jane Chin Davidson, Nikos Papastergiadis, Anne Ring Petersen, Michelle Antoinette, Dorothy Price, Helen Ennis and Caroline Turner have been central to the thinking that underlies this work: thank you. A fnal note of thanks goes to Loughborough University for the award of a Research Fellowship during 2018, without which this project would not have been possible. This book is dedicated with all my love to Phil and Davy, the heart of my home.

INTRODUCTION Knowing, imagining and inhabiting – earth-wide and otherwise

Tracing the genealogies of ecological feminisms, Chris J. Cuomo commented aptly that ‘Any piece of philosophy is merely part of a conversation’.1 Conversation resides at the very heart of this book, and in its extension as the frst volume, the opening conversation, in a Trilogy focused on creating dialogues between transnational feminisms and the arts. Simply, this book explores the critical signifcance of the visual arts to transnational feminist thought and activism, arguing that art’s particular affective and imaginative potential to articulate ideas and concepts through compelling visual, material and spatial forms is pivotal to effecting transformative and lasting socio-political change. The myriad conversations opened across the pages of this book turn around the key terms of its title: transnational feminisms, transversal politics, entanglements, intersections and art. These are not empty terms. They call for intellectual response and responsibility, for situated and embodied forms of critical and creative engagement that acknowledge epistemic location – a knowing from somewhere that has political and ethical effects. They call for dialogues in difference that can create solidarities by forging epistemic communities beyond essence or fxed identity. And for all of their differences of topic, tone and timbre, they call for connective conversations to be unfolded in their particularity through close reading, attentive looking and vulnerable listening. They call for the end of epistemic mastery and in its place trace a compelling conceptual arc that connects transnational feminisms with the arts through knowing, imagining and inhabiting – earth-wide and otherwise. This is the conceptual arc of this book. As the arguments in this volume demonstrate, the lines of this arc do not describe a singular pathway but rather make it possible to embark upon a critical journey, mapping any number of ongoing conversations in their connective, and collective, unfolding. Knowing is thus understood and engaged here as a practice: active, contingent, material and creative. Practices of knowing acknowledge the critical

2

Introduction

entanglement of knowers with the known, subjects and objects emerge through mutual intra-activity. Epistemic location and responsibility thus become more central than categorical mastery of known objects; simply, practices of knowing attend less to what is known, than to how, from where, and to what ends. Knowing, as traced through the conceptual arc of the present volume, is embodied, situated, perspectival, dialogic, intrinsically multidimensional, intersectional, entangled and contingent. It does not give the knower all-seeing, yet invisible, oversight of the world from an objective vantage point above and beyond, but rather enworlds knowers, as the very condition of worldmaking. And in this it meets imagining. Time and again, the arguments pursued in the chapters that follow pivot around knowing differently to imagine otherwise.2 This is neither a conceit nor a coincidence; knowing and imagining are deeply interwoven with political and ethical agency. Imagining here is connected materially with the possibility to compel action and drive political transformation. Imagining is the motor force of the cultural imaginary and of the shared social space of responsive and responsible solidarity, where imagination facilitates real, material bonds between diverse earth others. Knowing and imagining move beyond the categorical limits of essentialist identity politics toward building solidarities across differences. Their intimate interconnection also unravels the binary logic that pits the personal and the intimate against the political and the global. Knowing and imagining are not opponents, but partners, working toward new ways to inhabit the world, earth-wide and otherwise. The question of inhabiting, of how we might live together with both human and non-human earth-others, is of profound signifcance to transnational feminist thought and activism. It drives campaigns focused on iniquitous geopolitical power dynamics, challenging social, economic and ecological injustices sustained between wealthy and poor nations, the developed and developing world, and the Global North and South. Likewise, it is a cornerstone of the work undertaken by transnational feminists to end global sex and gender-based inequality at all levels, along with the extreme forms of violence and abuse that so commonly underpin it. Intellectual explorations of the politics of location and belonging bring geopolitical questions related to citizenship, migration and borders into direct contact with ethical issues around hospitality, cosmopolitan responsibility and care. Inhabiting thus creates a profound imbrication between politics and ethics and, as transnational feminisms increasingly embrace posthumanist insights (particularly via Indigenous, queer and trans ecofeminisms), acknowledging that signifcant others can be more than human raises searching questions for any knowing and imagining that is not earth-wide as well as otherwise. The entanglements and intersections that coalesce through transnational feminisms, transversal politics and art, thus foreground position, but challenge the essential authenticity of origin; if we all know from somewhere, we are also capable of imagining and inhabiting, with others, elsewhere.3 As I draft these lines, I am aware that my position in this project is not transparent, that I am interpellated by the arguments and conversations that weave across these pages: I am written as I write.

Introduction

3

And if these dialogues are mine and I am theirs, then, to paraphrase the title of Kim Mahood’s extraordinary account of dwelling and mapping within a small Indigenous Australian community, my position is doubtful.4 By this I do not invoke the now obsolete etymology that connects doubt with dread; rather I connect it more personally with the use made of the term by my brother, a social scientist who unilaterally adopted the middle name of Thomas as a personal talisman to ward against complacency and the hubris of certitude.5 Knowing is never fnished and there are no absolute coordinates, but there are conversations to be joined. By way of introducing the dialogues that underpin the present volume, I turn again to the central terms of the title as a series of provisional coordinates through which to map its trajectories. My introduction to transnational feminisms, art, transversal politics, entanglements and intersections is done with the awareness that, like a map of the heavens, some of the stars that I have used to mark out my path may well be gone by the time it is walked by others. But the practices of knowing, imagining and inhabiting that are materialized through these dialogues, and the chapters that lead out from them, will remain as an invitation to others to continue this act of wayfaring, creating new tools and forging new epistemic communities in future.

Transnational feminisms Throughout this volume, ‘transnational feminisms’ is used both empirically, to describe political practices ranging from the development of radical pedagogies to advocacy networks, activist campaigns and solidarity-building, and normatively, to refer to decolonizing feminist thought that demonstrates fuid, non-hierarchical and non-dominative understandings of subjects, politics, ethics and agency. This dynamic and plural combination of thought and activism (theory and practice) is a key characteristic of transnational feminisms, as is their manifestation across scholarly, intellectual and activist projects.6 Politically, transnational feminist campaigns facilitate large-scale, cross-border coalitions and galvanize effective grass-roots engagement with such major world issues as sexual violence, poverty, ecological devastation, human rights violations and gender-based inequalities under the law.7 Intellectually, transnational feminist theory describes a multidimensional feld of thought that commonly moves across and between disciplines, engaging intersectional, decolonizing and race-critical analysis, queer, ecological, Indigenous and ‘slow’ activisms, and, increasingly, a vital materialist move away from solely humancentred understandings of the world.8 In using the term, my work refects a growing consensus across the social sciences and humanities that specifc insights mark ‘transnational feminisms’ as distinguishable from, but with strong affnities to,‘international’,‘global’,‘postcolonial’ or ‘Third World’ feminisms.9 The frst of these is a determined riposte to centre-periphery models of geopolitical and cultural exchange. Transnational feminisms focus upon fows and multidimensional connections that profoundly unravel the ‘hub and spoke’ model, and, in so doing, move beyond any binary opposition between the local and the

4

Introduction

global, the personal and the political. Through the strategic deployment of a ‘both/ and’ logic that registers affnities with/in differences, transnational feminisms facilitate the articulation of plural epistemic, political and ethical positions that are capable of addressing major world issues without resorting to top-down, master discourses. Similarly, in terms of political activism and organizing, transnational feminisms are capable of facilitating large-scale coalition-building with and through careful attention to local, concrete conditions, replacing centre-periphery hierarchies (e.g. the ‘West’ and the rest) with multidimensional dialogues that take place across transnational feminist networks.10 Sensitive to differences at all levels, the premises for transnational feminist solidarity are political, epistemic and affective, rather than essential or identitarian; epistemic communities and political solidarities emerge in the recognition of heterogeneity and the formation of multidimensional coalitions that are themselves capable of profound reconfguration. Transnational feminist solidarities are critically informed by the politics of location, but location is mobile and dynamic. This is not a ‘blood and soil’ logic, but a denizen cartography drawn by embodied subjects as they make and re-make worlds from within. Not surprisingly, transnational feminisms are particularly well-aligned with theoretical trajectories characterized by fexible, intersubjective and intersectional modes of thought that emphasize heterogeneity, self-refexivity and active positioning, in combination with radical connectivity, multi-axis and horizontal analysis, and a generous criticality that seeks to establish relationships within, rather than mastery over, worlds. Briefy outlining the intellectual valences that coalesce in and through transnational feminist thought and activism is intended neither to suggest that the term is static nor to attempt to defne it here, once and for all. The parameters of the term and its use remain very open and, indeed, my interest in bringing transnational feminisms into an active dialogue with the arts in this volume, and in the wider Trilogy that it begins, is to further develop the conversations around knowing, imagining and inhabiting (earth-wide and otherwise) with which this introduction began. And here it is important to signal that I do not maintain a distant, disembodied, critical disinterest in transnational feminisms or the arts, but am compelled by, and invested in, the conversations their connection makes possible. There are two particular reasons for this. First, transnational feminisms’ creative confguration of theory, practice and location (thought, activism and position) posits radical imagination as a material force for political transformation. The words of bell hooks ring loud and true:‘Imagination plays a vital role in the struggle for liberation globally’.11 I concur and, more strongly, am convinced that the visual arts can and do participate in, and materially extend, the potential of transnational feminisms to transform the way we know, imagine and inhabit the world. In addition, if transnational feminist thought is characterized by the brilliance of its creative, imaginative and transformative politics, so too is it marked by its bravery, audacity and generosity of spirit. For me, transnational feminisms demonstrate the possibilities offered by ‘embracing a politics of vision, hope and love’,12 a way of inhabiting the world in solidarity and kinship with ‘other Others’,13 a way of

Introduction

5

living that is critical, yet hopeful, courageous, yet attentive. Embracing the strange encounters of transnational feminisms is an intrinsic part of living a feminist life.14

. . . and the arts In recent years, a ‘global turn’ in art and art history has mirrored the rise of the global art market, and both have tended to occlude feminist theories and practices while reinstating Eurocentric15 hierarchies under the homogenizing sign of ‘globalization’. While disappointing, this kind of ‘feminist forgetting’ is neither new nor very surprising.16 However, in tandem with the mainstream global turn, a plethora of work has emerged seeking to redress the gendered legacies of western imperialism by decolonizing feminist art, art history and theory, and with this has come an increased level of interest in feminist and women’s art practices from the ‘marginal’ regions of the developing world/Global South.17 The movement toward a more inclusive geography of feminist work across the arts is dynamic, innovative and characterized by an exceptional commitment to feminist politics and global dialogue, but it is as yet uneven in its outcomes. Some work in the feld retains a linear narrative of the histories of feminisms (usually as ‘waves’), and maintains a typology of feminist art and theory that privileges a Euro-US centrality, a fxation on ‘national’ styles of art, or a ‘racialized’ concept of transnationalism.18 Two tendencies typify this work: an additive, multinational survey approach (one from China, one from Brazil, one from France and so on), and the application of the term ‘transnational’ as a description of non-Western or diasporic practitioners and/or their work.19 The former serves to reinforce the Eurocentric primacy of national styles and schools, the latter relies upon essentialized models of subjectivity and biographical readings of art. In this context, it is worth remembering Elizabeth Grosz’s salient points regarding the contingencies at play in any defnition of a ‘feminist text’: no text can be classified once and for all as wholly feminist or wholly patriarchal: these appellations depend on its context, its place within that context, how it is used, by whom and to what effect. These various contingencies dictate that at best a text is feminist or patriarchal only provisionally, only momentarily, only in some but not in all of its possible readings, and in some but not all of its possible effects.20 Decolonizing feminism’s approaches to art history and theory, and integrating the important insights derived from transnational feminist thought and activism, means more than bringing art from a worldwide catchment into the Euro-US marketplace. Engaging with the multidimensional intersections between gender, sexuality, the global and the local (amongst other differences) requires a profound change of direction in the production of art’s histories and theories. There is work to be done to nuance the terrain of ‘global art’ such that it does not render gender and sexual difference invisible21 and, in addition, to explore the ‘unmarked’ centre in

6

Introduction

ways that can facilitate the unravelling of centre-periphery thinking.22 An increasing body of research emerging in the feld deploys close readings of artworks and practices to demonstrate the entangled genealogies that coalesce in every act of art (and world) making, while other interventions consolidate the pivotal role of intersectional, multidimensional and horizontal histories in telling the stories that comprise art’s migratory narrative pasts.23 This book fnds fellowship with these projects and their focus on interdependent ways of knowing, capable of articulating cross-cultural border concepts and forms of ecological thinking that challenge us to ask what transnational feminisms and the arts can do, rather than to seek to defne what they are.

Transversal politics This volume argues that transversal politics are central to transnational feminisms, and to the transformative art- and worldmaking practices explored in dialogue with them here. My use of the term ‘transversal politics’ derives principally from the work of sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis, and the extension of her ideas by scholars working on feminist peacebuilding, democratic solidarity-building, and redefning the political left following the rise of European nationalisms in the late 1990s.24 My deployment thus has a transnational feminist centre of gravity, but in acknowledging these coordinates, I am not signalling a singular point of origin, nor did Yuval-Davis make such a claim. Feminist transversal politics, as elaborated by Yuval-Davis and others, emerged in and through a range of conversations across and between theories and practices, and this genealogy provides the term with resonances that are also of critical signifcance here. Tracing few of the most signifcant of these,we fnd synergies,affnities and overlapping interests that I would argue mark out an important territory of experimental political praxis that connects transnational feminisms with the arts in particularly dynamic ways. A pivotal point in the genealogy that I am tracing resides with the history of the women’s movement in Bologna. Yuval-Davis notes that her initial encounter with the term ‘transversal politics’ came from her interactions with feminist activists in Bologna in the early 1990s.25 Feminist activists in Bologna had been using the term at least since the 1970s, to describe a form of self-organization forged through dialogues that cut across conventional social divisions and hierarchies. At least two modes of understanding transversal politics thus meet at the nexus of the feminist movement in Bologna: explorations of transversality in then current continental philosophy, most notably in the writings of Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault,26 and the political practice of multidimensional self-organization that typifed the anarchist histories of the Italian women’s movement since the turn of the 20th century.27 Each of these is important but neither provides an absolute or singular defnition of the emergence of feminist transversal politics in Bologna. Or, perhaps it is more apt to say that the ‘truth’ of transversal politics is that the concept evades linear narratives and instead demonstrates the potential of concepts to be intrinsically ‘both/and’ – both dialogic theory and radical collective practice at once. In positioning the concept of transversal politics within the arguments I am making in this volume, I want to encourage its multiple genealogical valences to

Introduction

7

intertwine and enrich the possibilities for further multidimensional dialogues to emerge. For example, by the frst decades of the 20th Century, Italian feminists had become ardent ‘internationalists’, working both with Spanish anarcho-syndicalists against fascism, and in the US, to radicalize migrant labour organizations. In Bologna, anarcha-feminists were central to the autonomous left actions of the 1977 Movement, as were the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. It is also useful to remember that Guattari came to explore transversality in the context of institutional critique, as a means by which to rethink care in La Borde, the psychiatric clinic in which he worked in the 1960s. And, in dialogue with Deleuze, Foucault turns to transversality to examine the political dynamics of sexuality that seem to lie beyond the realm of traditional party politics. These trajectories all describe a politics centred upon non-dominative, self-organization, radical transformations of subjectivity, and movements and forms of direct action that engender solidarities outside the limits of conventional institutional, party or identity politics. These are creative and experimental politics in which generosity and mutual beneft are central. As feminist social scientists developed their dialogues with transversal politics during the 1990s, these resonances helped to shape their contours. Signifcantly, Yuval-Davis articulated transversal politics as intrinsically intersectional,transnational, situated and dialogic, focused on advocacy, rather than ‘representation’ – speaking with rather than for. And, as Anja Kanngeiser argues, transversal politics are a way of refashioning the subject and the world in mutuality.28 With Kanngeiser, transversal politics move decisively toward the aesthetic; liberatory politics are creative, worldmaking, ecological and mobile. In the arguments pursued through the chapters of this book, transversal politics signal a critical link between political and ethical agency, epistemic community, collective belonging and non-domination. They are a politics that recognize the heterogeneity of subjects without sacrifcing their potential to form multiple, larger, coalitions that can act materially to change the social imaginary. The signifcance of affect, imagination and aesthetics are also posited as central to a creative and transformative political project that mobilizes the multiaxis analysis of feminist anarchism and intersectionality, in combination with the radical connectivity of ecological thinking and vital materialist entanglement.29 It is to such entanglements and intersections that this positional introduction now turns.

Entanglements and intersections Concepts of entanglement and intersectionality underpin many of the dialogues that unfold across the pages of this volume and, in keeping with its active exploration of positioning, they are pivotal not so much for what they are, but for what they can do. Echoing the words of Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Leslie McCall, intersectionality operates here as a critical approach, or an ‘analytic sensibility’: what makes an analysis intersectional – whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iterations, whatever its field or discipline – is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its

8

Introduction

relation to power. This framing – conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power – emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is.30 Intersectional analysis is dynamic, fexible, transdisciplinary, multiscale and crosscategorical; it challenges normative understandings of the world premised upon iniquitous relationships of power and domination at all levels, and it ‘runs against the grain of established (and oppressive) imaginaries’.31 Not surprisingly, given its focus on sameness and difference, intersectionality is central to transnational feminist thought and activism and is widely deployed in decolonizing feminist scholarship and in political campaigns.32 It also overlaps in important ways with the analytic sensibilities of anarchist political theory, especially in its emphasis upon multi-axis analysis designed to ward against both essentialist notions of identity and ‘hierarchies’ of oppressions.33 Likewise, the intrinsically connective politics of critical ecofeminisms align strongly with an intersectional analytic sensibility in understanding ‘“isms” of domination’ to be profoundly interwoven and in need of multidimensional analysis, critique and transformation.34 I would argue more strongly that intersectionality is a generative theoretical sensibility and particularly, that it creates kin. The power of intersectionality emerges in transversal acts of rooting and shifting that bring sameness and difference into compelling connection.35 Intersectional analysis fosters the creation of knowledges from somewhere that enable the possibility of forging epistemic communities elsewhere.36 As many scholars have pointed out, intersectionality itself comes from somewhere – it is rooted in the visionary politics of liberatory Black feminist thought and activism – but signifcantly, it also goes elsewhere, forging conceptual connections and affective coalitions in and through difference.37 As an analytic sensibility, intersectionality builds bridges, not walls; it critically unravels the naturalized certitudes of the unmarked centre,38 through radical acts of plural, collective and creative interdependence. And here intersections meet entanglements, as interdependence signals the emergence of subjectivity through visceral encounters with/in a world comprised of vital matter. Again, entanglement is a pivotal concept for the arguments made in this volume, most critically as it extends the frame of politics and ethics to include both human and non-human agency, and thus provides possibilities to engage with the material and imaginative agency of the arts and their potential to contribute to transformative acts of worldmaking. Positioning is critical; my primary encounters with the concept of entanglement came through non-dualist explorations of the bodily roots of subjectivity by feminist scholars whose insights are central to what came to be seen as a ‘material turn’ or the ‘new materialism’.39 Corporeality, embodiment, performativity, agential realism and feminist explorations of bioscience and quantum physics describe a wonderfully hybrid confguration of ideas and images that profoundly rethink subject-object becomings, situated knowledges and the embeddedness of knowers within the known.

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Our entanglement within vibrant material worlds raises substantive questions concerning the confguration of politics and ethics beyond a human-centred framework. Explorations of corporeal (and transcorporeal) generosity, an ethics of things, and the material and imaginative politics of posthumanism40 are some of the concerns that unfold through this volume around the notion of entanglement and worldmaking. These are not utopian concerns beyond the frame of history, but rather they are grounded in decolonizing,41 race-critical, Indigenous and queer activisms, as well as in the politics of critical ecofeminisms.42 Importantly here, the material explorations of ethico-political encounters with/in worlds sustain a detailed engagement with the arts as signifcantly more than a mute mirror onto the ‘real’. Art’s agency, its material, imaginative, conceptual and affective power to make worlds, not simply represent them, is understood as generative.43 Corporealmaterial feminisms, shot through with the insights of decolonizing, posthuman, queer ecologies, facilitate thinking differently about the agency of art within a transformative, transnational feminist ethico-political project. Thinking differently requires the introduction of new tools, for, as Audre Lorde so eloquently wrote more than three decades ago:‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.44

Transnational feminist methodologies: on tools All methodologies carry within them underlying assumptions that shape both how information – ‘data’ – is gathered and the kinds of knowledges that are constructed by and through information gathering and analysis. The marginalized and those who are committed to social justice at all levels of the research process want and need different kinds of knowledge and different and more congruent means by which to create it, or to allow previously subjugated knowledges to emerge.45

Acknowledging that replicating formulaic knowledge production serves only to reproduce the same knowledges, categories and structures of power currently in place,46 this volume, and the Trilogy of which it forms the frst book, heeds calls to fnd new forms of thinking-in-making capable of creating ways to know, imagine and inhabit a world beyond ‘the master’s house’.47 The important question of how we know, not just what we know, is driving an increasing number of feminist scholars to explore emergent writing methodologies.48 The insights of these fellow travellers have helped to produce the tools used in this project as I have sought to create a dialogue between transnational feminisms and the visual arts capable of articulating the transformative potential of their vital interconnection. An important aspect of this is dialogue. Transnational Feminisms and the Arts is not simply a series of three volumes on a topic, but a Trilogy, and as such, the writing materializes an extended critical dialogue, one that is materially connected to its method and argument. Dialogue is not conversation between two, but a ‘speaking through’, a knowing with, that can engage myriad positions. Throughout this volume, my words speak with those of many and varied fellow travellers; scholar and artist friends and colleagues, books, texts, and, importantly, artworks, share the

10 Introduction

spaces of these pages with me, are my critical interlocutors, my ideal readers and partners in dynamic dialogues. Their presence echoes through the text, is extended through the notes and citations, rendered visible in the bibliography and in the images reproduced, which are not illustrations of ideas, but participants in critical conversations. Position is an activity, not a description of a fxed reality. It informs how we read, look, think and write – with whom, from where and why. This book starts a dialogue that will extend, and be changed, as the Trilogy’s next volumes chart other courses and create different conversations between transnational feminisms and the arts. The Trilogy proposes that the ‘revolutionary power’49 of transnational feminisms and the arts can best be materialized through an embodied, situated, yet mobile and process-led critical practice, where epistemic location is acknowledged through responsive and responsible acts of attention, performed through writing, thinking and making with/in the frame of the dialogic encounter. What this means in practice is that the Trilogy does not defne something called ‘transnational feminist art/ists’ once and for all, but rather opens an intellectual and affective process of engagement with and across a range of theories and practices in order to articulate and imagine (and open the potential to re-imagine in future) what transnational feminisms and the arts can do. To that end, the volume and the Trilogy provide an intellectual architecture, enabling the writing to mirror the modulation between a close attention to concrete specifcity and heterogeneity at the level of individual case studies, while facilitating a higher level dialogue between cases, chapters and volumes, capable of addressing issues and ideas of a broader scope, on a larger scale. With a focus both personal and political, intimate and global, the volume and the Trilogy reject meta-theory and master discourse applied from on high, preferring instead, the performance of multidimensional, transversal encounters across and between diverse instances that permit affnities and solidarities of interest to emerge. The Trilogy and its volumes are not survey texts, and while they draw from a very wide range of case studies centred on specifc works of art, institutions, archives, exhibitions, collaborative projects and forms of art-writing worldwide, they do not purport to effect ‘global coverage’, as if that were either possible or desirable. Likewise, they do not presuppose that the transnational has a fxed abode in ‘marginal’ or peripheric geopolitical regions; transnational feminisms do not perpetuate the exceptionalist logic of the unmarked centre and have much to say about power in the Global North, the ‘West’, and the developed world. Writing the Trilogy is a creative materialization of the mobile and multidimensional ideas and meanings that transnational feminist thought and activism engenders, and, more strongly, it is an act of feminist hope and solidarity for the future. This frst volume is an opening foray focusing on transversal politics and the arts as a way to start a greater dialogue by considering the critical role that the arts can play within some of the most important challenges faced by transnational feminist praxis today. The themes of the chapters are not random; each takes a lead from a current matter of political signifcance that is especially central to transnational

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11

feminist activists organizing on a world scale: sexual violence, war, ecological destruction, migration and the return of neo-nationalisms are vital concerns for everyone. Transnational feminisms and the arts can and do speak to these issues and generate the affective and epistemic communities capable of knowing, imagining and inhabiting – earth-wide and otherwise – so needed now.

Notes 1 Chris J. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 8. 2 My use of the term ‘otherwise’ signals a number of connections, but I would like to point particularly to the queer feminist dialogues on art’s histories opened by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver in their anthology, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. 3 I would draw a parallel here with Julietta Singh’s description of reading as central to ‘imagining otherwise and dwelling elsewhere’; see her Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 6. 4 Kim Mahood, Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories, Melbourne and London: Scribe, 2016. I want to thank Helen Ennis for the gift of this book. 5 There are positioning coordinates here: my brothers and I were raised as Roman Catholics and so ‘Thomas’ was immediately recognized as the Doubter, and signalled my brother’s religious doubt as much as his intellectual curiosity. 6 Aneeth Kaur Hundle, Ioana Szeman and Joanna Pares Hoare, ‘What Is the Transnational in Transnational Feminist Research?’, Feminist Review (special issue on transnational feminisms), 121, 2019, pp. 3–8. Likewise, against any theory/practice divide in transnational feminisms, see Janet M. Conway, ‘Troubling Transnational Feminism(s): Theorising Activist Praxis’, Feminist Theory, 18:2, 2017, pp. 205–27. 7 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. 8 Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding, eds., Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial and Feminist World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. 9 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Caplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; Vrushali Patil,‘From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come’, Signs, 38:4, Summer 2013, pp. 847–67. 10 Aili Mari Tripp, ‘The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms: Consensus, Conflict and New Dynamics’, in Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing and Human Rights, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Aila Mari Tripp, New York: New York University Press, 2006, pp. 51–75. 11 bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, ix. On the significance of imagination to politics and ethics, see also: Dempsey, Parker and Krone on constructing ‘regional, international and translocal imaginaries’ through dialogue. S.E. Dempsey, P.S. Parker and K.J. Krone,‘Navigating Socio-Spatial Difference, Constructing Counter-Space: Insights for Transnational Feminist Praxis’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 4:3, 2011, pp. 201–20, p. 202; Cynthia Cockburn, ‘Transversal Politics: A Practice of Peace’, Pacifist Feminism, 22, February 2015, no pages; and in feminist philosophy, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 1999; Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity, 2002; Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, Oxford:

12 Introduction

12 13 14

15 16

17

18

19

20 21

Oxford University Press, 2006; Karen Barad, ‘Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2–3, June 2015, pp. 387–422. Sylvia Falcón, ‘Transnational Feminism as a Paradigm for Decolonizing the Practice of Research: Identifying Feminist Principles and Methodology Criteria for U.S.-Based Scholars’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 37:1, 2016, pp. 174–94, p. 187. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, op. cit., p. 4. This sentence is a playful take on Sara Ahmed’s wonderful explorations (including significant creative changes in her writing) of transnational feminisms over a number of projects, including Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London and New York: Routledge, 2000 and Living a Feminist Life, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017. I am using this term to indicate a bias toward what might variously be called the ‘West’, the ‘Global North’, the ‘developed world’ or, for feminist art history specifically, an identifiable ‘Anglo-US’ axis in the literature. Neither is the careless elision of the transnational with the global and both with neoliberal cultural practices designed to naturalize the flow of capital across borders. For a good essay on ‘forgetting’ the significance of feminism, see: Simon C. Estok, ‘The Ecophobia Hypothesis: Re-Membering the Feminist Body of Ecocriticism’, in International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok and Serpil Oppermann, London and New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 70–83. A few very well-known references will suffice to demonstrate this point: in 1997, n.paradoxa, the international feminist art journal (emphasis mine) was founded by Katy Deepwell; in 2002, the third (revised) edition of Whitney Chadwick’s pivotal survey, Women, Art and Society was updated with a chapter specifically exploring women, art and globalization; in 2007, in honour of the opening of the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition Global Feminisms, was co-curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin and lauded as the ‘first international exhibition exclusively dedicated to feminist art’. Jennifer C. Nash describes the propensity within the Anglophone/US academy to ‘apply’ the term ‘transnational’ to people and geographies of colour whilst leaving an unmarked, but normatively ‘white’, centre, out of the reach of its critique and analysis. Suffice to say that this volume does not participate in that project, but that its trace lingers across much mainstream art historical scholarship. See Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 98–103. Along similar lines, with specific reference to the ‘national’ reading of the arts, see Midori Yoshimoto, ‘Beyond “Japanese/Women Artists” Transnational Dialogues in the Art of Nobuho Nagasawa and Chiharu Shiota’, Third Text, 28:1, 2014, pp. 67–81. See: Dinah Dysart and Hannah Fink, eds., Asian Women Artists, Sydney: Craftsman House Press, 1996; Uta Grosenick, Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century, Cologne: Taschen Books, 2001; or, as above, Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., [exh. cat.] Global Feminisms, New Directions in Contemporary Art, New York: Brooklyn Museum and Merrell Publishers, 2007. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Sexual Signatures: Feminism After the Death of the Author’, in Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 9–24, p. 24. I am indebted to the ground-breaking work of decolonising feminist arts research by scholars such as Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis (‘In Search of a Discourse and Critique/s That Center the Art of Black Women Artists’, in Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, edited by Stanlie M. James and Abena P.A. Busia, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 228–66), Phoebe Harris-DuFrene, ed., (Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), and Ella Shohat, ed. (Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), for introducing me to ideas that directly inspired my own interventions years later: Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe, eds., Women, the Arts and Globalization:

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22

23

24

25 26

27 28 29

13

Eccentric Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; Marion Arnold and Marsha Meskimmon, eds., Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Deborah Cherry’s work is exemplary in this sense, taking a transnational feminist intersectional approach to work produced ‘in the centre’ (Britain) and by artists across an historical span. See: Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, Middlesex: Ashgate, 2006. Likewise, see the very rich collection Art/Women/California 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, edited by Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniella Salvioni, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2002 and the ground-breaking volume by Elaine H Kim, Margo Machida and Sharon Mizota, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, Oakland: University of California Press, 2005. Some especially excellent ‘transnational’ studies of contemporary practice that work across geographical scales and registers are: Clara Román-Odio, Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions, New York: Palgrave, 2013; Michelle Antoinette, Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014; Alpesh Patel, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational Asian Art Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017; Anne Ring Petersen, Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017; Leon Wainwright and Kitty Zijlmans, eds., Sustainable Art Communities: Contemporary Creativity and Policy in the Transnational Caribbean, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. I would also note the work of important scholars such as Claire Farago and Helen Hills, who have taken these connective, cross-cultural insights back in time to rethink Eurocentric approaches to the art of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods in wonderfully innovative ways. In particular, Nira Yuval-Davis,‘Human/Women’s Rights and Feminist Transversal Politics’, in Global Feminism, edited by Ferree and Tripp, op. cit., pp. 275–95; Yuval-Davis, ‘What Is “Transversal Politics”?’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 12, Summer 1999, pp. 94–8; Cockburn,‘Transversal Politics: A Practice of Peace’, op. cit., Mark William Westmoreland, ‘Feminist Transversal Politics and Political Solidarity’. Available at University of Pennsylvania, The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy Archives, 2013–14: www.sas.upenn.edu/andrea-mitchell-center/sites/www.sas.upenn. edu.andrea-mitchell-center/files/uploads/WestmorelandPennDCC.pdf. NB Soundings issue 12 was a special issue on ‘Transversal Politics’, edited by Doreen Massey whose editorial provided a powerful riposte to neo-nationalisms in Europe. Yuval-Davis,‘Human/Women’s Rights and Feminist Transversal Politics’, in Global Feminism, edited by Ferree and Tripp, op. cit., pp. 280–1. Christopher Penfield, ‘Toward a Theory of Transversal Politics: Deleuze and Foucault’s Block of Becoming’, Foucault Studies, 17, April 2014, pp. 134–72. The connection with Bologna comes especially through Franco Berardi, whose critical engagement with Deleuze and Guattari was mapped in the title of his magazine A/traverso and in his engagement with the free radio (Radio Alice) in the wake of the 1977 Movement. For a wonderful contemporary, online parallel, see Transversal Texts: https://transversal.at/ contact and I would note, especially, the critical writing of Gerald Raunig. Jennifer Guglielmo, ‘Transnational Feminism’s Radical Past: Lessons from Italian Immigrant Women Anarchists in Industrializing America’, Journal of Women’s History, 22:1, Spring 2010, pp. 10–33. Anja Kanngieser,‘ . . . And . . . and . . . and . . . The Transversal Politics of Performative Encounters’, Deleuze Studies, 6:2, 2012, pp. 265–90. Not surprisingly, there is a strong anarchist feminist thread that weaves across this book, and I would like to thank my colleague Ruth Kinna for generating my interest in the multiple connections between decolonising, race-critical, queer ecofeminism and anarchism, both historically and theoretically. This is a rich vein and Ruth’s work is exceptional; amongst other writing: Ruth Kinna, ‘Anarchism and Feminism’, in Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy, edited by N. Jun, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 253–84. See also, Quiet

14 Introduction

30 31

32

33 34 35 36

37

38 39

40

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Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, 3rd Edition, Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: Dark Star Press, 2012. Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Leslie McCall,‘Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis’, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, 38:4, 2013, pp. 785–810, p. 795. Vivian May, Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, p. viii. May’s volume provides an excellent exposition of the development of the concept of ‘intersectionality’, as well as some of the disputes the term has engendered within the academy. See, for example: Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13:3, 2006, pp. 193–209 and ‘Dialogical Epistemology: An Intersectional Resistance to the “Oppression Olympics”’, Gender and Society, 26:1 (Patricia Hill Collins Symposium Issue), February 2012, pp. 46–54; Sylvia Falcón and Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Shifting Analytics and Linking Theories: A Conversation about the “MeaningMaking” of Intersectionality and Transnational Feminism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 March 2015, pp. 1–10. Deric Shannon and J. Rogue,‘Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality’, 2009. Available at: www.anarkismo.net, theanarchistlibrary.org (accessed 7 August 2010). Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action, London and New York: Routledge, 1997; Karen J. Warren, ed., Ecological Feminism, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. See Doreen Massey’s editorial in Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, issue 12 (special issue on Transversal Politics), Summer 1999. This has been especially key to intersectionality’s political dimension, transnationally and transracially. See, for example Kim Marie Vaz and Gary L. Lemons, eds., Feminist Solidarity at the Crossroads: Intersectional Women’s Studies for Transracial Alliance, London and New York: Routledge, 2012 For a very compelling account of what she calls the ‘intersectionality wars’ and the complex personal and institutional politics in which Black feminist thought is pursued in the US academy, see Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, op. cit. Suffice it to say here that I am neither negating the critical, historical relationships between Black feminisms and intersectionality, nor seeking to essentialize it. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Cf. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London and New York: Routledge, 1991; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London and New York: Routledge, 1993; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994; Braidotti, Metamorphoses, op. cit.; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Cf. Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, Albany: SUNY Press, 2002; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010; Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Cf. Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997; Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, op. cit.; Nikos Papastergiadis, ed., Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003 Cf. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York: Routledge, 1993; Kim TallBear, ‘An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human’, in ‘Dossier: Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2–3, 2015, pp. 230–5; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016; Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017; Kali Simmons,‘Reorientations;

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44 45 46 47

48

49

15

or, An Indigenous Feminist Reflection on the Anthropocene’, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58:2, Winter 2019, pp. 174–9. Cf. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, London: IB Tauris, 2012; Erin Manning, Individuation’s Dance: Always More Than One, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013; Katve-Kaisa Konturri, Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration, London: Open Humanities Press, 2018. Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley: Crossing Press, (1984) 2007, pp. 110–13. (pp. 111–12; italics in the original). Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, ‘Introduction: Transgressive Possibilities’, in Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, edited by Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2005, pp. 1–17, p. 5. See, for example, Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2000. I am not suggesting that Lorde’s call was limited to tearing down current master discourses, but rather that it extended to the greater project of building new and more inclusive discourses; see: Lewis R Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, eds., Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Marjorie Pryse, ‘Trans/Feminist Methodology: Bridges to Interdisciplinary Thinking’, NWSA Journal, 12:2, Summer 2000, pp. 105–18; Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology, Writing, London and New York: Routledge, 2010; Mona Livholts, ed., Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 2011. With a nod to the well-known subtitle of JoAnna Isaak’s 1996 book, Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, London and New York: Routledge.

1 POST-TRUTH, COMPELLING FICTION

In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year was post-truth: ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less infuential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ’.1 Whilst the OED Word of the Year may not be a precise measurement of contemporary Anglophone linguistic development, it is a salient gauge of the cultural climate, characterized by a single word or phrase. Since its launch in 2004 (with chav), the annual award has charted the emergence of such techno-cultural phenomena as the podcast (2005) and the selfe (2013), alongside trending political notions, including Big Society (2010) and, more recently, youthquake (2017). Like many of the latter terms, post-truth is all the more effective for having a loose – allusive and elusive – defnition that enables it to generate (often heated) debate, yet evade the efforts of its detractors to quell its power. It is pointless to spend energy trying to defne post-truth once and for all and that is not my aim in the arguments that follow here. Rather, I am interested in the effects of its ‘fuzzy logic’ and its use as a term that begins to name particular clusters of contemporary political thinking and action that, whilst certainly not ‘new’, have come to the fore on a global scale in recent years. Specifcally, I am arguing that post-truth politics share certain characteristics, including an ability to transform rightful scepticism around singular truth claims into a type of radical relativism that not only eschews public appeals to evidence and mistrusts authority, but disdains and demeans knowledge, expertise and any form of intellectual responsibility. As a corollary, post-truth politics purvey a type of ‘populism’ that purports to be democratic and open, but is, in its effects, exclusive and brutal; post-truth rhetoric commonly draws sharp boundaries between insiders and outsiders (‘us’ and ‘them’) through bullying, harassment and incitements to violence. Though not simply the result of social media or online news, post-truth does beneft from both the speed of digital communication and its ephemeral ubiquity.

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Post-truth has many careless speakers, but not many attentive listeners; it circulates quickly and is just as swiftly forgotten. This does not make its impact less dangerous or decisive.2 Arguably, the political danger of post-truth does not reside simply in its appeals to ‘emotion and personal belief ’ rather than ‘objective facts’; the danger of contemporary post-truth politics resides in the groups who have been most effective in mobilizing its force. Post-truth politics can be linked to the rise of a range of neo-nationalist, hypermasculine, alt-right groups who espouse extremist views by circulating hate language and perpetrating violence. It is no wonder that the phenomenon of post-truth is so vehemently contested in the media and in political, academic and pedagogic circles, given that those who deploy it most readily would not grant others the freedom to contest it were they to gain power. Transnational feminisms could hardly be opposed more profoundly to the politics of post-truth nor more fundamentally threatened by its implications in the contemporary global arena. For decolonizing feminist activisms, premised upon intersectional understandings of subjectivity, sensitive to the articulation of differences at all levels, and focused on building solidarities with others through dialogue and debate, the validation of misogynist violence, exclusive, essentialist ‘ethnic’ identities, and wilful ignorance through the rhetoric of post-truth constitutes a major political challenge with material consequences. This chapter focuses on the challenge of formulating a determined and resilient riposte to post-truth that is linked explicitly to a transnational, and transversal, feminist politics. In so doing, I will argue that imagination, creativity, affect and fction, in the strong sense, are critical to this riposte and thus that the arts have an especially signifcant role to play. What does a rejoinder to post-truth look like? This question is not as simple as it might at frst appear. Challenging the insidious nature of post-truth does not merely entail an appeal to the ‘the truth’, as if this were an agreed standard from which all knowledge claims might naturally fow. Nor can we simply seek a new ‘metanarrative’, another great normative tale against which we can judge all actions and interests equally and impartially. While such appeals to universal truth claims and objective metanarratives might be comforting to some who feel as though they are lost in the mire of post-truth relativism, there is no going back to a point in time when a disembodied, transcendent, universal truth claim could be envisaged unproblematically; more to the point here, a transnational feminist argument would be loath to return to, or reinvent, such claims. Feminisms challenged the claims to objectivity underpinning universal concepts of truth precisely because they were not objective, but steeped in differential power dynamics and exclusions. Particularly for women, people of colour, colonized, queer and/or differently able subjects, the paradigm of objective truth offered neither space for the articulation of non-normative subject positions nor the potential to express alternative worldviews. It is thus hugely disappointing to fnd that some of the sharpest critics of post-truth politics have generated a veritable backlash against the decolonizing feminist scholarship that frst challenged the discourses of objective truth more than 30 years ago. As Eva Giraud noted in her article ‘Post-Truth is a

18 Post-truth, compelling fction

Feminist Issue’, many left-leaning critics of post-truth have singled out feminist and postcolonial science studies for special criticism as having ‘inadvertently provided the tools for conspiracy theorists and skeptics, as well as contributed to a broader political culture where facts can be easily undermined (with politically, socially, and environmentally disastrous consequences)’.3 This chapter argues otherwise. Transnational feminisms have provided the tools both to challenge the tired logic of disembodied objectivity that underpinned universal truth claims and to counter the anti-intellectual radical relativisms of contemporary post-truth. We are not trapped in a catch-22 scenario: one truth or post-truth. There is a space beyond the binary logic that incessantly pits a monolithic, ‘objective’ truth claim against no truths at all; transnational feminisms claim that alternative space and provide the ground on which to offer a resistant riposte to post-truth politics, while building transversal solidarities through responsible, epistemic dialogue and a compelling combination of knowledge, creativity and imagination. In particular, the spaces opened through the encounter between transnational feminisms and the arts enable new explorations of truth, objectivity, knowledge and power to emerge, explorations that are both critical and hopeful in their sustained efforts to usher in more equitable futures for us all. In developing the concept of a ‘dialogical epistemology’ as part of an intersectional and transversal feminist politics, Nira Yuval-Davis noted that ‘one of the cornerstones of feminist theory, in all its varieties, has been its challenge to positivist notions of objectivity and truth’.4 A number of the trajectories that Yuval-Davis brought together in that particular text (and elsewhere in her work) are pivotal to the arguments underpinning this chapter, most notably, that ‘standpoint theory, situated knowledge and imagination, and transversal political solidarity’ are interconnected, and that dialogue is critical to the formation of ‘epistemic communities’5 capable of sustaining solidarities in and through difference.6 Yuval-Davis is herself an eloquent voice within a transnational feminist epistemic community, and in her writing, she widely cites a range of others whose work facilitates dialogues and debates across geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries to form powerful conceptual solidarities. The attentive approach she takes to the work of other scholars, bridging differences through transversal dialogues (rather than assimilating them within a monologue), is also central to this chapter as it brings together a range of texts, images, objects and ideas from diverse locations to confgure a compelling, yet contingent, counterpoint to the politics of post-truth. The dialogic argument that I am pursuing here is as much about how we formulate practices of knowing that can unravel the untenable epistemic binary opposition between ‘one truth’ and ‘post-truth’, as it is about the content of any current knowledge system. Throughout this book, the words and works of others intertwine with my own as a dialogue that constitutes an intellectual argument through solidarities formed by creative affnities and aesthetic resonances. Working in this way means embracing partial perspectives and contingencies without negating responsibility. In making this shift from content to practice (object to process), I am not alone; transnational feminisms have been swift to explore the politics of knowledge practices

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and to link these to the power of the imagination; knowing differently is key to imagining otherwise, and imagining otherwise can compel change. But more than this, how we know, though what systems and trajectories of power our knowledges are constituted, is of central signifcance to feminisms that seek to create what Lorraine Code has called ‘ecological thinking’ and to formulating effective ‘successor epistemologies’: an ecologically reconfigured epistemology recommends itself to feminist and other postcolonial thinkers engaged in building successor epistemologies. It offers a conceptual frame within which to construct a responsive-responsible theory of knowledge and subjectivity: responsive to singularity, diversity, and community; responsibly committed to knowing well so as to counteract the oppressions that the epistemologies of mastery sustain; and sensitive to the multiple responsibilities invoked in claiming a place within naturalistic inquiry.7 The arguments of Code and Yuval-Davis are not the same, but resonant, and their affnities begin to draw many of the lines of the multidimensional knowledge practices that will be traced through the course of this chapter and throughout this volume as a whole. The frst is their critical awareness of situation or location to knowledges, and the rejection of universal, disembodied claims to objectivity or truth. The emphasis they place on our embodied entanglement with/in the world is key to the ways in which they bring responsibility (and ‘response-ability’) into play as pivotal counters to knowledge as ‘mastery’. Mastery is derived from knowledges positioned ‘nowhere’; an acknowledgement of the importance of epistemic location, by contrast, produces knowledges that are profoundly responsible for their positioning. Embodiment, situation and responsibility/response-ability gesture to their second point of affnity, namely an intersectional, non-binary, logic of the ‘both/and’ that compels a multidimensional analysis of the intrinsic connections between subjectivity, sociality and knowledge. These are forms of thinking that foster epistemic dialogue and coalition, rather than reifed notions of origin, authenticity or identity; they relish the complexities of many partial truths being negotiated in place and over time, and accept contingency as integral to ongoing knowledge practices. This leads directly to the third trajectory that is delineated throughout this chapter, namely, that understanding knowledge as a creative, imaginative and contingent practice, rather than a categorical system, can be politically transformative. Epistemic communities do not pre-exist knowledge practices, but emerge in mutuality through them, and just such mobile, responsive and positioned knowledge practices are needed to generate solidarities capable of challenging the politics of post-truth. Signifcantly, both Code and Yuval-Davis drew on the work of Donna Haraway in their thinking about knowledge, truth, embodiment and position, most particularly exploring arguments Haraway made in an article frst published in 1988, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’.8 It is useful to bring Haraway’s oft-cited text into the conversation

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at this point for a number of reasons, not least because it remains a cornerstone in feminist thinking about the politics of knowledge and is indicative of the longevity of such thought in the feld, but also, as discussed earlier in this chapter, because it has been attacked (along with the work of Sandra Harding, Jane Flax, Evelyn Fox Keller and other scholars in ‘feminist and postcolonial science studies’) in the anti-feminist backlash in which some critics of post-truth have recently indulged. Whether such critics’ misunderstanding of Haraway’s argument as providing the conditions for the emergence of post-truth is simply, or wilfully, ignorant is not the point of this chapter to determine. Rather, what is signifcant to the explorations that follow here are the salient ways in which Haraway’s arguments concerning objectivity from this early text had already posited a strong riposte to the binary logic that pits ‘one truth’against ‘no truths’. In moving beyond this binary deadlock, the arguments made in ‘Situated Knowledges’ also materialized the potential to develop ‘successor epistemologies’ of exceptional range. Haraway’s is a very open text, prescient and dialogic in its structures, creative and transdisciplinary in its range, compelling in its logic. Also, and of central signifcance to the argument here, it is a performative text that materializes what it claims. Probably the most quoted line of the text,‘Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges’,9 gives a clear indication of its central premise. More strongly, however, Haraway demonstrated a keen awareness throughout the text that, as the idea of ‘situated knowledges’ came to supplant transcendent objectivity, it might well usher in the malignant radical relativism that we now see marching under the banner of ‘post-truth’. Haraway articulated counters to these dual threats at many points – two examples will suffce here: Feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something, and unlimited instrumental power . . . we do need an earthwide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different – and power-differentiated – communities.10 But the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.11 We can see in these brief excerpts a move away from binary thinking, the rejection of disembodied, transcendent objectivity and truth claims, and a call for responsibility, contingency, entanglement, location, solidarity and conversation at an earth-wide level (not just at the human). Haraway’s text encapsulated these ideas nearly three decades before the OED nominated ‘post-truth’ as a point of contention, but critically, her text was not written as yet another (just different) claim to truth or originary metanarrative; the text itself refused to participate in the logic to which it ran counter and, instead, articulated its contribution to a more extensive

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and different form of dialogue. Written as a commentary on Sandra Harding’s volume The Science Question in Feminism (1986),12 Haraway structured her text as an exchange with a number of feminist scholars, with work from many felds and disciplines and, in parts, as a conversation on collaborative thinking. The text produces a form of epistemic community forged through active and visceral dialogue from start to fnish – including in the footnotes.13 While its stylistic features, turns of phrase and uses of footnotes are not completely beyond the conventions of academic writing, they are certainly testing the limits of the objective and invisible authorial voice, mastering critical debate from afar.14 At the end of her text, Haraway brings in the fgure of the coyote, the infnite trickster, as key to the kinds of thinking and, arguably, making, that might be possible after objectivity and beyond the stale binary that pits one truth against post-truth: not mother/matter/mutter – but coyote, a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. Feminist embodiment, feminist hopes for partiality, objectivity, and situated knowledges, turn on conversations and codes at this potent node in fields of possible bodies and meanings. . . . Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse.15 And that is the point; we need partial, dialogic truths, exchanged between subjects and objects entangled in the world, a coyote discourse, intertwining knowledge and imagination, ready to compel transformation. Transnational feminisms fashion their conversational tools to produce just such knowledges, beyond the deathly disembodiment of post-truth. And, where we extend the dialogue through the extraordinary imaginative and material potential of the arts, the riposte to posttruth becomes all the more compelling.

The whole truth and nothing but . . . In April 1996, South Africa opened its frst Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings and in 1998, as the fve-volume offcial report was published, the artist, writer and activist Sue Williamson made Truth Games, a series of 15 wallmounted multi-media works drawing directly upon news reports, documentary photographs and testimony from the hearings.16 Acknowledging that the ‘truth’ unearthed by the Commission’s years of hearing and broadcasting witness testimony is multifaceted, complex and contested, is an understatement; as Marion Arnold so eloquently wrote: To know about the work of the TRC, there is the Official Report (www. justice.gov.za/trc/report/indexhtm) and there is Art – novels, poems, images, theatre, films – responding to the words and photographic records of the public hearings. Pictures and words: what do they prompt us to make of truth?17

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Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and working through three Committees (Human Rights Violations, Reparation and Rehabilitation, Amnesty), South Africa’s TRC was not the frst Truth Commission to make its mark on the international stage (important predecessors include Uganda [1974], Argentina [1983–84] and Chile [1990–91]), but it was the frst in which testimony was heard openly and broadcast live on radio, with televised weekly overviews and detailed newspaper coverage, rendering it both a political act and a major international media event.18 Another critical difference between the TRC and its predecessors that inherently complicated its relationship to ‘the truth’, was the fact that applications for amnesty were considered, and testimony heard, from victims and perpetrators across the political spectrum in an attempt to foster reconciliation through restorative, rather than retributive, justice. The TRC was not designed to adjudicate on the truths presented so as to reach a verdict and punish or exonerate as appropriate, but to listen, to fnd a forum to hear what had for so long been silenced through extreme state violence and radical resistance. Truth Commissions are an evocative case study for an exploration of the politics of post-truth, given their emphasis upon gathering a range of eyewitness testimony and other forms of frst-hand documentary evidence (visual, textual, material) as a means by which to establish a version of past events that meets the acid test of collective consensus. This is not the revelation of a divine truth beyond any doubt but the socially responsible work of dialogue and negotiation that propels us toward contingent truths. Proponents of post-truth have called into question the political signifcance of witness accounts and testimony, as well as the veracity of journalism and broadcast news, the latter under the rubric of ‘fake news’. In this ugly rhetoric, Holocaust and climate change denial alike meet self-styled, public-access broadcasting in a marriage of wilful ignorance and incendiary misinformation. I want to begin to unravel these spurious links at the heart of post-truth by looking in greater detail at the ways in which Truth Games explored testimony and the public role of the media in complex, scripto-visual constructions of truth and political solidarity. I will argue that Truth Games provides an exemplary transnational feminist riposte to the untenable charges of fake news by mobilizing media-based testimony as a form of ethically responsible, situated knowledge, specifcally produced to be experienced as an artwork, rather than a documentary record. The anticipation of ‘fnally hearing the truth’, and the material qualities of its media trace, were both invoked by Williamson when she recounted the impetus for Truth Games: To think we would finally hear the truth, which was beyond what could have been imagined, beyond the veil of secrecy and absolute blatant lies. I knew I would do something with it. I cut out newspaper articles and kept files and finally had the idea to do something case by case.19 This was by no means Williamson’s frst work exploring the struggles against apartheid and the complexities of truth, justice, voice and representation in South Africa. During the 1980s Williamson produced a series of photo-etched, collage portraits

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celebrating women activists entitled A Few South Africans (1983–87), postcards of which were widely distributed at the time, and images from which are the basis for the continuing series, All Our Mothers (1983–), a photo-archive of some of the many women who contributed to lasting political change in South Africa during and after the struggle. Trained as a journalist, Williamson founded the periodical ArtThrob in 1997, a locus for critical thinking on contemporary art, community and activism in South Africa and beyond, and her frst book, Resistance Art in South Africa, was published in 1989 and is now in its second edition.20 In short, the political acuity of Williamson’s art-making and writing was well-honed before she embarked upon Truth Games. Case by case, each of the works that comprise Truth Games tells a particular story, irreducible to a general rule, normative paradigm or universal truth. Just as the TRC brought to light human rights violations, tales of atrocity and extraordinary acts of forgiveness on all sides under apartheid, Williamson’s choice of cases had no unilateral victims or perpetrators. There were, of course, notorious security police cases in the mix, such as in the work Tony Yengeni – wet bag torture – Jeff Benzien (1998) where, in a shocking courtroom re-enactment, Benzien demonstrated the technique of the wet bag torture used to extract information from suspects. But Williamson also included, for example, the case of an ANC offcial admitting to a bomb attack that left a bystander blinded in Neville Clarence – hold no grudge – Aboobaker Ismail (1998). Ismail’s apology and Clarence’s simple statement

Sue Williamson, Tony Yengeni – wet bag torture – Jeff Benzien from Truth Games, 1998.

FIGURE 1.1

Image courtesy of the artist.

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Sue Williamson, Nkosinathi Biko – false medical certifcate – Dr Benjamin Tucker from Truth Games, 1998.

FIGURE 1.2

Image courtesy of the artist.

of forgiveness,‘I do not hold any grudges’, remain among the most remarked upon exchanges of the TRC’s long hearings. Greater ambivalence pervades some of the other cases selected by Williamson, not least in Nkosinathi Biko – false medical certifcate – Dr Benjamin Tucker (1998), the work based on the murder of Stephen Biko in 1977 by the South African security police and the false medical certifcate issued by Tucker that had allowed the fve policemen to evade prosecution for 20 years. Biko’s family, led by his son Nkosinathi, were strong critics of the TRC as an amnesty and reconciliation process that they felt would never achieve justice for those who had given their lives for the struggle. Whilst the TRC named the fve policemen as those responsible for Biko’s death, and refused their pleas for amnesty, they have as yet never been prosecuted. These disparate tales of truth are unfolded through a strict formal layout in Truth Games: from left to right in each work are three images taken from documentary photos showing the victim or their representative, a scene associated with the case, and the perpetrator. Moveable, translucent perspex slats, printed with words, phrases and quotes from the case testimony and reports in the media, overlay the three images. Each slat has a round hole at one end, and viewers of the work can play the ‘truth game’ to which the title alludes, by sliding these text fragments to and fro across the images, veiling and revealing in turns. We see, for example, Benzien demonstrating his skill in torture in the central panel, and justifying himself through

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the words ‘ordered to lie’ and ‘I got the job done’, while his erstwhile victim Tony Yengeni says he was treated ‘like an animal’ and referring to Benzien, asks ‘what kind of human being’, Elsewhere, we read ‘death in detention’, ‘father’s brain haemorrhage’ and ‘false medical certifcate’ over images of Stephen Biko’s grave marker, his adult son’s face, gaze averted, and the non-descript features of the elderly white doctor wearing glasses. Our position in these games of truth becomes pivotal; we must participate in the testimony, move the text and work to see the images. There is no simple revelation offered to us as participant-witnesses. With every movement of the perspex slats, the fragments of testimony redefne the screen reminding us that we will never see the ‘whole truth’ nor be able to win this ‘game’. Commenting on critical responses to her work in 2003, Williamson made the following observation on documentary: ‘Often my work is looked at as a documentary thing of apartheid. Although my work has a documentary side, it’s not just about that’.21 Her observation is telling; Williamson is here drawing a line between conventions of documentary photography that read the resultant images as objective, or ‘true’, records of events, and the work of a visual artist who uses documentary material with a critical awareness of its already-mediated status, even before it is confgured within composite, multi-media works of art. Weaving the residual traces of documentary evidence and testimony within a more complex and demonstrably mediated confguration of text and image, Truth Games ‘has a documentary side’, but is, indeed,‘not just about that’. There is another valence to Williamson’s invocation of, and distancing from, documentary photography that is particular to the South African context, namely, the history of ‘struggle photography’. This form of documentary photography was characterized by highly politicized images, frequently shot in the midst of violent confict between the state and anti-apartheid demonstrators. It is work that documented violent truths, clearly identifed ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sides in the struggle, and was produced by, as Lize van Robbroeck aptly put it: ‘the (white and all-male) members of the ‘Bang Bang Club’, whose gung-ho masculinity affrmed the gendered nature of documentary with its claims to truthful representation and objectivity’.22 Truth Games ran counter to this hyper-masculine language of South African documentary, suggesting that the many-sided truths that co-existed within apartheid South Africa were neither going to be unravelled by the statements of a singular victor or victim, nor by claiming a totalizing knowledge of the events of the past, underpinned by technologies of vision that operate as if from nowhere. Williamson located vision and voice in Truth Games and while this refuses to give us a mastering gaze or yield a monolithic metanarrative, it materializes a feminist objectivity of situated knowledges. In dialogue with Haraway: All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view, even when the other is our own machine.23

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Nearly twenty years after the end of apartheid, Williamson produced a sixscreen, rear-projection video installation entitled There’s something I must tell you (2013). Bringing that work into the conversation at this point enables the arguments linking situated knowledge, imagination and transversal political solidarity to extend in critical ways around the signifcance of embodied dialogue, materialized in and through art. Taking a lead from the work of Patricia Hill Collins on Afrocentric feminist epistemologies and the evaluation of truths in a feld of contested meaning,24 yet another critical riposte to the relativist rhetoric of post-truth emerges in the aesthetic dynamics of response-able listening. This is signifcant; dialogues are exchanges between speakers and listeners and they do not take place only in conditions of full equality, but in many instances, where power politics mean that some voices are heard whilst others remain silenced. The masculine-normative visual languages of struggle photography cast the politics of the time as principally a struggle between men. It has become clear in the decades following the TRC hearings that, there too, women’s voices were present, but their stories remained elusive. What does it take to provide a space in which the voices of women, in all their particularity, can become part of a very different claim to knowledge? There’s something I must tell you is centred on the voices of women and their experiences of the changing political landscape of South Africa during and after apartheid. In each of the six video works, two women, described by Williamson as ‘veteran women activists from the struggle against apartheid and their “granddaughters”’,25 speak with and to one another and, in moments of direct address to

FIGURE 1.3

Sue Williamson, Amina and Luiza Cachalia from There’s something I must tell

you, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

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the camera, to us.26 The conversations vary considerably, from senses of deep closeness in political and intellectual terms (Brigalia and Busiswa Bam; Ilse Fischer and Thandi Lewin) to a strong sense of disconnection with the past (Vesta Smith and Tammy Leigh Lodge) or a desire to understand the family’s history better (Amina and Luiza Cachalia). Like the cases selected by Williamson for inclusion in Truth Games, the tales told by the dozen women at the centre of There’s something I must tell you defy any reductive attempts to be assimilated into a singular position, voice or narrative.27 The women come from many different racial, cultural, religious and class backgrounds; what the older women shared in the past was a cause and what all of the women share in the present is a legacy. But their positions in relation to the cause and legacy are not identical. Tammy Leigh Lodge speaks of the ‘textbook version’ of the past that is her understanding of apartheid and Caroline Motsoaledi wonders whether the pain and loss of the struggle were worth it when she sees so many young people caring about little else than their football clubs. By contrast, Busiswa Bam and Thandi Lewin evince personal pride in the actions of their elders and see the struggle as both ongoing (Bam notes continuing racism) and as having provided constitutional rights amongst the best in the world (Lewin notes the legal recognition of her same-sex partnership). This is not a work that assimilates differences between women into essential sisterhood, but rather, through carefully deployed intersectional aesthetics, one that facilitates ‘solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’. The work was frst installed in a larger exhibition of Williamson’s work held in the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town in 2014.28 The show (also entitled There’s something I must tell you) included A Few South Africans (from the Iziko collection) and All Our Mothers; in this initial installation, therefore, There’s something I must tell you was already contextualized in dialogue with the multi-racial, multi-generational histories of women’s activism in South Africa. A specifc visual structure organized the installation of the six-screened work in the Slave Lodge; the conversations between the women speakers were shown as ‘talking heads’ (one on each screen, speaking to each other and to us) next to a changing display of archival stills of the veteran women’s lives and full-length portraits of each woman in a shared domestic setting [Colour plate 1]. This display locates the speakers in time and place and, importantly, lays bare to the viewer-listeners, the technologies of the still and moving images. It also places the viewer-listeners within the gaze of the women on screen.29 Refusing to position the speakers or the videos as ‘transparent’ or unmediated in the space, viewers cannot perform the ‘god-trick’ of disappearing into the disembodied screen of an ‘invisible’ cinematic apparatus.30 The visual, audible, spatial confguration of the work is central to its generation of the women’s stories in dialogue, as shared acts of attentive speaking and listening, to which we, as viewer-listeners, are party. We are interpellated twice as listeners by the direct address of the work: frst, in its title (there’s something I must tell you), and second, in the moments when the speakers on screen turn to address the camera/ us. Through these aesthetic tactics, we are made aware of our own location within the telling of these tales that must be told. In addition, we experience the women

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on screen listening, attentively, as the work unfolds in space, over time. The stories each woman tells respond to the stories of others; listening, as well as telling, becomes a profound act of sharing responsibility. Nowhere has the ethical and political signifcance of call-and-response dialogue been argued more eloquently than in the writing of Collins on Black feminist epistemology: Dialogue is critical to the success of this epistemological approach, the type of dialogue long extant in the Afrocentric call-and-response tradition whereby power dynamics are fluid, everyone has a voice, but everyone must listen and respond to other voices in order to be allowed to remain in the community. Sharing a common cause fosters dialogue and encourages groups to transcend their differences.31 In arguing for an epistemology that is founded on neither elitist objectivity nor defeatist relativism, Collins’s development of a concept of dialogue that is both responsive and responsible, situated and accountable, is pivotal to a politics of intersectional solidarity.32 I am arguing here that this form of dialogue, materialized, rendered bodily, experienced in and through participation in Williamson’s artworks, provides a challenge to the post-truth rhetoric of irresponsible and often violent, speech. Post-truth is the accession of diatribe over dialogue, an incendiary telling that provokes inattentive listening and thoughtless response. It does not forge communities, but creates monadic masses. Collins makes clear that there are preconditions for dialogue that include attentive listening, respectful response, ethical integrity, empathy and the collective evaluation of speakers’ speech. These are not designed to produce one truth, but a community of responsive knowing that can transform relations of fxed privilege and oppression into shared power. These dialogues take time.

Unmaking the master’s house In Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time,Yve Lomax wrote evocatively of the role of listening in the production of knowledge as an emergent event in space, over time, that unravels the primacy of the knowing subject over the known object. It is signifcant that in her pivotal passage on listening, Lomax embarked upon a creative dialogue with the geneticist Barbara McClintock, via the feminist philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers: I have been listening, as carefully as I can, to Isabelle Stengers; and now I hear this philosopher speak of Barbara McClintock, a scientist whose passion was to study maize corn. . . . For Barbara McClintock, each grain of corn asked a question and rather than rushing to impose an answer, she listened. . . . Barbara McClintock knew only too well that she couldn’t force the corn to speak, to testify. Yes, she had to listen and listen she did. And what she heard was a confusion of stories, but she neither battled against nor plugged her ears

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to this noise. . . . Barbara McClintock loses herself in the confusion generated by aberrant grains of corn; but she knows only too well that nature cannot be described or thought from the exterior as if one were an ideal god-like spectator.33 Lomax listens to Stengers, who listens to McClintock, who listens to the maize corn. Their mutual acts of listening are responsive and open; even when they do not initially understand what they hear, they continue to listen and respond, and it is this attentiveness to the sounding of others (both human and non-human) that enables them to connect across time and space in dialogue. Extending the dialogue a step further, I hear another telling invocation of McClintock’s ‘listening’, this time by Marjorie Pryse in her article on ‘trans/feminist’ methodology. Signifcantly, Pryse brought McClintock’s ‘listening’ into a critical conversation with Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ and Harding’s ‘strong objectivity’, arguing that transversality is ‘more than a political issue; it becomes an alternative intellectual structure for Women’s Studies’.34 In their very different projects, both Lomax and Pryse drew upon McClintock’s attentive listening and her ground-breaking studies of genetic mutability to support a key, critical point about knowledges: knowing subjects are not the masters of known objects, but partners in knowledge practices through which subjects and objects emerge in mutuality. Acknowledging our epistemic entanglements with other actors in the world, both human and non-human, recasts agency and responsibility beyond the logic of mastery, toward alternative models of non-dominative knowing and this has important ramifcations for a feminist transversal politics. The deep interconnections between intellectual drives toward mastery and forms of political, cultural and ecological domination have been delineated with great clarity by Julietta Singh in her recent book, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Throughout the volume, Singh confronts the desire for mastery that resides at the heart of many critical projects (including her own) and turns it on its head.35 Advancing a notion of ‘vulnerable reading’, underpinned by an explicit decolonizing, queer feminist politics and the theoretical insights of deconstruction and new materialism, Singh posits a different model of knowing, one vitally connected to entangled listening: I dwell on listening as a critical mode of becoming vulnerable to the voices – human and nonhuman, audible and muted – that are always sounding even when we have not been trained or allowed ourselves to listen: Listening as opposed to voicing that which we ‘know’.36 Central to Singh’s argument, and to the earlier, resonant insights of Code, Collins, Haraway and Lomax (via McClintock), is the premise that undoing knowledge as mastery facilitates conversations with many different ‘others’. This is not the same as ‘representing’ or assimilating others within a master discourse. However wellintentioned, the quest to know fully the unknown other, can in itself become a form

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of domination, of mastery produced through the fction of totalizing knowledge. Nowhere has this been better articulated than in the landmark essay by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’.37 For Mohanty, the construction of a monolithic category, ‘third world woman’ by privileged ‘(Western) feminist texts’ is the paradigmatic instance of colonizing knowledge practices that silence the very subjects they seek so earnestly to hear. This is a pressing issue for transnational feminist epistemologies, not least when they contest, through forms of knowing well, the wilful ignorance and unknowing that lies at the heart of post-truth politics. To develop these ideas further, I want to bring Audre Lorde’s incisive thinking on power, knowledge and feminist solidarity into the conversation at this point. Lorde’s creative activism adds a crucial element to the lines of a feminist epistemological project that seeks to know well, but not to master. Time and again in her writing, Lorde turned to the issue of feminist solidarities across racial, national, cultural and sexual divides, arguing that women’s potential to transform the world was being undermined by those forms of identity politics that foreclosed the possibility of responsive and responsible intellectual dialogue and creative coalition. This was not a matter of Lorde being insensitive to differences between women or to the myriad processes of identifcation that underpin subjectivity, but a mark of her political, creative and intellectual commitment to collective forms of knowing and imagining otherwise. As she wrote: Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. . . . Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. . . . Survival is not an academic skill. . . . It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.38 Lorde’s emphasis upon tools is crucial; the transformative dialogic epistemologies proposed by transnational feminisms are grounded in new and different practices of knowing, new tools for new knowledges. Lorde returned often to these ideas in her work, linking power, knowledge and truth to the practice of writing, her own most transformative tool:‘For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it’.39 If we are to begin to respond effectively to the political expediencies of post-truth by engendering transversal dialogues with difference, we need to fashion our tools anew. It is my contention that the visual arts provide a particularly important contribution to transnational feminist knowledge projects, and to their toolkit, as they materialize practices of non-dominative knowing that are embodied, durational, affective and imaginative, challenging us to explore how we look, listen and engage to make meanings toward new ends.

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For me, this contention is no mere abstraction; over a number of years, across a range of projects, I have been challenged to renegotiate my position as a knowing subject, trained as a scholar through the very paradigms of mastery that I now seek to unmake. I recognize the paradox with which I am faced, as it is not mine alone, but central to transnational feminist thought and activism: how can we create political and ethical solidarities that neither assimilate nor reify difference, especially critical differences between women on a global scale? How can transnational feminist knowledge practices facilitate connections through affnity and common cause while, at the same time, teach us how to ‘take our differences and make them strengths’? My claim is not that this is a simple or easy task, but that the compelling arguments made by transnational feminist scholars on the relationships between power, knowledge and truth, provide a pivotal direction for taking this forward. Situating knowledge and imagination, privileging partial perspective, acceding to contingency without relinquishing responsibility, and according agency to human and nonhuman actors, are substantive moves toward creating epistemic communities that are ecologically, politically and ethically transformative. And to begin, we can listen. During the summer of 2017, at Documenta 14 in Kassel, I encountered a work by Vadodara-based artist Nilima Sheikh entitled Terrain: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind (2016–17). The 14th Documenta was held across two sites: Kassel, its historic home, and Athens, a new venue, where Sheikh showed a suite of double-sided scrolls from

Nilima Sheikh, Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, installation at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017. 16 scrolls, each 213 cm high, Sanganer Paper mounted on fabric, painted in casein tempera, supported by an octagonal wooden structure.

FIGURE 1.4

Photograph by Avijit Mukul Kishore. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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the series Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14).40 Drawing upon my encounter with Terrain, both in Kassel and after, enables me to demonstrate how the work might be understood to materialize the conditions of knowing otherwise, providing the tools to open a coyote conversation that refuses mastery and ‘one truth’ logic in favour of responsible dialogues between and across many partial truths. Terrain is not a simple piece to view, nor is it easy to describe the experience of viewing it. The work consists of 16, paper-on-canvas scrolls, each over two metres long and just under a metre wide (213 x 87 cm). Four of the scrolls are principally text pieces in which written passages appear over richly pigmented and patterned ground, while the other dozen are multi-layered text-image compositions, deploying a similar richness of colour and ornament. The texts cited in the works are multi-lingual (many are written in English, Urdu and Hindi, but vernaculars such as Punjabi and Gujarati are also used), multi-genre (referencing ancient and modern poetry, song verse and prose, academic and popular writing) and multi-national (hailing from diverse places, including South and East Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas). The visual images, materials and techniques deployed in the scrolls derive from an equally varied and rich array of sources, including Indian and Persian miniature painting, large-scale scenographic design, Chinese and Sanjhi stencils, Tibetan Tangkas, Middle Eastern decorative friezes, frescoes from the European Renaissance, 20th-century European, American and South Asian modernisms, and contemporary documentary. Installed, the scrolls are hung as panels on an open octagonal frame, creating a viewing structure and screened enclosure that engenders a mixture of distant and proximate viewing, undertaken through movement in and around the panels. The combination of fgurative scenes, texts, decorative motifs, colours and patterns on the layered surfaces of the work act as palimpsests and pentimenti; reading and looking take place through and across the residues of earlier words, images, fragmentary symbols and signs. In Sheikh’s words, Terrain creates a space that is both ‘vulnerable and meditative’.41 A visual, material and spatial coyote conversation, Terrain offers no singular viewpoint to its participant-spectators, but rather an entanglement of space, time, words and bodies perceived in multiple acts of looking and reading, watching and listening, intimacy and estrangement, negotiated with and through others. Like many critics who have written about Sheikh’s work, I was drawn frst to Terrain’s aesthetic qualities: its rich surfaces, luminous colour felds and beautifully rendered, interleaved fragments of text and image hailed me, affectively, and compelled my engagement. Yet, even as I revelled in the pleasure of viewing the work, it was clear that reading/ looking/listening between and across the decorative surfaces of Terrain could not but be partial, perspectival and unfnished. For every resonant fragment that I could weave into a precarious story, there were others that eluded interpretation, exceeding the limits of my knowledge and remaining inaccessible – text passages in languages that I do not read, visual motifs I could not recognize, signs and symbols that would not resolve through a singular interpretation. Critics of Sheikh’s work frequently respond to this combination of desire and ‘failure’ (to know), through default patterns of interpretation; many fatten the multiple narratives to one overarching term (e.g. Terrain is about migration),42 or attempt to

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provide a ‘complete’ interpretation by listing the many different references that can be deciphered in Sheikh’s works.43 Others evince frustration:‘Because these pieces are so detailed, so precise and intentional in their manner, I found it frustrating to not have some kind of textual support to fully understand the magnitude of Sheikh’s work’.44 The critical desire to ‘fully understand the magnitude of Sheikh’s work’, or to alight upon the interpretation, is telling. This is the desire to master the work, rather than to converse with it, and Terrain resists this masterful mode of knowing at every turn. Yet if Terrain punctures the God-trick of knowing everything from nowhere, it does not foreclose embodied and situated knowing through dialogue. Responsible dialogues begin from somewhere and, coming to Terrain, I am at once a privileged viewer, bringing a wealth of information and intellectual training to the work, and an outsider, engaging from a distance with histories and cultural traditions beyond my immediate experience.45 The former locates me within a transnational epistemic community of feminist scholars working on recent and contemporary global art, and through that community of interest, I am aware of other work by Sheikh and of her commitment to the development of an aesthetic ‘language’ capable of articulating the complex experiences of women in culture.46 Bringing this awareness together with Documenta 14’s emphasis on migration, resettlement and the politics of belonging, provided a location from which to enter into dialogue with Terrain and the work did not disappoint. Terrain’s sub-title, Carrying Across, Leaving Behind, and redolent images of bordercrossing over land, water and air, combine with a veritable archive of evocative textual excerpts focused on exile and resettlement. Female fgures play a key role in many of the panels, and the voices of women mystics, poets, writers and scholars abound in the excerpts. I fashion a precarious and vulnerable reading through some of these texts and images, bringing the spiral of fgures ‘carrying across’ from the panel entitled Border, together with the extraordinary central gestural motif of its neighbouring panel, Family, in which a young woman kneels to be beheaded by her father. Excerpts from feminist scholars I recognize, such as Jacqueline Rose and Urvashi Butalia, explore the contemporary continuation of the practice of ‘honour killing’, and the rape and abduction of thousands of women during the Partition of India.47 I later fnd that the motif of the kneeling woman at the heart of Family, is a recurrent motif in Sheikh’s work, inspired by accounts collected by Butalia, of women being killed pre-emptively by family members seeking to ‘protect’ them from the potential of sexual assault. In Family, the motif is set beneath the following excerpt: Broadly speaking, violence is a foundational and systemic feature of all contemporary patriarchies. Women’s consent to patriarchies is often an effect of the anticipation of violence, or the guarantee of violence in the last instance – to ensure obedience, inculcate submission, punish transgression. Patriarchies rest equally on consent by women, violence against women and on legitimating ideologies. The fact that there is no full male monopoly of institutional and interpersonal violence, suggests the obvious: that patriarchies are not the rule of men over women but systemic structures. Indeed, patriarchies work to undermine solidarities by dividing women within the same family, neighbourhood, caste or class, as well as across classes, castes and religions.48

Nilima Sheikh, Family from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17. Casein tempera on Sanganer paper, 213 x 89 cm.

FIGURE 1.5

Image courtesy of the artist.

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The reference at the end of this excerpt to the importance of solidarities between women that cross the boundaries of family, neighbourhood, class, caste and religion, articulates a cornerstone of transnational feminist thought and activism. Terrain creates an affective parallel to this statement of solidarity through difference, bringing texts and images together such that their affnities resonate in and through a diverse and complex picture of female agency set against the multifarious legacy of patriarchal violence. In this, Terrain materializes a transversal knowledge project capable of recognizing position without reifying identity, and contributes, aesthetically, to the formation of a transnational feminist epistemic community. But there is more. The dialogues created across and between the spaces, surfaces, fgures, narratives and textual fragments of Terrain are not smooth, seamless or monolithic. Meanings do not emerge as fxed or fnished, but rather in contingent convergences between resonance and dissonance that leave material and conceptual traces. On the outer curve of the screened space of Terrain, two panels arrest my attention, but neither depicts a scene familiar to me. I fail to read them directly and proceed elliptically. The images focus on water and air, their surfaces are brilliantly decorated and diminutive fgures carry the burden of the depicted action in each image. The textual fragments in the works suggest an ethereal longing: ‘The road that leads me to you is safe, even when it runs into ocean’ and ‘I believe, I believe, that I can travel to the stars’. In Kassel, I connect these two panels intuitively, but cannot articulate how and why, and I cannot, without resorting to considerable epistemic violence, assimilate them into a unifed interpretive framework for Terrain. Arguably, it is when we cannot seamlessly assimilate the voices of others that we need to listen all the more attentively – and vulnerably. Knowing otherwise is not linear or teleological; it unfolds through hesitation, diffculty and desire, emerging elliptically, moving forward, drawing near, turning back and on, anon.49 And where we risk not mastering the objects of our knowledge, we open the far more radical possibility of conversing with, and knowing well, the subjects with whom we share the world. Terrain provides an aesthetic opportunity to explore transnational feminism’s radical encounters with epistemic contingency, difference and transformation, and to engage with the tools needed to know and imagine otherwise to create an ‘earthwide network of connections’. Long after I have left Kassel, I locate titles for the panels that had so compelled my viewing of Terrain: Chenab and Shadow and Stars. Chenab depicts a well-known Punjabi folk tale of the tragic love story of Sohni and Mahiwal. I quickly fnd that Sheikh has painted this motif before and that it has become one of the most commonly reproduced images in critical reviews of Terrain published in the South Asian press. The tale has many subtle variations and versions, but it is simple in outline: Sohni, the daughter of a potter, is forbidden to marry the foreign man whom she loves (Izzat/Mahiwal). Each night, clutching a baked pot as a foat, she swims across the Chenab River to meet her lover on the other side. Betrayed to her family, who substitute an unbaked pot for the foat, Sohni is faced with the ultimate choice – does she swim to see her lover once more, risking her

FIGURE 1.6 Nilima Sheikh, Chenab 5 from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17. Casein tempera on Sanganer paper, 213 x 89 cm.

Image courtesy of the artist.

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life in the water, or leave him waiting and believing that she has not come because she no longer loves him? She elects the former and the pot dissolves. The fact that the Chenab river undulates over and across the contested border between India and Pakistan, that the lovers are kept apart (in various versions) by differences of religion, class, caste, language and nation and, that the border crossing that signals the radical potential for change at the heart of the story is motivated by the active desire and agency of a woman – Sohni, who risks her life each night in the river – are not details that have been lost on viewers of Terrain and certainly, as I learn about this tale, they resonate for me. As I sought to learn more about the invocation of particular songs and tales in Terrain, I was struck by a comment made by Sheikh herself, who spoke with astonishing precision of these tales as potent traces of the past remaining within the present:‘These were sung by men and are still sung in lands where there is pre-emptive killing of daughters, and where violence against women in the family is rampant’.50 Terrain’s multi-layered archive of texts and images invite vulnerable, contingent reading across and through the past and the present, intertwining elegant and arresting aesthetics, with histories, myths, testimonies and legends that give meaning to seemingly random acts of courage or brutality. But, in materializing the mythopoesis of history,51 the substance of the cultural imaginary at work in the present (and in ordering the past), Terrain makes no pretense to completion or fnality. Rather, the work is replete with elisions and ellipses, brief gaps, protective shadows and silences, that open the work to becoming52 – to the transformations that ‘spark like a dialectic’ at the nexus of difference. Another small fgure emerges beneath a blue night sky in the panel Shadow and Stars; the fgure kneels and bows his head in a gesture reminiscent of the dutiful daughter of Family, but the tale is, again, not familiar to me at frst sight and I fail to master it. I read the line by Emily Dickinson on the panel, ‘The stars are not hereditary’; this line is in dialogue with another whose attribution I do not recognize: ‘My birth is my fatal accident’. For me, this small fgure beneath a starry blue feld is linked to Sohni, swimming for her life, and to the woman who spares the honour of her family by submitting to the sword. I later fnd the text comes from the suicide letter of the Dalit activist and university student Rohith Vemula, whose death sparked controversy and swept the news in India and internationally in 2016. My continuing engagement with Terrain over time creates a complex coyote conversation, a dynamic and inexhaustible dialogue in and through difference that only gains in complexity, detail and power through partial, perspectival and embodied encounters. The dialogues the work engenders are contingent and open-ended, they facilitate many different voices being heard and acknowledged through a practice of vulnerable listening/reading, but they do not assimilate them within one, seamless, tale. Terrain is a compelling fction, an ethical and embodied invitation to hear the call of the other and to respond by creating ‘solidarities in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’. It is signifcant that Sheikh’s subtly nuanced

Nilima Sheikh, Shadow and Stars from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016–17. Casein tempera on Sanganer paper, 213 x 89 cm.

FIGURE 1.7

Image courtesy of the artist.

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descriptions of her work, and of her practices of making art, similarly demonstrate an aversion to mastery and open dialogues across difference. Like Lorde, Sheikh articulates a feminist practice of knowing-in-making that radically undermines the convention of the (male) artist as master and origin of the truth of the artwork. She seeks to develop her language/tools to facilitate this. For example, through her deployment of a wide range of excerpts (to which she tellingly referred as a ‘bibliography’), a reservoir of images, and many different media and techniques, Sheikh disperses singular, ‘authoritative’ or proprietary control of meaning: ‘What happens in my work is that there is an over layering, it’s not just that this work’s about this and this work’s about this . . . [rather] this work’s primarily this and then other things slide into it’.53 Sheikh further rejects the modernist mode of mastery through ‘originality’: ‘I like quotations, as I have no anxiety about originality’.54 The critical vulnerability of the making process that Sheikh articulates is exceptionally open; she listens, and her language emerges through intra-active encounters between and with the voices of others and the materiality of art. How does this way of thinking-in-making link to transnational feminist articulations of a dialogic epistemology and a transversal politics? I will argue both in method and in outcome. Turning back to Shadow and Stars, I am drawn to the paradox suggested by its title and imagery, between light and shade, hope, aspiration and despair. Vemula’s suicide was a fashpoint in a long and ongoing struggle for basic human rights for members of scheduled castes in India. This struggle is intimately intertwined with feminisms in South Asia, both historically and in the contemporary political arena. The links are complex and multidimensional, but they share signifcant valences around questions of education, representation (both political and cultural) and the control of women’s bodies. Sexual violence and restrictive marriage practices maintain the social structures that underlie both gender inequality and the caste system, and, for nearly a century, feminist and Dalit activists have made the intrinsic intersectionality of differential cultural, economic and political power explicit in their protests.55 But recognizing interconnections between various levels of domination is not the same as reducing particular instances to a general argument about ‘oppression’. Shadow and Stars makes direct reference to a tragic incident and names a particular person, Rohith Vemula – this is an important act of political solidarity. In addition, the visual resonances of this panel hearken to other panels and other resonant stories, legends and historical events, such that the particularity of actions in the present cannot be disentangled from the historical past, nor simply divorced from the weight of cultural convention as invoked in myths, songs and lore. And, if Sohni’s fragile pot could not, in the end, withstand the weight of tradition, her exercise of agency and desire, swimming against the current under the beautiful night sky, connects visually with the luminous stars in which Vemula’s hopeful message is inscribed [Colour plates 2 and 3]. The delicate visual qualities, decorative stencilling and tonal luminosity of the panels in Terrain bring its sombre scenes together through a sensory language that never abandons imagination, beauty, hope,

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longing and the desire for transformation. The elements of Terrain gather momentum in dialogue, but they do not translate one into another; rather, they draw out an intersectional, entangled knowing that neither silences what it wishes to (wilfully) ignore, nor assimilates that which it cannot master. We began this chapter with a riposte to a post-truth politics of wilful ignorance and violent speech that purports to be democratic in its relativisms, but admits of no dialogue and no difference. The binary thinking that would oppose posttruth with one, ‘objective truth’, no longer works; the God-trick of knowing all from nowhere convinces no one. Transnational feminisms have long proposed successor epistemologies premised upon embodied and located knowledges, framed through responsible and responsive dialogue with other human and non-human subjects. These are creative and contingent knowledges, whose aim is not to produce a master discourse, but to engender ethical relationships with others. Creating transnational feminist epistemic communities challenges us to test the limits of our tools and techniques to explode learned gaps and structural occlusions, and listen, at the risk of our own vulnerability, to those voices, human and otherwise, we have not been trained to hear. Knowing differently facilitates imagining otherwise, enacting, as Singh wrote, a ‘delicate maneuver (sic) between reckoning with our ignorance of the Other (there is a space between us and the Other that we cannot close) and the fact that we still bear responsibility for the Other’.56 Articulating affnities of interest within and through difference is central to transnational feminist coalition-building; materializing knowledge practices capable of performing that delicate manoeuvre is imperative to making change. The artworks we have explored through this chapter contribute a wealth of visual, material and spatial tools to the endeavour to create coyote conversations that link knowing with creativity, affect and imagination at the nexus of bodies and meanings. And, arguably, if we cannot master this work, we can converse with it, and each other, in and through our affnities and differences, toward responsible, located acts of knowing and imagining otherwise.

Notes 1 Oxford Languages Word of the Year 2016: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-ofthe-year/word-of-the-year-2016. 2 Post-truth politics have raised alarm in many quarters, not least amongst supporters of a free press (Matthew d’Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, London: Ebury Digital Kindle Edition, 2017), representative democracy (Ilan Zvi Baron, How to Save Politics in a Post-Truth Era, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) and academic integrity (Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 3 Eva Giraud, ‘Post-Truth Is a Feminist Issue’, Discover Society, 4 October 2017. Available at: https://discoversociety.org/2017/10/04/post-truth-is-a-feminist-issue/ (accessed 15 May 2018). 4 Nira Yuval-Davis,‘Dialogical Epistemology: An Intersectional Resistance to the “Oppression Olympics”’,Gender and Society,26:1 (Patricia Hill Collins Symposium Issue),February 2012, pp. 46–54, p. 46. As will be discussed more in later sections of this chapter, it is to Patricia Hill Collins’s notion of the centrality of dialogue in Afrocentric feminist epistemology that Yuval-Davis refers in her argument.

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5 Yuval-Davis uses Alison Assiter’s term ‘epistemic community’: see Alison Assiter,‘Feminist Epistemology and Value’, Feminist Theory, 1:3, December 2000, pp. 329–45. 6 Yuval-Davis,‘Dialogical Epistemology’, op. cit., p. 46, p. 49, p. 51. 7 Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 21. 8 Donna Haraway,‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14:3, Autumn 1988, pp. 575–99. 9 Haraway,‘Situated Knowledges’, op. cit., p. 581. 10 Haraway,‘Situated Knowledges’, op. cit., pp. 579–80. 11 Haraway,‘Situated Knowledges’, op. cit., p. 584. 12 Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. 13 Taking up my role in this dialogue through a footnote on footnotes is a playful way of making a serious point. Through the text, but especially in her notes, Haraway conversed with feminist science scholars (e.g. Evelyn Fox Keller, Jane Flax) standpoint theorists (e.g. Nancy Hartsock), postcolonial and race-critical feminist writers (e.g. Chandra Mohanty, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua) and science fiction authors (e.g. John Varley) amongst others. Her comments in the notes are often affable, conversational – from the first note discussing Bruno Latour (‘Latour is not otherwise a notable feminist theorist, but he might be made into one by readings as perverse as those he makes of the laboratory’ (p. 596, note 1) to the direct statement of dialogue with Zoe Soufoulis:‘She will forgive me the metaphor. . . . My essay was revised in dialogue with Soufoulis’s arguments and metaphors’, p. 597, note 3). In other notes, there are indications of conversations beyond the text ‘I owe my understanding of the experience . . . to Jim Clifford’ (p. 598, note 9) and ‘Joan Scott reminded me’ (p. 598, note 13), and intellectual desire,‘I still want more’, for the arguments of Hayden White (p. 597, note 2). 14 Haraway’s later works take the formal and stylistic elements of her writing further into transdisciplinary territory through transcultural and transmedial explorations of transspecies kinship: cf. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016. 15 Haraway,‘Situated Knowledges’, op. cit., p. 596. 16 My friend and colleague, Marion Arnold, has written about Williamson’s Truth Games (particularly focusing on the Jeff Benzien piece) in two very evocative articles: ‘Mind the Gap: Translation in a Fractured African Society’, Third Text, 27:3, 2013, pp. 419–35 and ‘The Dark Art of Equivocation’, Stimulus-Respond, special issue: Post-Truth, 2017, pp. 16–23. I want to acknowledge here the ways in which Arnold’s creative explorations of political art and truth in these articles, in her own art and in many conversations we have had over the years, have contributed to my thinking; her impact has been greater than a simple textual citation can convey. 17 Arnold,‘The Dark Art of Equivocation’, op. cit., p. 19. 18 Jacques Derrida, for example, was one prominent member of the international audience of the TRC hearings, and incorporated his experience of this into his ode to the exceptional status of forgiveness: On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London and New York: Routledge (Thinking in Action series), 2001. 19 Kim Gurney, ‘Sue Williamson Artbio’, ArtThrob, 2003. Available at: https://artthrob. co.za/03nov/artbio.html (accessed February 2018). 20 Sue Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa, 2nd Edition, Lansdowne, SA: Double Storey Publishers, 2004. 21 Gurney,‘Sue Williamson Artbio’, op. cit. 22 Lize van Robbroeck, ‘Dis-Locating the Colony: Utopia, Dystopia and Heterotopia in Svea Josephy’s Twin Towns’, in Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies, edited by Marion Arnold and Marsha Meskimmon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 309–24, p. 310. 23 Haraway,‘Situated Knowledges’, op. cit., p. 583.

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24 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, London and New York: Routledge, 1990. See, especially, chapter 10, ‘Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology’, pp. 201–20. 25 The quotation marks around ‘granddaughters’ indicate that the cross-generational relationships are close and familial, but not all are blood ties; Ilse Fischer and Thandi Lewin are not, strictly speaking, related, though their grandmothers were close and both of their fathers (Bram Fischer and Hugh Lewin) were imprisoned together. 26 The conversants include Amina and Luiza Cachalia; Ilse Fischer and Thandi Lewin; Vesta Smith and Tammy Leigh Lodge; Caroline Motsoaledi and Busisiwe Khatibe, Rebecca and Mpumelelo Kotane; Brigalia and Busiswa Bam. 27 I would like to thank Sue Williamson for her generosity in discussing a draft of this chapter with me; during our correspondence, she shared with me a current project exploring the longer term impact of the TRC hearings on witnesses and their families (It’s a pleasure to meet you and What is this thing called freedom?). These multi-screen dialogues continue and extend Williamson’s exceptionally nuanced film/documentary work on memory, history, truth and politics in South Africa and I am grateful for the opportunity to have viewed them before completing this chapter. 28 A lucid review of the work is: Lloyd Pollak,‘There’s Something I Must Tell You; Sue Williamson at Iziko Slave Lodge’, ArtThrob, 2014. Available at: www.artthrob.co.za/Reviews/ Lloyd_Pollak_reviews_Theres_something_I_must_tell_you_by_Sue_Williamson_at_ Iziko_Slave_Lodge.aspx. 29 Sue Williamson made this point to me in correspondence and it strongly reinforces the embodied and situated relationship set up by the work in space. 30 Without labouring the point, I note that the video conversations are available on Sue Williamson’s website in a version that derives from the installed piece (and, additionally, includes pop-up text information when moving the cursor to view). Thus, even online, we watch the work ‘in situ’ and the technologies are made manifest to produce an active viewing/listening encounter, rather than passive immersion. 31 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, op. cit., pp. 236–7. 32 Continuing the multidimensional conversations implicit here, Collins used Haraway’s critique of objective truths in her work, and Yuval-Davis cites Collins in developing her arguments for dialogue as a core condition of transversal politics. 33 Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, London: IB Tauris, 2005, pp. 64–6. 34 Marjorie Pryse, ‘Trans/Feminist Methodology: Bridges to Interdisciplinary Thinking’, NWSA Journal, 12:2, Summer 2000, pp. 105–18. McClintock is cited via the work of Evelyn Fox Keller in this text, rather than through a dialogue opening with the work of Isabelle Stengers. 35 Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018. Singh draws on Jack Halberstam’s poignant and productive use of ‘failure’ in The Queer Art of Failure, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011 in her arguments around the potential inherent in ‘failures to master’ texts. I am much indebted to Halberstam, Singh and Alpesh Patel (Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational Asian Art Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) for their thoughts on ‘failure’ as opening more radical potential for engagements with difference. 36 Singh, Unthinking Mastery, op. cit., p. 27. 37 Mohanty’s essay in Boundary in 1984 and subsequently reprinted and revised in a number of publications. I am using here the version published in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 51–80. 38 Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley: Crossing Press, (1984) 2007, pp. 110–13. (pp. 111–12; italics in the original). Lorde’s conversation with Adrienne Rich,

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also published in Sister Outsider, further emphasizes the need to build feminist communities that both acknowledge and cut across the differences between women. Audre Lorde,‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, in Sister Outsider, op. cit., pp. 40–4 (p. 43) This is a point that has come further to the fore in Indigenous scholarship on critical pedagogies and knowledge production; see, for example: Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books, 1999 and Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, eds., Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2005. The relationship between feminist pedagogies and activism is developed more in Chapter 2. Although I will not develop this line of thinking further at this point, the two works, sited in Athens and Kassel, can be read as having been in dialogue during Documenta. Sheikh cited in Tejal Pandey,‘A House with Many Windows’,The Hindu,1 December 2017. Available at: www.thehindu.com/entertainment/art/a-house-with-many-windows/article21244085.ece Cf. Ella Datta, ‘Kashmir, Partition and Displacement: Multiple Strands Come together in Nilima Sheikh’s new work’, Scroll.in, 29 May 2017. Available at: https://scroll.in/ magazine/838225/kashmir-partition-and-displacement-multiple-strands-cometogether-in-nilima-sheikhs-new-work One of the most detailed and inclusive accounts of Sheikh’s textual and visual sources can be found in Chapter 5 of the doctoral thesis of Priyanka Kulshreshtha, Depiction of Social Themes in the Painting of Contemporary Women Artists, Doctoral Dissertation, Aligarh Muslim University, 2015. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/151965 Kulshreshtha defends a very complex argument concerning contemporary women artists in India and key feminist political questions in this excellent thesis, delineating (almost as a list at some points) Sheikh’s influences as an evidence base for the political claims of the dissertation. Rachel Parikh,‘Trouble in Paradise: A Tribute to Kashmir in Chicago’, review of Nilima Sheikh at Art Institute of Chicago, Apollo Magazine, 20 March 2014. Available at: www. apollo-magazine.com/trouble-paradise-tribute-kashmir-art-institute-chicago/ It is important to remember that Terrain was made for Documenta, for which I am part of a majority demographic. Casting the work as an exotic artefact would be a conceit. Sheikh uses ‘language’ in a way that resonates with Lorde’s use of ‘tools’: ‘In that sense, the feminization of my language has in some way contributed to my feminist ideas. It’s not so separate from the language that I use’. Sheikh, cited in Hera Chan,‘Nilima Sheikh in Conversation’, an Ocula Conversation, Ocula Magazine, Hong Kong, 28 June 2018. Available at: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/nilima-sheikh/. Jacqueline Rose, ‘A Piece of White Silk’, London Review of Books, 31:21, 5 November 2009, pp. 5–8. Available at: www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jacqueline-rose/a-piece-of-whitesilk; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence:Voices from the Partition of India, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Kumkum Sangari,‘Violent Acts: Cultures, Structures and Retraditionalization’, in Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods, edited by Bharati Ray, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005, pp. 159–82, p. 161. Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing, London: IB Tauris, 2016. Sheikh cited in Vandana Kalra,‘My Concerns Are Primarily about Losing Home: Nilima Sheikh’, The Indian Express, 29 July 2018. Available at: https://indianexpress.com/ article/express-sunday-eye/my-concerns-are-primarily-about-losing-home-nilimasheikh-5279542/. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in dialogue with Judith Butler, in Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2010, p. 115. Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek, London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Sheikh cited in Pandey,‘A House with Many Windows’, op. cit.

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54 Datta,‘Kashmir, Partition and Displacement’, op. cit. 55 Anupama Rao, ed., Gender and Caste, London: Zed Books, 2005. Terrain cites the rallying call used in Vemula’s suicide note (his signatory words ‘Jai Bheem’); this alludes to the connections between the Dalit movement and the political legacy of Dr Ambedkar, whose campaigns profoundly connected caste with gender. 56 Singh, Unthinking Mastery, op. cit., p. 143.

2 CITIZENS, MIGRANTS AND WORLDMAKING DENIZENS

The myth of national/natural citizenship The words ‘nation’ and ‘nature’ share a common root in the Latin: natio (origin, breed) from natus (be born). As events over the past century have demonstrated all too clearly, this root is not innocent. Rather, the etymology of nation conspires to suggest an essential (natural) connection between blood and soil, lineage and location, such that the nation is understood as both a place and a group of people, intrinsically interconnected through homeland and birth-right. By contrast, in exploring the diverse phenomena of which nationalisms are comprised, Benedict Anderson developed his compelling concept of the nation as ‘an imagined community’, a collective entity whose power derives from naturalizing the elision of identity and place.1 When the practices that naturalise the nation’s boundaries are working well, citizenship, like gender, is experienced as ‘second nature’, as a (nearly) seamless connection between subjects and their nations. However, the imaginative fction2 of citizenship comes into sharp relief when its borders are tested, from either within or beyond. As this chapter will explore, transnational feminisms and the arts consistently test the limits of the ‘natural’ nation and her citizens, demonstrating the radical potential inherent in denaturalizing essentialist bonds between place and identity, so to decolonize and demonstrate the myriad ways in which subjects belong in the world. Arguably, the imaginative fction of the nation, naturalized, epitomizes what Roland Barthes described as myth:‘Myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifes, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us’.3 Signifcantly, the passage from Barthes’s 1957 essay ‘Myth Today’ in which he explored the construction of contemporary myth as a semiological system, opens with what has now become a very well-known visual analysis of the cover of a 1955 issue of Paris Match that Barthes read as signifying French citizenship, extended across her Empire.

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FIGURE 2.1

Paris Match (cover) 1955

The cover showed a young soldier in French uniform, offering a salute. The soldier’s gaze was focused out of shot, but Barthes interpreted his look as ‘probably fxed on a fold of the tricolour’. Barthes again referred to the not-pictured-fag in his fnal evaluation of the cover’s status as myth: ‘But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifes to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her fag’.4

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Barthes’s elegant semiotic deconstruction of the cover of Paris Match demonstrated that nation and citizenship are not natural, but rather, performed by a semiological elision of space and identity that becomes second nature through repeated iteration. Even more pertinent to the argument being developed in this chapter are three details from Barthes’s famous text: the frst, an addition, the second, an occlusion, and the third, an impossible incorporation. Barthes’s analysis added the French fag to the image (there is no tricolour in the photograph, only in the text), occluded gender and sexual difference in the concept of citizenship (France’s sons), but could not incorporate racial difference. Time and again, Barthes referred to the ‘colour’ of the soldier’s skin, despite arguing that the function of the image was to bring all of France’s sons (sic) together,‘without any colour discrimination, [to] faithfully serve under her fag’. These textual impasses suggest that the visual and material qualities of the photograph exceeded the limits of a seamless semiotic system. I would argue that this was not a failure, but an indication of the power of the visual and material registers of meaning production to exceed unifed systems of interpretation as they call for an embodied, and multidimensional, response from their viewers. Nearly half a century after Barthes wrote ‘Myth Today’, the artist Zoulika Bouabdellah produced the single-channel video Dansons (Let’s Dance) (2003).5

FIGURE 2.2 Zoulika Bouabdellah, still from Dansons (Let’s Dance), single-channel video, 2003 © Zoulika Bouabdellah Localisation: Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle.

Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Service audiovisuel du Centre Pompidou.

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Focused on the midriff of a young woman, the video opens as the fgure ties three silken scarves, one red, one white and one blue, around her waist and hips. The scarves are enhanced with a fringe of small, metal disks, typical of decorative textile embellishments from North Africa and the Middle East, that catch the light as they move. For the next fve minutes, the female fgure belly dances to the Marseillaise in her makeshift, Arabic-embellished, tricolour. Dansons resonates with the 1955 Paris Match cover and its construction of French imperialism and national identity, yet brings to the fore the very elements that Barthes struggled to control within the myth of the universal citizen – embodied sexual and racial difference, the feminization and subordination of the French Maghreb and the complexity of symbolic citizenship in a world marked by (de)colonization. Bouabdellah’s Dansons distils these complexities and tensions in a remarkably succinct video work. The march-step national anthem of France, the Marseillaise, reminds us that the contemporary concept of the nation-state and citizenship was forged during the French Revolution and was profoundly entwined with the notion of military sacrifce by men (France’s soldier sons).6 Visually, the three scarves place the tricolour at the centre of the image, yet the ‘fag’ is not a universal symbol here, but particular; it is shaped by its contact with the curves of a female body and it moves as she dances. Its Maghrebi embellishments render it as a sign of ‘exotic’ difference and erotic desire, thus situating the potential meanings of the ‘French fag’ within a discourse of cultural exchange (yes, Let’s Dance) between and across Europe and Arabic North Africa, rather than as a symbol of the assimilation of the ‘other’ within the universal logic of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ [Colour plate 4]. As Siobhán Shilton astutely surmised in her evaluation of Dansons: The work demonstrates not the eventual absorption of ‘otherness’ into a predetermined and superior identity but shows the participation of perceived ‘others’ in the national experience or in the formation of French identity’.7 Signifcantly, Shilton’s analysis draws upon the transnational feminist theory of Mary Louise Pratt, and especially Pratt’s notion of ‘transculturation’, a productive encounter between multiple cultural traditions, conventions and signifcations that is mutually constitutive, rather than homogenizing.8 This accords well with Bouabdellah’s descriptions of her work, where she speaks compellingly of being a French citizen of Algerian descent and how this facilitates creative encounters within her work that emerge at the nexus of multiple cultural conventions.9 These perspectives on Dansons are intersectional, rather than binary; they neither compel a hierarchy of differences to be maintained, nor force differences into homogeneity. Yet they do unravel the myth of Eurocentric, masculine-normative citizenship, and ask, to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler, just ‘who sings the nation-state’?10 It is hardly surprising that this question should be raised in an exploration of citizenship through the lens of transnational feminisms, transversal politics and the arts. In an increasingly expansive body of scholarship, decolonizing feminist engagements

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with citizenship, nationalism, migration and cosmopolitanism, consistently point to the inadequacy of conventional modes of analysis, and the limitations of historically determined vocabulary, in understanding the experiences (particularly, but not only) of women and people of colour who have long been excluded from normative paradigms of ‘citizenship’ in the developed world.11 A singular, universal model of citizenship simply does not work any longer or, as the editors of The Limits of Gendered Citizenship so aptly wrote: In the authoritative body of theoretical work, citizenship is typically conceptualized in a universal and, at the same time, often abstract manner, which leads to a very general and supposedly “objective” construal of this notion. Its decontextualized nature tends to locate the concept of citizenship within the nation-state and, simultaneously, signifies a lack of attention to the actual and diversified contexts in which citizenship in general, and gendered citizenship in particular, is practised, articulated and experienced.12 In her early, ground-breaking work on feminisms and citizenship, Ruth Lister similarly emphasized practice, calling citizenship both a ‘status, carrying a wide range of rights, and . . . a practice, involving political participation, broadly defned’.13 The formulation of citizenship as both a status and a practice acknowledges that, while institutional structures can delimit rights within and beyond the borders of the nation, they cannot curtail the potential of individuals to imagine and create new forms of community, connection and belonging in many different ways and places. Underpinning her dual notion of citizenship as status and practice, Lister articulated the concept of a ‘differentiated universalism’, the proposition that any collective (‘universal’) concept of citizenship only emerges through the diverse practices of embodied subjects negotiating particular local (‘differentiated’) dynamics.14 If attending to difference in practice, articulation and experience provides a compelling argument against an abstract and disembodied ‘universal citizenship’, it further underpins the centrality of intersectionality to differentiated concepts of belonging – not just in the cases of non-normative subjects who cannot easily be incorporated into the ‘universal’. It is important to note that ‘intersectionality’ is not being taken here as a ‘thing’ or ‘quality’ that some subjects ‘have’ or ‘are’, but rather, as a process or operation of corporeal-materialist agency in the world.15 This is not an inconsequential point; rather than seeking to identify categories of subjects who are citizens, intersectional feminist perspectives demonstrate how subjects become citizens (or not) through the very interactions that enable the concept itself to emerge and crystallize. Neither ‘subjects’ nor ‘citizenship’ are fxed categories, but rather, contingent constellations of meaning, materialized in multiple, differentially positioned, instances. Exploring the embodied processes of intersectional belonging central to a reconceived citizenship facilitates a critical intellectual move away from a logic confned by ‘representation’ (both political and aesthetic) toward a more productive

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engagement with articulation/materialization. Rethinking citizenship through the lens of decolonizing transnational feminisms facilitates new forms of collectivity that neither rely upon disembodied universalism nor essentialist identity politics. In their pioneering book, Women, Citizenship and Difference, Nira Yuval Davis and Pnina Werbner called for ‘recasting citizenship’, through ‘transversal dialogues across difference’, into a useful political tool that is both accountable and responsible – or, in the terms this chapter will pursue, they hearken to a situated and differenced fguration for belonging, otherwise, in the world.16 Arguably, the transversal dialogues delineated by Yuval Davis and Werbner mark a shift toward materializing citizenship as a lived, practised, imaginative and intersubjective form of belonging. However, suggesting that citizenship is more than an abstract status associated with rights/responsibilities upheld through legal or ‘nation-state’ regulation, is not the same as arguing that the legal status of citizenship as it is currently (inconsistently) applied throughout the world is of no signifcance. Far from it; at a time when large numbers of people in the world are refused the rights and status accorded to ‘citizens’, are subject to unequal treatment under the law as ‘migrants’ and, in many instances, suffer economic exploitation and/or political and other forms of violence whilst awaiting recognition in either category, the matter of citizenship has never been more urgent. At no point in the present argument is this being discounted. However, legal rights form only one part of a more complex set of material relationships that constitute and enable (or disable) any sense of inclusive ‘citizenship’. In addition to legal status, affective practices of belonging, collective identifcations and the imaginative forms of participation in public life are also brought into play as modes through which ‘citizenship’ is practiced and experienced and these modes bear no simple or singular relationship to the legal status afforded (or not) by citizenship rights. Bringing the insights of feminist corporeal-materialism together with a decolonizing praxis of reading, writing and making within and yet against the grain of the exclusive limits of the ‘nation’ and ‘her citizens’, transnational feminisms suggest ways through which it becomes possible to imagine and materialize forms of embodied and participatory worldmaking that challenge the limits of exclusive and normative citizenship. Such an argument assigns a strong role to the creative and imaginative practices of the arts and to their ability to experiment within the material parameters of the world without being wholly constrained by them. Indeed, it is central to the thinking that drives this chapter that art is not seen as an outside of the world, standing at some distance and representing it as a kind of mirror held up to refect a pre-existent reality, but is understood to provide experimental opportunities to materialize the mutual emergence of transversal worlds and intersectional subjects. For me, this points toward an alternative fguration for a vastly expanded concept of ‘citizenship’: the worldmaking denizen.17 In calling this a fguration, I do not mean that it is a fgure or merely fgurative, nor do I intend the term ‘denizen’ to be limited to its legalistic use as variously ‘naturalized’ or ‘resident’ persons with lesser rights than ‘citizens’. Rather, I am drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti in

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deploying the idea of the fguration as a radically extended, yet materially situated, trope that permits experimental thinking through process. As Braidotti wrote: Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings of situated, or embedded and embodied, positions. By figuration I mean a politically-informed map that outlines our own situated perspective. A figuration renders our image in terms of a decentred and multi-layered vision of the subject as a dynamic and changing entity.18 Embodied and entangled denizenship is not an object, but a dynamic and changing process, capable of encompassing intersectional identifcations and transversal dialogues across difference. Denizens are always becoming, mobile and mutable; there is no ‘origin’ that guarantees ‘belonging’ through a claim to an essential identity. Denizens demonstrate the limits of the binary thinking that pits ‘citizens’ against ‘migrants’, and colonizing ‘settlers’ against ‘Indigenous’ guardians. Denizenship is a post-authentic claim to belonging that does not seek a ‘truth’ in either blood or soil and does not set up the brutal exclusions that those models of authentic and essential identity so commonly do.19 As a process, worldmaking denizenship focuses on participation and the continual action of making oneself at home with others, forging solidarities and connections in and through transversal dialogues over time and across spaces. The denizen and the world come into being in mutual exchange; neither is a preformed real and both are altered in their encounter. The terminology deployed throughout this chapter is deliberately evocative. Tracing trajectories from representation to articulation,20 exploring materialization and diffractive agency,21 and drawing the lines of a new fguration are used here both to argue for the potential of art to engender creative ecologies of belonging beyond the limits of the masculine-normative citizen and to hold a dialogue with the rich work of those feminist theorists who, over the past three decades, have unravelled the intellectual stalemate of dualist thinking. Thinking through the fguration of the denizen enables a dialogue to emerge between feminisms, the arts, world citizenship, intersectional agency and global demographic change. This thinking resonates around a reconceived, embodied and worlding agency that is still and ever becoming – not a thing, but a process of intersubjective belonging – that challenges us to fnd adequate forms for its articulation. These ideas are crucial to transnational feminist thought and activism; it is to their materialization through the arts that this chapter now turns.

World citizens and frst nations In her 1938 novel-essay, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf argued that the limited boundaries of the political nation-state were in direct confict with the articulation of her identity as a woman, a pacifst and a cosmopolitan, famously declaring that ‘as a woman I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world’.22 Within the same paragraph, Woolf framed her impassioned plea for a feminist cosmopolitan

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imagination within a visceral exploration of the ‘obstinate emotion’ of her affective belonging to home, a home remembered and felt in and through the body. I do not take this to be a contradiction. Cosmopolitan, inter- and transnational worldviews have long been deeply entwined with feminisms, which at the same time, are profoundly attentive to the personal, domestic and local levels of political agency. Practices of making oneself at home in the world refuse the myth of essential authentic identity based on homeland and birth-right, but they embrace embodiment, the affective qualities of belonging and forms of experimental collectivity in and through difference. It is hardly surprising that transnational feminisms draw on cosmopolitan debates, but it would be mistaken to think that these describe a monolithic terrain; the cosmopolitan subject of transnational feminisms is not the disembodied elite ‘world-traveller’, but the embodied and situated ‘worldmaking subject’ who participates in exchanges that cross cultural and geopolitical boundaries without reifying identity or difference. This is not an abstract or utopian cosmopolitanism; to see the commitment to exploring forms of belonging that move beyond the limits of the sovereign nation-state as hopelessly utopian and idealist, would be to misapprehend the critical materialist trajectories that inform this argument and many others.23 For example, in making their compelling case for the critical role of constitutive imagination to an ethics premised upon embodiment and intersubjectivity, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd wrote this of ‘world citizenship’: [T]he exercise of the capacity to see the specificity of one’s own world as one among many others . . . would be to conceive of one’s own form of sociability as a valued but contingent way of life that does not cancel one’s responsibilities as a ‘citizen of the world’. . . . On this view,‘world citizenship’ does not involve an ‘idealistic’, or unattainable, transcendence of embodied being, but rather an immanent, embodied and ongoing negotiation between multiple forms of sociability.24 This is not a retreat from the world, but a profoundly responsible worldmaking, an engagement with (and within) the material constraints of the past that yet fosters the emergence of open and different futures. By calling for an ‘embodied and ongoing negotiation between multiple forms of sociability’, Gatens and Lloyd emphasise process over object; responsible world citizenship is not a thing that one fnally, once and for all, produces, attains or owns. It is, rather, a process of continual dialogue and interaction, an iterative and intersubjective form of engagement whose specifc materializations over time and in space are substantive but never fnal. In what follows, I will argue that works of art can provide especially provocative insights into these multiple and mutable processes of materialization and, moreover, that where the formal and conceptual qualities of the artworks pose searching questions of belonging with others in the world, they act less as representations of ‘world citizenship’ than as forms of diffractive agency through which the world and the citizen/ denizen (the cosmos and the polis of cosmopolitanism) emerge in mutuality.

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Before developing the arguments around world citizenship as an immanent and embodied form of cosmopolitan denizenship, it is worth expanding briefy on the idea of worldmaking being deployed in this text. To say that art is worldmaking, rather than a mere refection of a pre-existent world, is intended to emphasise the affective agency of art and suggest that, through its imaginative fctions (of the most powerful sort) art can materialize different possibilities for the future from within the material legacies of the past and present. Following Nelson Goodman, worlds do not ‘come from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking’.25 Recent scholarship by Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner has developed the idea of art as worldmaking with exceptional nuance to engage with contemporary art, politics (particularly in Asia) and questions of human rights.26 As will become clear as the present argument unfolds, these insights into art’s worldmaking potential and its ability to participate in processes of social change have important ramifcations for rethinking normative citizenship beyond the nation-state. As a way of opening the dialogue between art and the materialization of multiple forms of sociability, I want to turn to a particular work at this point: Monica Ross’s Anniversary – An Act of Memory (2008–13). Anniversary – An Act of Memory was a multi-sited, participatory performance piece in sixty Acts that took place between 2008 and 2013. A direct precursor to Anniversary, the work Rights Repeated – An Act of Memory, was performed by Ross in November 2005 in response to the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, a young man mistaken for a fugitive ‘terrorist’ and shot dead on the London underground in July of that same year. The tragic case of Menezes has become a touchstone for many people concerned that our fear of others is leading inexorably to an erosion of human rights, dignity and empathy; countering this fear is itself an act of cosmopolitan solidarity. In seeking words to remember Menezes in Rights Repeated, Ross recited the Preamble and 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, ratifed 1948) from memory as a two-fold act of remembrance: for the loss of this man’s life and of our commitment to the continual and collective reinstatement of the rights of ourselves and others in the world. The recitation from memory of the Preamble and Articles of the UDHR remained the cornerstone ‘act’ that later constituted Anniversary – An Act of Memory through its sixty particular iterations between 2008 and 2013. Act 1, the frst recitation of Anniversary, was a solo performance by Ross in the British Library undertaken as part of Ours By Right, an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the UDHR. The event was staged within the wider context of a British Library exhibition supported by the Equality and Human Rights Commission called Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights (2008) [Colour plate 5]. Over the next fve years, Anniversary – An Act of Memory was performed through many Acts in a variety of public venues; recitations took place, for example, at events to mark International Women’s Day, in support of Amnesty International’s campaign for Prisoner’s Rights, for World AIDS Day and as part of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art’s 2011 festival To Reverse the Usual Order of Things, where

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Monica Ross, Anniversary –  an  act  of  memory, Act 38 (10 December 2011) group recitation, performed for We  Are  All  Equal, an event in honour of International Human Rights Day, with the Sheffeld Socialist Choir and Northern Refugee Centre, Nelson Mandela Room, Sheffeld Town Hall, presented by Site Gallery, Sheffeld.

FIGURE 2.3

Photograph, Bernard Mills; reproduced by kind permission of the family of Monica Ross.

the articles were signed rather than spoken. That the ‘act of memory’ residing at the heart of the work was undertaken both by Ross and by many other participants across a variety of spaces, contexts and languages, demonstrates Anniversary’s complexity as a dialogic form of public art and a ‘negotiation between multiple forms of sociability’, whose embodied performance materialized both specifc,‘local’ concerns and a shared commitment to human rights and their continual instantiation.27 As noted earlier, the ‘anniversary’ to which the title refers is particular: on 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by a Proclamation of the United Nations General Assembly. Although scholars are right to argue that Ross’s work is more than just an interesting way to re-present the UDHR in a performance piece,28 nevertheless, the document is central to the work and retracing some key aspects of the UDHR’s history helps to illuminate the relationship between this living document and the signifcance of its recitation in Anniversary. Drafted in the wake of the Second World War and in the full awareness of the atrocities committed during that confict, the UDHR was written under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights, chaired at the time by Eleanor Roosevelt. Despite some issues of ‘dated language’ (and Ross used the plain speech, gender-neutral version of the UDHR as her core text in English), the UDHR is

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still considered to be the only written document to defne a set of world principles that transcend nation-state authority and it is still widely used to enable Human Rights violations to be prosecuted across national borders. While it remains subject to ongoing debates concerning the details of the Articles (e.g. the absence of an article to protect the right to ‘refuse to kill’) and the potential confict of the UDHR with Sharia Law, it has nonetheless been adopted formally by 192 countries29 and is invoked even more widely. Indeed, it is said to be the most translated document in the world; there were, at last count, 520 offcial translations, including into sign language.30 The issue of translation is signifcant; at its proclamation, the UDHR appeared in the fve offcial UN languages and following that, an emphasis was placed on ensuring that the document was widely translated into the vernacular, living languages of the world in an attempt to make certain that it could be read, heard and understood in real and local conditions. Performed, Anniversary also took shape across many sites and among many different groups of people whose specifc circumstances were as important to the recitation as the central text itself. In its local, polyvocal and corporeal performance, Anniversary reanimated the living, vernacular and local dynamic of the original constitution of the Declaration, or as Louise Purbrick put it, Anniversary ‘gives abstract ideas, such as the rights to freedom, equality, dignity and personhood, a physical presence’.31 The entanglement within the work of the universal declaration made by specifc bodies, in particular locations, is remarkably resonant with a statement made by Eleanor Roosevelt to mark the 10th Anniversary of the UDHR in 1958: Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. . . . Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.32 If Roosevelt’s plea for ‘concerned citizen action’ to uphold human rights ‘in small places, close to home’, fnds its aesthetic parallel in the myriad of voices brought together through the recitations of Anniversary, then both can be understood as tracing the lines of a differentiated universalism, articulating transversal dialogues across difference and beginning to materialize an inclusive, embodied and intersectional mode of world citizenship that emerges in mutuality with/in a critical public sphere. In the many small acts of speaking the universal declaration in the here and now through the particular gestures and voices of selves and others, Anniversary did not ignore or reject the material conditions of the past and present, the contexts and institutions through which rights and responsibilities are enshrined and ensured or neglected and negated. But neither did it fall at these limitations; the united voices speaking in time and space, sometimes faltering, hesitating,33 did not merely represent a coalition in and through difference . . . they performed it, in the strong

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sense of a performative iteration that instantiates as it voices. In this, Anniversary is a materializing performative (rather than a representational performance) and is profoundly worldmaking. In arguing that Anniversary performs, rather than represents, a differentiated universalism and an emergent form of embodied and intersectional citizen/ denizenship,34 it is important not to elide the materializing agency of the work’s performativity with a typological categorization of the work as a recitation or a live performance. In other words, the use of ephemeral, performative and/or participatory strategies in public artworks does not in itself ensure a dialogue with/in difference, a challenge to the concept of public culture, a redefnition of the contours of art’s ‘publics’ or a move toward a more inclusive public sphere. I am not arguing that Anniversary is ‘performative’ simply because it was enacted as a performance, or that it constitutes a move beyond representation just because its formal qualities are not ‘representational’. Moving from representation to materialization is not a matter of typology, but of re-focusing on what art ‘does’ rather than what it ‘is’. The present argument for the potential of particular public art practices to materialize a cosmopolitan worldmaking that instantiates a transversal feminist politics does not in any sense entail a wholesale rejection of ‘representational’ or ‘fgurative’ forms of art, but rather focuses on art’s agency in multifaceted encounters with subjects and objects in the world. If challenges to the conventional logic of the nation-state can emerge through explorations of a differentiated universal and the potential of ‘world citizenship’ to describe located yet extended senses of cosmopolitan, denizen belonging, so too can they be forged as a response to alternative calls for sovereignty from within. As the rubric under which this section of the chapter coalesces, ‘World Citizens and First Nations’, suggests, the myth of national sovereignty is both an internal and an external construct that includes and excludes subjects both beyond and within its geographical and imaginary boundaries. Without collapsing ideas around the differentiated universalism of ‘world citizenship’ into First Nations’ claims to sovereignty (or vice versa), the two positions share important affnities in relation to denaturalizing concepts of nation and citizenship. Indeed, I am arguing that both positions – the cosmopolitan and the Indigenous35 – are crucial to transnational feminisms36 that seek to decolonize dangerously exclusive constructions of nation/ citizenship, and to develop alternative fgurations for new geopolitical and imaginative ecologies of belonging. To open the discussion to internal contests of nation, sovereignty and belonging, it is useful to turn at this point to two works by Nadia Myre, Indian Act (2000–3) and For Those Who Can Not Speak: The Land, The Water, The Animals and the Future Generations (2013). Like Ross’s Anniversary, Indian Act took a formal document, the Canadian Parliament’s Indian Act of 1876, as the centrepiece of an extended participatory project. Between 1999 and 2002, more than 230 people joined Myre in sewing bees to stitch the Act in red and white glass beads. The resulting 56 beaded panels, some completely covered, others still showing areas of the original text, are a testament to a monumental act of collective historical refashioning [Colour plate 6].

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FIGURE 2.4

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Nadia Myre, Indian Act (detail), 2000–3

© Nadia Myre ©DACS 2019; reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Viewing the panels lays bare the extraordinary quotient of labour undertaken by participants from both Indigenous and settler communities in hand-beading the Act.37 In many hours of freely given labour, a creative act of collaboration became an empowering political act of coalition, transforming a central colonizing text into a work of art that materialized transcultural and transhistorical solidarity with the Indigenous communities whose histories and lives were determined by the formulary words of the Act and their legacy in destructive policies of extractive land rights and cultural assimilation.38

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Indian Act is a profound political statement of the power of creative agency to make the world otherwise, but it is also a statement of entanglement, of the signifcance of the personal to the political and of materiality to meaning. Myre’s work does not remake the world from some ‘objective’ space beyond or outside the frame, but from an embodied and situated space within. Like Ross, who was moved to make the work that would become Anniversary by the shooting of a young visitor to London, the impetus for Myre’s Indian Act was an experience close to home – her mother’s long battle to reclaim her status as an ‘Indian’ (specifcally, as Anishinabe and a member of the Kitigan Zibi reserve) under the terms of the Act.39 As many commentators on the Act have argued, its premises were not only Eurocentric, but also highly gendered; its terms defned status through patrilineage in contrast to First Nations’ conventions of matrilineal affliation. Myre’s mother, as both Indigenous and a woman, was thus placed at the sharp end of normative European colonial defnitions of citizenship. It is important to remember that the Indian Act is not just a symbol for First Nations communities resident in Canada, it is a living document that constrains, yet cannot wholly contain, their agency as Canadian citizens and as frst guardians of the places within which, and the peoples with whom, a more complex and multiple understanding of ‘nation’ emerges in and through everyday experience. If the document at the heart of Indian Act is located in an ambiguous relationship with First Nations communities (a restrictive colonial imposition, yet the guarantor of desired status), the beading that is the work’s central material gesture is likewise an entangled motif. Glass beads were a European introduction to North America that largely replaced traditional wampum beads made of shell, but were commonly used for the same purposes. Indigenous communities used beads as a mechanism to facilitate trade and communication between their own groups, and between themselves and settlers. Glass beads and their use in beadwork, are a decidedly post-contact medium; any sense of their being read into an essentialist account of ‘Native American craft’, is a misapprehension of their intrinsic imbrication within a history of complex transcultural encounter and engagement.40 Myre was certainly aware of this when making Indian Act and in her continued use of beadwork in a range of other projects, saying of Indigenous creativity that: ‘the truth is we’ve always been interchanging, collaborating, mixing and mingling and changing ideas from one place to another, across the continent, and even across North and South America’.41 In an insightful essay on Myre’s work, ‘Making Contact’, Sandra Dyck further explored beadwork as a richly evocative material, and noted its important connections to women’s cultural agency within First Nations communities. But Dyck’s argument is especially compelling in its exposition of the complex relationships between beadwork and other systems of communication, including writing, weaving, graphical informatics and the development of digital code. In her account, Dyck stressed that beaded wampum belts were not merely an abstract sign system, like European written language, but a form of cultural communication ‘whose meanings depended entirely on the interpretive acts of elders’.42 Thus, though

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woven beadwork belts were sometimes understood literally as an Indigenous equivalent of written colonial proclamations or legal documents, their purpose was, in fact, not the same. Wampum belts were designed to secure the most important acts and sacred agreements of the community through the bodily memory of the group, reiterated in physical acts of interpretation made within the community. Beaded belts thus required the performative agency of interpreters, working within a community of listeners, to make meaning; they are the materialization of a learned, rehearsed and bodily manifestation of the collective, epistemic and cultural, community. In Myre’s Indian Act, the transformation of the colonial Act of Parliament through the collective agency of hundreds of participants stitching and talking together, is the enactment of an alternative to transcendent, disembodied citizenship; it is an immanent performance of denizenship, of forging one’s belonging to multiple communities of understanding through dialogue and creative coalition. These are intersubjective activities of belonging – they are the stuff of denizenship, its materialization. Denizens do not make themselves at home through ‘colonizing’ or assimilating other subjects and objects but through mutual exchange. Hosts and denizens both change and accommodate through responsible (and responseable) engagement, where differences are acknowledged but not deemed to be fxed. The clear implication of this way of thinking about intrinsic intersubjectivity and interobjectivity is that denizenship extends beyond the human. Worldmaking denizenship incorporates the human and non-human (indeed, it does not recognize that dualist categorization as in any sense secure) and suggests an ecological model of living within the world that is comprised of a full range of human and nonhuman actors/agents.

Nadia Myre, For Those Who Can Not Speak: The Land, The Water, The Animals, The Future Generations, 2013.

FIGURE 2.5

© Nadia Myre ©DACS 2019; reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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In 2013, Myre installed the work For Those Who Can Not Speak: The Land, The Water, The Animals and the Future Generations in the show Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.43 The work consisted of two pieces: a beaded belt, akin to a two-row wampum, shown as an object, coiled in a glass case, and a 23 meter long digital print taken from a scan of the belt and installed as a long image on the wall of the main entrance ramp of the gallery. The title of the work comes from the statement spoken on Parliament Hill by the Anishinabe Kokomisag (‘Algonquin’ Grandmothers) in support of First Nations Chief and activist Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement: We join the voices of all our Relatives who are standing up and speaking for the land, water and future generations. We invite the Settlers to join us in this call to their governments. We demand that the Crown and all governments on Turtle Island start to behave in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Royal Proclamation, the Treaties and their own Constitution. All of the newcomer governments are in violation of all of these. This means respecting our customary law and finally beginning to be in a relationship with Indigenous People which is respectful and honest. We make these demands on behalf of all those who can not speak- the land, the water, the animals and the future generations. Their very survival depends on our success. This is our responsibility as Grandmothers, Kokomisag. Chi-migwech (11 January 2013).44 The words of the Kokomisag that reside at the heart of For Those Who Can Not Speak articulate a clear and distinct message of solidarity and responsibility for a shared world, a world in which the notion of the ‘national citizen’ is simply so limited that is has no purchase on the matters that are of real concern. The words of the Anishinabe Grandmothers cut across historical and geopolitical boundaries, challenging us to recognize the failures of the past so that we can act in the present in such a way as to honour the future for which we bear shared responsibility. Their words are not ignorant of the historical contexts (they invoke key texts in international law with ease), yet they do not surrender the greater cosmological picture. Their authority derives from something greater than notions of European colonial nation-state sovereignty, derived from extractive technological reason and colonizing universal frst principles. The Grandmothers’ authority derives from a notion of sovereignty as responsibility, care, maintenance and guardianship.45 Their invocation of First Nations’ sovereignty rests on ‘doing’ rather than ‘having’, it is enacted through stewardship, by caretaking that transcends distinctions between the human and the non-human. While this conception of vital materialist agency and belonging in the world offers a profound challenge to the conventional limits of nation-state citizenship, it provides an empowering extension of transnational feminist thinking on intersectional and entangled worldmaking and their implications for materializing

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responsible and response-able forms of belonging.46 Through its multiple material mediations, For Those Who Can Not Speak is one such materialization of a located and differenced form of belonging that moves beyond essentialism and the reifcation of identity. Myre’s work spoke the words of her Anishinabe elders into a beaded belt; that frst gesture, taken by a woman maker, links For Those Who Can Not Speak back to the community, authorizing its present political stance within what is now Canada, within an extended sense of sovereignty as stewardship. But the work does not end there, materially, visually or spatially. Scanning the belt to transform it into a digital image extends its meaning; this is not a return to a notion of traditional craft as unchanging or out of time (in both senses), this is its transliteration into the technologies of the present, its way of taking its place within contemporary visual culture. But there is still more. The scanned image was meticulously hand ‘cleaned’ before its digital quality could sustain the extreme change of scale in its fnal, printed, format. From the analogue belt to the digital image through hand and machine, the processes transformed an intimate object into a monumental image, a marker of transmediation and a cipher for meanings made through processes of corporeal translation in articulating moments of transcultural exchange. Hanging in the National Gallery of Canada during Sakahàn, the image threatened to open the institution to the claims being made by Idle No More. In a misguided attempt to minimize this threat, a disclaimer was placed next to the work to ensure that viewers knew that the opinions expressed by the piece were not those of the NGC.47 Arguably, the gesture was too little too late; the disclaimer simply could not unwrite the visual and spatial power of the work on that scale and in that space. Amplifed digitally, the small glass beads woven for those who could not speak were cacophonous; the resonance of the Grandmothers’ call to all to respond, exceeded the limits of the disclaimer as it sought to reinscribe the boundaries of the colonial nation-state. Like the French fag in Bouabdellah’s dance to the Marseillaise with which this chapter opened, the affective force of the work opens meaning to embodiment, entanglement and the politics of epistemic location. We are situated by this work, we are called to respond by its physical presence, to listen to the words of those who cannot speak for themselves, but to whom we have a responsibility as denizens in a shared world. Indigenous notions of sovereignty, guardianship and vital matter have profound implications for transnational feminisms, especially where these touch upon practices of decolonizing worldmaking, beyond the limits of the nationstate.48 In part, these are matters of ‘freedom’, a concept too readily understood as a by-product of normative citizenship. As Elizabeth Grosz has argued, feminism has not had a simple relationship with the concept of freedom as conventionally understood in post-Enlightenment European political theory for just this reason. Premised on transcendent individuals whose rights are assured through nationstates, freedom has commonly been seen as a commodity, but, as Grosz countered, freedom ‘is not a state one is in or a quality that one has, but it resides in the activities one undertakes that transform oneself and (a part of) the world’.49

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It is to just such a transformative mode of freedom that this chapter will now take in its fnal turn.

Denizen dwelling This chapter has focused consistently on the potential of art to materialize forms of embodied and participatory worldmaking that challenge the limits of exclusive and normative understandings of ‘citizenship’, arguing that art can provide experimental opportunities to explore the mutual emergence of transversal worlds and intersectional subjects – or worldmaking denizens. Dansons, Anniversary, Indian Act and For Those Who Can Not Speak do not deploy the same formal strategies, nor do they refer to the same historical circumstances. Yet each of these works demonstrates the problematic of fxed or universal concepts of citizenship that ignore the specifcity of multiple forms of sociability, the dynamic processes of intersectional identifcations and the affective and entangled forms of belonging that enable worlds and subjects to fnd a voice and a place. By creating critical public spaces in and through the materiality of art, these very different works set up transversal dialogues across difference and posit a fguration of extraordinary resonance with a non-dualist exploration of worldmaking and world-dwelling in the present – the denizen. But what of subjects who have, or have had, historically, no rights guaranteed by residence within the nation? How can the belonging of the stateless or the enslaved be envisaged? To explore this question, it is useful here to look at a work of public art and history-making designed both to commemorate an individual and, at the same time, create a critical public space in which the rights, responsibilities and status assured through normative versions of ‘citizenship’ could be reconsidered and reconceived: Biddy Mason: Time and Place (1989) by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with The Power of Place. Biddy Mason: Time and Place is one part of a multi-stranded project (The Biddy Mason Project50), produced collaboratively by Dolores Hayden, Bettye Saar, Susan King, Donna Graves and de Bretteville through The Power of Place, an experimental non-proft corporation founded in 1984–5 by Hayden while she was working in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA. The Power of Place undertook projects centred on making visible the public histories of women, workers and people of colour in Los Angeles, starting with the development of a walking tour that focused on spaces associated with signifcant individuals or activities that had shaped the multicultural profle of the city – one of these sites was the former home of Biddy Mason. It is worth rehearsing Mason’s biography briefy here. Mason was born enslaved on a plantation owned by Robert Smith in Mississippi in 1818. Following Smith’s Mormon conversion, he moved his family and enslaved people frst to Utah, in 1847, and then, in 1851, to San Bernardino, California. As an enslaved woman, Mason herded cattle, acted as a nurse and mid-wife, bore three children (her owner’s) and trekked on foot behind the family’s carts from Mississippi to California. Unbeknownst to the Smiths, slavery had been abolished one year before their arrival

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into the state and, in 1856, Mason pursued a successful legal case for herself and her children to be granted free status. As a freewoman, Mason moved to Los Angeles, worked as a domestic servant/nurse for Dr John S. Griffn and continued to provide healthcare and midwifery services in the local community. She was one of the frst African-American women to own property in the city, was a founding member of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, supported charities that provided food and shelter for the poor residents of her neighbourhood and died in 1881 leaving a substantial legacy to her heirs. The Biddy Mason Project celebrated the life of this one woman and her remarkable story through the production of a decidedly fgurative and narrative set of works, including a journal article by Hayden, an artist’s book by King, a poster designed for wide distribution by de Bretteville (Grandma Mason’s Place: A Midwife’s Homestead) and two works of public art located at the site of Mason’s former homestead on Spring Street: the installation Biddy Mason’s House of the Open Hand by Saar, and the mural wall Biddy Mason: Time and Place by de Bretteville [Colour plate 7]. The mural wall is the main focus of attention here, but it is crucial not to lose sight of the fact that the work is part of a bigger project that operated through research and collaborative dialogue between scholars, artists and the wider local community and the legacy of the project resides both in the public space constructed through the sited artworks and in the published archival material that has helped to ensure Mason’s place, and the place of African-American women, in the urban history of the United States. Signifcantly, the Biddy Mason Project was not the only project undertaken by The Power of Place; between 1984 and 1991, the organization intervened in a number of sites across Los Angeles, using collaborative art, design and public engagement activities to demonstrate the signifcance of the multi-ethnic histories of the city. Nor is the Biddy Mason Project the only major work of public history making in Los Angeles to have focused on Mason. Biddy Mason was also included in Judith Baca’s extensive mural on the concrete sides of the Tujunga Wash, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1978–83).51 Baca’s collaborative community mural project also focused on the occluded histories of women and ethnic minority communities in the city and, importantly, brought young people from local neighbourhoods in East Los Angeles together over six summers to learn about their own and others’ histories as well as to develop as muralists. The elements of collaboration, community building, history making and urban intervention that both projects share, are rooted in feminist activism and critical pedagogies. It is not surprising that feminist acts of public history making and urban intervention exploring alternative forms of belonging should focus on the central role of producing and sharing knowledge. Decolonizing, race-critical feminisms locate knowing otherwise at the very heart of forging solidarities in and though difference, and these ‘denizen solidarities’ suggest ways of imagining and inhabiting the world differently. As bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains wrote in their dialogic volume Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism:‘Imagination plays a vital role in the struggle for liberation globally. . . . What we cannot imagine cannot come into being’.52

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Throughout Homegrown, hooks and Mesa-Bains explore global liberatory politics and feminist activism within the dual contexts of critical public culture and radical pedagogy, understanding that education can provide a crucial tool for political transformation. In making these links, hooks and Mesa-Bains articulate a long tradition of the centrality of radical pedagogies to transnational feminist activism.53 Signifcantly, the use of feminist pedagogical strategies to create a critical public culture was not new to de Bretteville who, in 1971, founded the frst design programme for women at California Institute of the Arts and, in 1973, co-founded (with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven) the Feminist Studio Workshop based at the Woman’s Building. The mural wall, Biddy Mason: Time and Space, materializes these interconnections, engendering a transformative space for the development of an epistemic community of mutual learners through its material and spatial dynamics. The wall is 81 feet long, comprised of poured concrete with inset slate, granite and limestone panels that narrate Biddy Mason’s biography in a series of simple statements, low relief images and embedded documents, including a photograph of Mason (also used in Saar’s installation) and copies of her Freedom Papers and the title deed to her homestead. The narrative is constructed in straightforward sentences that develop a sense of Mason’s agency over time. The frst, ‘Biddy Mason born a slave’. uses her name and notes her status in no uncertain terms. The later texts, however, emphasise her deliberative actions: ‘She learns midwifery’, ‘She walks to California behind a wagon train’, ‘She wins freedom in court’,‘She owns land’,‘She delivers hundreds of babies’. The fnal text, marking her death, places her at the centre of a community:‘Los Angeles mourns and reveres Grandma Mason’.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with The Power of Place, Biddy Mason: Time and Place (detail), 1989.

FIGURE 2.6

Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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Participant-spectators are, literally, walked through this narrative; following the wall, the tale unfolds in space, through marked decades, each statement accompanied by an elegant motif in relief – a midwife’s medical bag, four interlaced wagon wheels, a picket fence (a motif taken from a photograph of Mason’s home and used again in Saar’s installation to great effect). Mason’s photograph, her papers and a mix of maps and images of Los Angeles from her lifetime are also embedded in the wall and, with the motifs, form a legible narrative bricolage that brings the fragments of one specifc life into vital connection with the histories of other lives lived in this space in the past and, signifcantly, in the present. The space has been successful; visitors walk through the story, read the panels, touch the motifs, look at the image of Mason and are brought, bodily, into connection with a specifc instance of the worldmaking agency of a non-normative subject, denied access to full public participation as a woman and an enslaved African-American. The decision to focus on one specifc woman’s life story in this project was deliberate, as this frst-hand account by Hayden explains: Using Biddy Mason’s biography as the basis of the project was the key to finding a broad audience . . . the record of a single citizen’s struggle to raise a family, earn a living, and contribute to professional, social, and religious activities can suggest how a city develops over time. This is especially true for Biddy Mason. Her experiences as a citizen of Los Angeles were typical – as a family head, home owner and churchgoer. Yet they were also unusual – since gender, race, and legal status as a slave increased her burdens.54 Using Mason’s biography, articulated in direct language and fgurative imagery, captured the imagination of viewers, but Hayden’s quote indicates more – that the story asks questions about citizenship and it is that aspect of the work that links it to the argument being pursued here and to which I will now turn through the worldmaking evoked by Biddy Mason: Time and Place. Mason’s biography is an empowering story, but not an easy history. As an enslaved woman, Mason was subject to hardship and abuse. Despite becoming a freewoman in 1851, Mason was not a citizen of the United States until the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratifed in 1868. She died before African-American women gained suffrage in 1920, a signifcant mark of full citizenship rights in a democracy. Yet Mason, despite being unable to read or write, fought for her legal rights, worked in a skilled occupation, enjoyed economic independence, established a home and community and, through her generous caring activities, found a place of belonging in her own right during her lifetime. Her legacy was and is empowering, but it does not ft a normative model of US history or the corollary ideals of citizenship. Hayden’s use of the term citizen in her statement quoted earlier is characterized by qualifcations – Mason was ‘typical’ but also ‘unusual’ – this case does not quite ft the norm. If Biddy Mason’s Place materializes a mode of worldmaking, it is not one in which the ‘world’ or the subject made through the visual and spatial unfolding of the

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narrative, conform to a fxed notion of ‘citizenship’ premised upon claims to authenticity and/or originary status. Neither, however, was Mason a ‘migrant’; born within the nation, yet excluded from its defning category of belonging, Mason’s story defes either term in the conventional binary logic of insider/outsider. Her relationship to the space of the burgeoning and multi-cultural nation of her times was not singular or unchanging. There is no singular authentic or ‘natural’ identity/location that assures Biddy Mason’s claim to belong. Rather, as her tale unfolds, Mason makes and is made, in acts of intersubjective community-building: her belonging becomes. This is a story of the continual making and re-making of the future in the small acts of the present; this ‘small’ story then transcends its particularity to become something bigger, a widely legible tale of the differentiated universal, a demonstration of an ‘ecological’ way of knowing and acting that unites the possibilizing action of imagination with the minute material legacies of history. The work does not negate the past, but neither is it lost in it – rather, it establishes a new and different discursive space, a space in which we might all imagine our worldmaking belonging as an ongoing and perennial process of dwelling with others. For decades, transnational feminist critiques of the ‘naturalized’ nation-state, and the masculine-normative citizen, have facilitated explorations of alternative concepts of belonging that neither reify links between identity and place, nor collapse into transcendent forms of disembodied ‘universal citizenship’. Transnational feminisms have instead suggested ways of negotiating multiple forms of sociability, toward a dynamic, yet connected, relationship to place and a response-able/ responsible belonging with others. Focusing on the fguration of the denizen and the process of worldmaking, it is clear that the material and imaginative potential of the arts contributes substantially to these debates and offers a way to bridge knowledge, affect and imagination toward inhabiting the world otherwise. Denizen belonging does not look back to where we have been, but beyond to where we are and will go; the arts suggest some of the routes we might take as we encounter the alternative ecologies of belonging, collectivity and agency that constitute transnational feminist worldmaking.

Notes 1 It is not a coincidence that the acquisition of citizenship is called ‘naturalization’; as someone who has been ‘naturalised’, and holds dual-citizenship, I can attest to the fact that these forms of official belonging are anything but ‘natural’, and even less so when one contends with the citizenship of one’s child. 2 Invoking the term ‘fiction’ here, I am indebted to the work of Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens (cf. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 1999) and to Jacques Rancière (cf. Film Fables, New York: Berg, 2006, pp. 157–71), who take ‘fiction’ to be a significant articulation of political agency, important to the construction of the social imaginary and indicative of our responsibility toward others. 3 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies (Editions du Seuil, 1957, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1972) selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers, London: Vintage Books, 2000, p. 117. 4 Barthes,‘Myth Today’, op. cit., p. 116.

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5 Siobhán Shilton,‘Belly Dancing to the Marseillaise: Zoulika Bouabdellah’s Dansons’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 12:4, October 2008, pp. 437–44; later developed as chapter 3 in Shilton’s book Transcultural Encounters: Gender and Genre in Franco-Maghrebi Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. It was also one of the works shown in the exhibition Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, curated by Maura Reilly at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. In the catalogue, Bouabdellah’s work is briefly, but tellingly, mentioned in two essays: N’Goné Fall’s ‘Providing a Space of Freedom, Women Artists from Africa’, pp. 71–7, and in Elizabeth Lebovici’s ‘Western European Women Artists: Speaking in a Minor Voice’, pp. 145–51 (Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminisms, ex.cat., London and New York: Merrell and Brooklyn Museum, 2007). 6 ‘The Revolution, in short, invented not only the nation-state but the modern institution and ideology of national citizenship’. See William Rogers Brubaker,‘The French Revolution and the Invention of Citizenship’, French Politics and Society, 7:3, Commemorating the French Revolution, Summer 1989, pp. 30–49, p. 30. See also Jean-François Berdah, ‘Citizenship and National Identity in France from the French Revolution to the Present’, in Frontiers, Regions, and Identities in Europe, Pisa, Italy: Pisa University Press, Edizioni Plus, 2006, pp. 141–53. This version: Hal Open Archives: Steven G. Ellis, Gudmundur Halfdanarsonet, Ann Katherine Isaacs. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ hal-00143925/document Berdah traces the tensions in the French empire very interestingly in this article, noting that the 1950s and 1960s (contemporary with Barthes’s writing) were a highpoint in the extension of the language of belonging to Maghrebi French citizens. Following the moves for independence in Algeria and Tunisia, as well as greater numbers of North African migrants arriving into France, this ‘inclusivity’ began to wane from the 1970s forward. (p. 150). 7 Shilton, Transcultural Encounters, op. cit., p. 98. 8 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 9 See Bouabdellah’s artists’ talk for Global Feminisms. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lBa0A1ubDY0 In an especially interesting comment, she notes that the colour of her skin plays into the complex readings of this work and discusses being ‘read’ as variously ‘European’,‘African’, and ‘coloured’ during a residency in South Africa. This ‘racial’ slippage is also part of the visual structure of Dansons. 10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State: Politics, Language, Belonging, Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2007. 11 For an excellent intervention into these arguments in the arts, see Anne Ring Petersen, Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalized World, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 12 Jeff Hearn, Elzbieta H. Oleksy and Dorota Golanska, eds.,‘Introduction’, in The Limits of Gendered Citizenship, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 1–24, p. 1. 13 Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, New York: New York University Press, 1998, p. 42 14 Lister, Citizenship, op. cit., p. 10. 15 I have developed this particular terminology elsewhere; see Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics’, in The Companion to Feminist Art Practice and Theory, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, Oxford: Blackwell, 2019. 16 Nira Yuval Davis and Pnina Werbner, Women, Citizenship and Difference, London: Zed Books, 1999. 17 The use of the term ‘denizen’ as a figuration to think beyond normative citizenship is an ongoing concern in my work; see, for example: ‘As a woman, my country is . . .: On imag(in)ed communities and the heresy of becoming-denizen’ in Marion Arnold and Marsha Meskimmon, eds., Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 253–68. The present chapter extends an argument I

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18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

28

29 30

published in 2017:‘From the Cosmos to the Polis: On Denizens, Art and Postmigration Worldmaking’, The Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, special issue (Post)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation, edited by. Moritz Schramm and Anne Ring Petersen, pp. 25–35. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Oxford: Polity Press, 2002, p. 2. I am particularly indebted to the formulation of ‘postmigration’ as used by Moritz Schram and Anne Ring Petersen, for thinking about ‘post-authentic’ identifications; see: The Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, special issue (Post)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation, op. cit. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London and New York: Routledge, 1991; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938, University of Adelaide online version: https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/index.html See Section 3. In her Conservative Party Conference Speech of October 2016, British Prime Minister Teresa May said: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’. This was not spoken without riposte: see, for example, letters to The Guardian, 9 October 2016. Available at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/09/theresamay-rejection-of-enlightenment-values. Likewise, Angela Dimitrakaki has been critical of cosmopolitanism as idealist; see Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, artWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. I am, instead, aligned with cultural theorists such as Nikos Papastergiadis, in my view that Cosmopolitanism is both materially situated and critical to the cultural imaginary; cf. Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, Cambridge: Polity, 2012; Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, op. cit., p. 149. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978, p. 8. Caroline Turner and Michelle Antoinette, eds., Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, Canberra:ANU Press,2014;Michelle Antoinette,Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014. The final Act of the sixty recitations was especially poignant, as it took place in Geneva at a meeting of the UN’s Human Rights Council on 14 June 2013 – the day that Monica Ross died. Subsequent performances of the work have taken place in memory of Ross and its prolongation by others following her death demonstrates its continuing power and relevance to many different groups of people. There are three critical texts on Anniversary that are especially eloquent in their appraisal of its affective power and these all make the point that it is more than just a vehicle for the ‘content’ of the UDHR: Louise Purbrick,‘Museums and the Exercise of Human Rights’, Transnational Justice Institute Research Paper, 10–17, 2010, University of Ulster. Available at: http://ssm.com/abstract=1685334; Alexandra Kokoli, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Anniversary: An Act of Memory by Monica Ross and Co-Recitors (2008–)’, Performance Research, 17:5, 2012, 24–30; Rachel Withers, ‘“By Dint of Repetition”: Rachel Withers on the Lasting Legacy of Artist-Educator Monica Ross’, Art and Christianity, 77, Spring 2014, 2–5. There are 195 ‘official’ countries in the world today (i.e. Taiwan and the Cook Islands are not officially recognized as countries), 193 of which belong to the UN with two (The Holy See and Palestine), being non-member observers. As of March 2018 there were 520 versions. Available at: www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/ Pages/Introduction.aspx.

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31 Purbrick,‘Museums and the Exercise of Human Rights’, op. cit., p. 2. 32 Eleanor Roosevelt,‘In Our Hands’, 1958, speech delivered on the tenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org/ blog/2015/2/18/human-rights-day-december-10. 33 Kokoli,‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, op. cit. 34 At certain points in this text I move between ‘citizen’ and ‘denizen’ in order to point to the more open parameters of the figuration of the denizen while acknowledging the continued relevance of contemporary debates around citizenship. Claims for citizenship (and the rights attendant on such claims) are still important, even if we can see the limitations of the concept more broadly. 35 In Canada, the term ‘Indian’ was long used for First Nations, Inuit and Metis people; it is clearly the inaccurate language of colonization and I will only use it here where it is deployed within titles of works. The term ‘Aboriginal’ came into legal usage in Canada in 1982, but the term ‘Indigenous’ is gradually replacing it as a more appropriate collective noun. I use this term (capitalized) because of its international political valences, including its use in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 36 Increasingly, the Indigenous context is seen as central to a transnational feminist project, see for example, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck and Angie Morill,‘Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy’, Feminist Formations, 25:1, 2013, pp. 8–34. 37 Myre saw her open call to both Indigenous and settler communities as ‘an act of coalition’, opening a space where people could ‘come to a similar understanding that these ideas, so oppressive to native people, can be healed’, adding that ‘other people who aren’t necessarily native could work towards healing what’s happened’. Myre in Lisa Sproull,‘Montreal Artist Nadia Myre Has Had a Big Year’, Cult MTL, 19 March 2015. Available at: www. cultmtl.com. 38 Strictly, the Indian Act only legislated for the 614 First Nations Bands, not for the Inuit or Métis communities. However, in practice, some of the most brutal outcomes of the Act, such as the formation of the Indian Residential Schools (nearly 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were removed to these institutions; the last one closed only in 1996), applied to all Indigenous groups. 39 The story of Myre’s mother is related in the entry on Myre and the Indian Act on the Medicine Project website: www.themedicineproject.com/nadia-myre.html 40 Noted Belmore refusing to enter the ‘Walking With Our Sisters’ exhibition: David Garneau, ‘Indigenous Criticism: On Not Walking With Our Sisters’, Border Crossings, 134, May 2015. Available at: www.bordercrossingsmag.com. 41 Myre in Sproull,‘Montreal Artist Nadia Myre Has Had a Big Year’, op. cit. 42 Sandra Dyck,‘Making Contact’, in Nadia Myre EN[COUNTER]S, ex.cat., Montreal: Éditions Art Mûr, 2009, pp. 43–55, p. 50. 43 To date, Sakahàn remains the largest show of contemporary international Indigenous art ever brought together. Albert Dumont, Greg Hill, Candice Hopkins and Christine Lalonde, eds., Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, ex.cat. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2013. 44 The Anishinabe ‘Algonquin’ Grandmothers: statement read by Algonquin Kokomisag on 11 January 2013 in support of Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement. Full statement available on Nadia Myre’s site: www.nadiamyre.net. N.B. The Nobel Women’s Initiative also supported the hunger strike: https://nobelwomensinitiative.org/supporttheresa-spence-idle-no-more-movement/. 45 Dylan Robinson,‘Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space’, Art Journal, 76:2, Summer 2017, pp. 85–99. 46 Another dimension to these arguments concerning responsibility and subjectivity in relation to indigenous notions of sovereignty and belonging is taken up by Jodi A Byrd in ‘Loving Unbecoming: The Queer Politics of the Transitive Native’, in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, edited by Joanne Barker, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 205–27. In this essay, Byrd discusses the

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47

48 49 50

51 52 53

54

conundrum faced by Indigenous scholars who both embrace the possibilities offered by queer unbecoming and ‘subjectlessness’ in sidestepping ‘ethnographic entrapment’, and yet desire to maintain a strong sense of ‘accountability to community, relationality and connection’ (see pp. 215–16). Cheyanne Turions, ‘How Not to Install Indigenous Art as a Feminist’, in Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, edited by Heather Davis, Montreal: McGill Press, 2017, pp. 242–56. As if a final riposte to the disclaimer, Myre’s installation won the 2014 Sobey Prize, the National Gallery of Canada’s most important annual prize for contemporary art. Robert Warrior has traced some of the complexities of thinking transnationally for First Nations scholars and activists in: ‘Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn’, Cultural Studies Review, 15:2, September 2009, pp. 119–30. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Feminism, Materialism and Freedom’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 139–57, p. 152. There are a few key sources that document this project, including an essay by Dolores Hayden,‘Claiming Women’s History in the Urban Landscape: Projects from Los Angeles’, in Design and Feminism: Re-Visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things, edited by Joan Rothschild, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999, and a Power of Place website for the project: www.publicartinla.com/Downtown/Broadway/Biddy_Mason/. Hayden refers collectively to the varied work undertaken for this commission as The Biddy Mason Project and I am adopting that nomenclature here. See also Hayden’s history of the Power of Place in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Judith Baca’s Great Wall will be explored at greater length in the second volume of this Trilogy. bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, p. ix. See, for example, Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, eds., Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, London and New York: Routledge, 1992; Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, eds., Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2005. It is also interesting to note how many of the various essays included in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, draw on teaching and learning spaces, pedagogies and public forms of education in their discussions of transnational feminist political transformation. Hayden,‘Claiming Women’s History in the Urban Landscape’, op. cit., 49.

3 CRITICAL ECOFEMINISM AND ECOLOGICAL THINKING

I recuperate and continue my work here with the term critical ecofeminism for the ways that this ecofeminist perspective advances on the earlier fndings of feminist animal activists, feminist peace and antinuclear activists, feminist environmental justice activists and queer feminist environmentalists as well as antiracist ecofeminists. Critical ecofeminism benefts from past lessons about gender and racial essentialisms, as well as from the more contemporary critical dimensions of economic, posthumanist, and postcolonial analysis. It offers helpful critiques and augmentations to ongoing conversations within environmental justice and sustainability studies discourse . . . [and] it grows in dialogue with queer ecologies. Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism (2017)1 [E]cological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about ‘the environment’, although these fgure as catalysts among its issues. It is a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfgures theory and practice. Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking (2006)2

The connections between the politics of ecology, environmental activisms and transnational feminist theories and practices are extensive, complex and multidimensional.3 Across the world, women have been central to the formation of grassroots movements against the destruction of the environment, and have mobilized locally, regionally and globally, in favour of strategies for an equitable, sustainable and healthy earth-wide eco-system. At the same time, feminist scholars have engaged productively with the cultural, economic and philosophical underpinnings of political ecology, changing the shape of radical environmentalism by examining the relationships that have been constructed between gender, sexuality, nature, power and development.

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Sometimes collected under the umbrella term of ‘ecofeminism’, the conjunction of transnational, decolonizing, Indigenous and queer feminisms, with political ecology, environmental activism and development studies, describes a multifaceted terrain of affnities and coalitions that cut across hierarchical and anthropocentric structures of knowing, imagining and inhabiting the world. Ecofeminisms are profoundly connective in their praxis and intersectional in their analysis, foregrounding, as Noël Sturgeon succinctly put it, ‘that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment’.4 Making these connections entails the development of a pluralist approach capable of articulating affnities and ‘family resemblances’ between seemingly disparate felds, while working across different scales of agency and activity.5 Asking questions on both a micro and macro level,6 multidimensional thinking mobilizes the potential of transnational feminisms to build solidarities across what Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner have so aptly termed ‘the global and the intimate’: To disrupt traditional organizations of space, to forge productive dislocations, to reconfigure conventions of scale: these are the goals that underwrite many feminist investigations. In our own historical moment of growing global consciousness, they have led us to examine more carefully the ways in which the global and the intimate, typically imagined as mutually exclusive spheres, are profoundly intertwined.7 As a multidimensional praxis, critical ecofeminism8 creates transnational and transversal connections between the global and the intimate, challenging isolationism and the disempowering logic of ‘remoteness’.9 Such analysis often reveals networks of interest that cut across scales of activity, such as the imbrication of local environmental crises with regional displacements of Indigenous communities, nationalist exercises of military force and/or the global corporate management of energy and biotechnologies. As an intersectional mode of engagement, critical ecofeminism ensures that the gendered power politics that connect structures of domination and control are kept in view, but does not engage in single-axis analysis. Rather, the transversal lines of connection drawn by a critical transnational ecofeminism acknowledge the challenges and pleasures of entanglement, making compelling arguments for moving beyond the instrumental logic of mastery (be that of ‘nature’ and/or of ‘other Others’10), toward a decolonizing praxis that articulates our embodied and embedded agency and interdependence with/in a world of which we are but one, vibrant, element. The transversal affnities that characterize critical ecofeminism cluster around specifc concerns. One is to rethink scientifc objectivity and its historical connections with technological positivism, unrestricted capitalist growth (as ‘development’) and colonial expansion. A second is to unravel instrumental interpretations of ‘nature’ as an eternal (timeless), resource to be exploited, and to counter the

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essentialist corollary to that view, which posits women, children, non-white/Indigenous, queer and other non-normative subjects ‘as nature’. A fnal affnity that has emerged in more recent ecological material feminist thinking is the exploration of vibrant matter and the development of an ethics of fourishing. Posthumanism and vital materialism are especially pertinent to transnational feminisms, transversal politics and the arts, as they radically refashion anthropocentric worldviews-fromabove, in and through ecological practices of entangled worldmaking-from-within. As Lorraine Code so aptly framed it, an expanded form of ecological thinking is ‘not simply thinking about ecology’, it is a ‘revisioned mode of engagement’ through which it becomes possible to reconfgure, critically and creatively, the ways in which we inhabit the world. Historically, women artists and feminist activists have been central to the emergence of art practices specifcally engaged with ecological issues, and decolonizing feminist thought has been pivotal to the theoretical premises and positions materialized by these practices.11 Yet, what is fascinating about the intimate interconnections between transnational feminisms, the arts and political ecology is not simply that the links are so extensive and enduring, but that they posit an expansive sense of ecological thinking-in-making that challenges us to imagine, understand and live in the world differently. Emphasizing horizontality over hierarchy, interdependence over mastery, and embodied entanglement over transcendent oversight, the worlding ecologies of transnational feminisms materialized through the arts provide possibilities to reconceive our histories and direct our futures toward greater social and environmental justice. Such critical practices of reconception12 do not fail to recognize the political, economic and institutional politics of the arts in the present moment; indeed, they frequently invent compelling counter strategies for the production and consumption of visual culture more broadly. Yet they do not limit their intervention to mere institutional or corporate critique, nor do they simply focus on ‘ecology’ as ‘subject-matter’. Rather, the creative practices to which this chapter attends, and the transformative multidimensional connections they materialize through analogy and affnity, engender interdependent and intersectional forms of critical ecofeminist agency. The works suggest creative and transformative confgurations of politics and ethics, uniting deep critiques of social and ecological injustice with contingent, but sustainable, strategies for developing vibrant engagements with an extended community of earth Others. *** During the three decades preceding her death in 2005, Australian artist Joan Brassil produced a number of installations that embodied a critical ecofeminism and an expanded mode of ecological thinking, materializing compelling connections between science, history, geography, technology, poetry and art.13 Her works moved easily between the cosmos and the quotidian, tread softly on the contested ground shared by settlers and frst guardians alike, and evoked a profound sense of posthuman entanglement that opened an emergent future flled with hope and wonder.14

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Often working in trilogies,15 combining poetic texts with found and crafted objects, still and moving images, compositions of sound and light, Brassil’s practice revelled in the interdependence of modes of knowing the world from within. Fusing materials and meanings from the arts and the sciences through practices of dynamic co-production, Brassil explored space, time and energy in collaboration with astrophysicists, microbiologists, computer scientists, musicians and experts in the most current video technologies of her day. Brassil’s practice often saw her re-use elements from earlier pieces in new installations, making and re-making spaces as processes of ecological engagement between and across disciplines, genres, histories and, importantly, scales – the micro and the macro were ever-present companions in the ecologies created by Brassil’s trilogies. Materially too, the work was multidimensional, ‘high-tech’ and ‘low-f’ at once: rocks, sand, soil and fungi conversed with cosmic rays and Geiger counters, while spark chambers and video monitors, enhanced by hand-turned glass and perspex screens, told stories of strangers in the landscape. Saplings, pasture grass and seedlings grew amongst ceramic potatoes and metal trees, microphone stands held core samples aloft, enabling them to sing, while participant spectators pressed their ears against vast tuning forks, tethering time’s ethereal frequencies, ordinarily unheard. Underlying the material and technical poetics of Brassil’s practice was an exceptional sensitivity to the complex politics of place, and to the mutual emergence of human and non-human agency through processes of emplacement. Between 1976 and 1978, Brassil frst showed the works comprising the Trilogy entitled Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming at the Sculpture Centre in Sydney.16 In each of the works in the Trilogy, an entangled dialogue between the micro and the macro located the participant-spectator at the centre of a dynamic and changing universe, composed through three fundamental vectors: space, time and energy. The works’ titles were posed as lyrical, yet searching, questions related to each dimension: How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? (1976), Have You Metamorphosed Lately? (1977), and Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? (1978).17 The Trilogy emerged following a trip made by Brassil in 1975 to the small town of Narrabri in New South Wales to visit the Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer (NSII), and meet the scientists there who measured the diameters of distant stars using radio waves, telescopes and the vast computers of the day. The heavy plant of the NSII was set on tracks in a feld, at the side of which were grazing sheep and crops of sunfowers and wheat.18 The poignant poetry of the adjacent pastures, where subsistence crops and astronomical instruments each measured space and time in their particular idiom, was the impetus for How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets?, the work that marked the start of Brassil’s Trilogy. How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? combined obsolete KDF9 computer circuit boards (the computers to which data from the NSII was sent) with a range of ‘astral potatoes’ – real, cast and carved versions of Pontiacs, Sebagoes, Delawares and Kennebecs. In the frst installation of the work, the potatoes and the circuit boards were placed on a ground of pasture-planted soil, with the addition of mirrored

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Joan Brassil, How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? 1976, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78; perspex, computer circuit board, potatoes – natural aluminium, ceramic, soapstone, wax and bronze. Dimensions variable. Installation view from The Gorge, Campbelltown Arts Centre curated by Jasmine Kean, 2016.

FIGURE 3.1

Photograph courtesy of the Campbelltown Arts Centre; reproduced by kind permission of the family of Joan Brassil.

platforms and dark translucent perspex panels suspended above to create multiple visual relays between the ‘heavens’ and the ‘earth’.19 In the work, the cosmos met the quotidian, and the macro was enfolded within the micro in an endless play of matter, measured, refected and refracted. How far between the potatoes and the planets? Well, it all depends upon where you might be standing. The second work from the Trilogy explored, in Brassil’s words,‘Time encoded in an infnitesimal capsule of an insect egg’.20 Focused on the ‘instar’, the transformative, temporal ‘in-between’ that defnes the process of metamorphosis, for the installation, Brassil fashioned hourglass shapes from sapling stems taken from

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Joan Brassil, Have You Metamorphosed Lately? 1977, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78; cherrywood tree stumps, ironbark posts, stringy-bark slabs, earth, bush twigs, ceramic pupae, moths and eggs, copper and brass. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Sydney Sculpture Centre, 1977.

FIGURE 3.2

Image courtesy of the family of Joan Brassil.

outside her bush studio in Wedderburn, into which were placed small objects that hearkened to each stage of an insect’s life-cycle: egg, pupa, larva, adult. But the work did more than represent the unfolding of an insect’s life over time, the work interpellated viewers within the dynamic becoming of life played out in cosmic time, posing a direct and unequivocal question in its title: Have You Metamorphosed Lately? The fnal work of Brassil’s space, time and energy Trilogy, Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging?, drew a transversal cartography across and between different ways of mapping the energy of the cosmos experienced at human scale. Upright saplings of native Australian casuarinas and eucalypts, topped with chromium aerials, were arranged on a roughly raked sandy ground, ochre bands around each stem signifying the use of Indigenous plants in Aboriginal cultural wayfaring and in the stories of the Dreaming. Betwixt and between the stems of the saplings, a different tale of the planet was traced on the ground by a series of glass-panelled circuit boards, Geiger tubes and light-emitting diodes, that captured the energy from random cosmic rays showering the earth (pulsars and quasars) and transformed it into light. In the installation, native species and Indigenous worldviews met high-tech science in full partnership to tell the story of an ancient land in a dynamic and transformative cosmos.21

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FIGURE 3.3 Joan Brassil, Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? 1978, from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78; earth, spark chambers, light diodes, computer circuit boards, geiger tubes, ceramics, perspex, steel, wood and tapa cloth. Dimensions variable. Installation view from The Gorge, Campbelltown Arts Centre curated by Jasmine Kean, 2016.

Photograph courtesy of Campbelltown City Council collection; reproduced by kind permission of the family of Joan Brassil.

Brassil’s early Trilogy provides an apt starting point from which to explore an expanded, transnational ecofeminist mode of thinking-in-making, wherein multiple knowers and ways of knowing converse within a world marked by material vitality and agential interdependence. Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming demonstrates the potential of such an expanded ecology, materialized through the arts, to reconfgure knowledge practices that can connect disparate spaces and times through critical and creative forms of analogy and affnity. As we shall see, pivotal to these reconfgurations are issues of measurement, metamorphosis and matter. Taking my lead from the eccentric and entangled ecologies that Brassil’s trilogies so compellingly confgured, this chapter proceeds through three parabolic tales. The frst raises the spectre of science, technology and the spatial logic of colonialism, exploring the signifcance of feminist and Indigenous ways of mapping the world against the grain. The second tale pivots around a transcorporeal generosity that connects human and non-human agency through a queer, metamorphic ecology. The fnal tale is a dialogue between worldly co-production and an ethic of fourishing. My parables trace parabolas – horizontal genealogies of entanglement that move outward from the nexus of Brassil’s Trilogy and return through material conversations with diverse interlocutors. These conversations demonstrate that ecological feminist thinking articulated through the visual, material and spatial qualities of the arts, provides creative instances of interdependent worldmaking that

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engender and sustain connections between widely disparate agents without reducing their complexity to an economy of the same. As will become clear, this is a vital component in any project seeking a more equitable, earth-wide, ecology for the future.

Three parabolic tales of transversal affnity Parabolic (adjective)

1

Of or like the symmetrical curve made by an object that is thrown into the air, landing in a different place. 2 Of or expressed in parables.

I. Space: an Australian tale As part of her research for How Far Between the Potatoes and the Planets?, Brassil got to know the humble potato. Native to South America, potatoes were frst introduced to Europeans by Spanish and British explorers in the latter half of the 16th century. In Europe, potatoes were generally seen as cheap sustenance, best beftting peasants and their herd animals, but later recognition of their usefulness on board the ships of the British merchant navy meant that when James Cook arrived in 1770 in what would come to be known as Australia, his ship was carrying potatoes. The potato was introduced into the country as a food crop some 18 years later with the arrival of the frst colony of British settlers. By the time Brassil approached local farmers for her research, the varieties being grown bore North American names. But how did a Stellar Intensity Interferometer end up in a small town in New South Wales? The tale is not million astral miles away from the story of the potatoes. The NSII was designed by Robert Hanbury Brown, a British astronomer and physicist, born in India in 1916. Working with British astronomer and mathematician Richard Quentin Twiss, who was also born in India (1920), Hanbury Brown designed and built an earlier version of the optical device at the University of Manchester. In 1959, Twiss was appointed to the University of Sydney, but found Australia, by all accounts, ‘a colonial backwater’22 and swiftly returned to Britain. However, in 1962, Hanbury Brown took up a post at the University and the NSII was completed in Narrabri in 1963, taking its frst measurements of the angular dimensions of stars from 1965. Hanbury Brown returned to England in 1990, where he died in 2002, but Twiss had a change of heart. Becoming enamoured with Australia following a visit to Sydney in 1998, he lived the remaining years of his life in the country, where he died in 2005. These Australian tales converge at the point of Brassil’s installation How Far Between the Potatoes and the Planets?, but they do not provide a single, authentic, point of origin for the meaning of the work. Rather, they explode outward into the world, connecting the histories of British colonial expansion with experimental science and the development of new technologies. This Australian tale, as it crosses

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between Europe, India and the Americas, demonstrates what Doreen Massey, in her brilliant account of London’s Kilburn High Road, called an ‘extroverted’, or ‘global sense of place’. As she wrote: It is (or ought to be) impossible even to begin thinking about Kilburn High Road without bringing into play half the world and a considerable amount of British imperialist history (and this certainly goes for mining villages too). Imagining in this way provokes in you (or at least in me) a really global sense of place.23 Brassil’s installation makes it ‘impossible even to begin thinking about’ the potatoes or the planets without becoming entangled within a cosmic tale of micro to macro that brings a small town in New South Wales into the story of the global reach of the British Empire. However, Brassil’s entangled tale is not just a story of human pre-eminence through historical ‘progress’. The Interferometer at Narrabri and the subsistence crops introduced to Australia from another ‘new world’ have neither ‘mastered’ nature, nor superseded Indigenous knowledges. Rather, the later arrivals have joined the earlier in an encounter between space and its varied modes of measurement to become an ‘environment of 20th century Dreaming’.24 This epistemic shift away from mastery is important, not least because so many Australian tales of contact, technological ‘progress’ and the British colonial project were far less gentle than the establishment of the NSII in a feld of sheep. Between 1956 and 1963, the British conducted seven nuclear tests, and many more ‘minor’ nuclear trials, at Maralinga, a site 800 km northwest of Adelaide. The comment made in 1955 by Howard Beale, then Australian Supply Minister, speaks volumes: England has the know how; we have the open spaces, much technical skill and a great willingness to help the Motherland. Between us we should help to build the defences of the free world, and make historic advances in harnessing the forces of nature.25 Beale might well have been describing the siting of the NSII in Narrabri, but of course, what he described as ‘open spaces’ for nuclear testing were areas of the Great Victoria Desert that had for millennia been inhabited by Indigenous Australians. And, while there is some evidence to suggest that the Australian and British military planning for Maralinga included attempts to ensure that local Aboriginal communities were removed from the testing sites, it is clear that the legacy of terra nullius, the colonizing discourse that legally rendered the continent ‘nobody’s land’ and thus ‘open space’, available for making ‘historical advances in harnessing the forces of nature’, played out its deadly logic at Maralinga. This Australian tale is again one of contact and empire, but here it both explodes time and space outward, linking a piece of the South Australian desert with the military force of the global British imperial project, and implodes, inward, to render

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visible the presence of those Indigenous communities that its master discourses sought so fervently to occlude. It was only in the 1970s that the story of Maralinga became a matter of public knowledge and scrutiny, and then only because of the bravery of a whistle blowing leak of secret documents. Formal reports began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s, but the full extent of the destruction of Indigenous people, their forms of community and their lands, as well as the radiation poisoning of Australian military personnel, is still unfolding. Activists, scholars, writers and artists have responded in their work to the devastation at Maralinga,26 none more poignantly than Yhonnie Scarce, whose hand-blown glass objects and installations interweave personal stories and memories of her family with the complex politics of Australia’s colonial past.27 Born in Woomera, Scarce is a descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people, whose ancestral lands extended into the Maralinga test site. In works such as Death Zephyr, commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2017, Scarce suspended a swarm of clear and black hand-blown glass forms from the ceiling of the gallery like a deadly murmur of starlings, evoking the heat from the nuclear blasts as it swept across the desert sand, turning it to glass and charring black the bush yams that lay beneath its surface. In Blue Danube (large bomb) from 2015, we are invited to inspect one glass object more closely; here, blackened glass yams are held inside a clear glass case, like a fragile coffn, fashioned in the shape of a ‘Blue Danube’, Britain’s frst post-War atomic bombshell. How far between the potatoes and the planets? Perhaps we should ask also, how far between the yams and the bomb?

FIGURE 3.4 Yhonnie Scarce, Death Zephyr, 2016–17. Hand blown glass yams, nylon, steel armature. Dimensions variable. Installation view at The National: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Image courtesy of the artist & THIS IS NO FANTASY.

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FIGURE 3.5 Yhonnie Scarce, Blue Danube (large bomb), 2015. Hand blown glass bomb and yams. Unique works 60 x 20 x 20 cm.

Image courtesy of the artist & THIS IS NO FANTASY.

These two questions open a transversal dialogue between the works of Brassil and Scarce that enables yet another Australian tale of the entanglement between the global and the intimate to unfold. Indigenous and imported, bush yams and cultivated potatoes speak of mutual histories of contact and land use, quotidian rituals of subsistence, still provided mainly though the labour of women, and local Australian tales that expand to resonate throughout the world.28 Measuring the planets and testing nuclear weapons brought colonial science into close contact with local technological expertise, materializing the best and the worst of empire. But in the works of Brassil and Scarce, colonial power did not meet terra nullius; in their powerful invocation of a long-inhabited continent, the works provide a decided riposte to the essentializing defnition of Indigenous people or worldviews as remote, eternal or timeless (read, ‘out of time’, dying out in the face of technological progress).29 Installed in the gallery, Scarce’s glass objects often appear with photos of her family members and maps of the test site to remind us, as present viewers, that the people displaced from their ancestral lands in Maralinga, who suffered radiation poisoning, cancers, stillbirths and early death, were historical agents, just like us.30 The works of Brassil and Scarce resonate at multiple scales, forging intimacies between the specifc, local space of Country, the global space of Empire, and the cosmic space of the planets and the Dreaming. Tracing an overview of engagements with land, space and the environment in Australian art over the past century, Catriona Moore wrote:‘In Australia, the landscape tradition has been thoroughly modifed by the voices of Indigenous knowledge,

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scientifc research and environmental activism’.31 Tellingly, in that same essay, Moore argued for the pivotal role played by feminist and conceptual interventions of the 1960s in expanding ‘landscape’ into what she termed ‘ecological communication’. Moore is not alone in arguing for the signifcance of feminism, Indigenous activism and environmentalism to the development of socially engaged art practices in Australia.32 Arguably, this triumvirate further underpinned the signifcant developments of feminist philosophy in Australia during the period, including, in 1993, the publication of Val Plumwood’s pivotal book, Feminism and The Mastery of Nature, in which she argued against ‘the logic of domination and the deep structures of dualism’, and for radical democracy, mutuality and interdependence, under the headline of ‘critical ecofeminism’.33 Again, this is an Australian tale that opens outward onto the world. ‘Australian feminist philosophy’ has come to describe an entangled and eccentric epistemic community of scholars and ideas: entangled with/in the histories and traditions of continental philosophy, engaged in an expanded dialogue with transnational feminist thought and activism, this work challenged Eurocentric philosophical conventions by means of an ‘eccentric’ intellectual standpoint underpinned by nondualist critiques of the masculine-normativity of ‘reason’. The work is known for its emphasis on embodied subjectivity, corporeal generosity, materialist becoming, and the politics of epistemic location in which imagination and affect are understood to be pivotal to political responsibility.34 Plumwood’s perspectives on reason, difference and dualism are deeply enmeshed with the insights of other Australian feminist philosophers and with the work of transnational feminist scholars, Indigenous activists and anarchist environmentalists.35 Plumwood’s critical ecofeminism was thus richly entangled within a transnational feminist network while also bearing the hallmarks of its ‘local’ epistemic community; likewise, her activism was borne of a visceral entanglement between the global and the intimate. In 1973, Plumwood and her then husband, Richard Routley, wrote The Fight for the Forests, which quickly became a rallying cry against Australian deforestation and global corporate agriculture.36 She remained throughout her life a champion of Indigenous land rights and a proponent of an extended, interspecies ethics. Not surprisingly, she was also involved in anti-nuclear campaigns linking regional environmental damage with sexism, militarism and capitalism on a global scale. And thus, in a fnal turn, our parabolic tale sets to land. In 1973, Australian artists boycotted the Mildura Sculpture Biennial in response to French nuclear tests in the Pacifc. In 1995,Indigenous Australian artist and environmentalist Judy Watson won the prestigious Moët and Chandon Fellowship, using the art she produced during her residency in France as an opportunity to raise European awareness of continued French nuclear testing in the region. In Britain, the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common was established in 1981 to protest US nuclear weapons being sited in the UK. The camp lasted 19 years. In 1989, feminist environmental artist Margaret Harrison produced the installation Common Land/Greenham, to celebrate the activists at the Peace Camp and raise awareness of continuing environmental destruction. In the border of Harrison’s work were the words of Virginia Woolf:

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‘We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by fnding new words and creating new methods’.37 Feminism, anti-nuclear pacifsm, Indigenous land rights and environmental activism articulated through the arts connect local protests with transnational campaigns through affect and affnity. The expanded ecological thinking-in-making that underpins these connections, moves across time and space at many scales, connecting the potatoes with the planets, the yams with the bombs, new worlds with old [Colour plates 8 and 9]. The tales that entangle the global with the intimate in critical ecofeminist theory, activism and art, are transnational feminist tales of transversal dialogues across difference, but they are also, many times, tales of love and courage that act as a creative catalyst for personal, as well as political, transformation. In this way, critical ecofeminisms may also tell stories of the possibility of alternative ecological intimacies.38 But that is another tale.

II. Time: a frefy’s tale The second work of Brassil’s Trilogy focused on time. Have You Metamorphosed Lately? comprised two ‘hourglasses’ fashioned from slim casuarina saplings, each containing an egg, larva, pupa and adult insect made of white ceramic. The eggs were set at the base of each hourglass, next to a metal DNA helix, while the instars, ciphers for the stages of metamorphosis, were held within the structures. Five upright trunks of ironbark with metal sensors pointed toward the hourglasses. In the work, time was expressed through energy exchanges between macro and micro, the organic and the inorganic; the movements of the planets and rotation of the earth, vitally connected with the metamorphosis of an insect: ‘A cosmic contraction/of a pulsar/On a frefy tail’.39 Organic/inorganic, nature/culture assemblages, Brassil’s structures did not so much illustrate metamorphosis, as produce a metamorphic fguration that articulated life as an intimate ecology of material transformation over time. Central to the work’s invocation of transformative time is the question posed by the title, and its address to ‘you’, to ‘us’, as the interpellated subjects of the work. Have we metamorphosed lately? This is not a question posed to provoke an answer revealing the truth of our Being, but a whimsical enquiry as to what we might become. And, in her invocation of trans-species transformation and the temporal logic of ‘humanimal’ becoming, Brassil’s work was, and remains, in very good company [Colour plate 10]. Metamorphosis is a concept with compelling cultural resonance across literature, philosophy and art.40 In transnational feminisms and queer theory particularly, explorations of sexuality and sexual difference as metamorphic processes of multidirectional unfolding, have been critical to unravelling the binary logic of ‘natural’ (or fxed), linear relationships between bodies, identifcations and desire, and to confguring transcultural encounters as mutually transformative, rather than assimilative. One of the key voices within this posthumanist terrain is feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, and her metamorphic fgurations for nomadic subjectivities provide a useful trajectory through which to open this parabolic tale.

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For the best part of three decades, Braidotti’s work has set an agenda for exploring nomadic becoming-subjectivities that has signifcant ramifcations for transversal politics and material ecofeminisms.41 In her recent proposal for a framework for ‘the critical posthumanities’, she delineated a particularly compelling description of subjectivity as an unending process of metamorphic assemblage; the description resonates powerfully with Brassil’s earlier, metamorphic installation: Subjectivity is not restricted to bound individuals, but is rather a co-operative, trans-species effort that takes place transversally,in between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past – in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries.42 Perhaps not surprisingly, it was in relation to the particular valences of insect metamorphosis,‘becoming woman/animal/insect’, that Braidotti posited the pivotal role played by encounters with others in posthuman, materialist becomings.43 Arguably, such encounters are always, per Sara Ahmed,‘strange encounters’:‘ways of being in the world that open the possibility of the distant in the near, the unassimilable in the already assimilated, and the surprising in the ordinary’.44 In the context of critical ecofeminist thinking, these might also be called ‘ecological intimacies’ or ‘queer ecologies’. Queer ecologies describe an expansive terrain of posthumanist, ecological thinking and experimentation centred on, but not limited to, sexuality, sexual difference and desire.45 Profoundly engaged with politics and ethics, queer ecologies bring questions of environmental justice together with explorations of non-normative becoming-subjectivities. In queer ecological thinking, polymorphous perversity meets metamorphic subjectivity to move away from any lingering sense that human heterosexuality is ‘natural’, or indeed, that it can operate effectively as a normative category in a world comprised of vital matter. Or, as Braidotti exclaimed in Metamorphoses: ‘It is a queer world out there!’46 Signifcantly, this expansive thinking resists the conventional logic of representation; queer ecosexuality is not a thing to be represented, but a process of becoming-matter, a movement from metaphoric to metamorphic exchanges between selves and worlds. Queer ecologies invite ‘strange encounters’ in which bounded notions of subjectivity begin to dissolve through, often ecstatic, becomings and assemblages with non-human species, geological entities or cosmic forces.47 In these terms, ‘Have you metamorphosed lately?’ poses an invitation as well as a question, suggesting that strange, but desirable, encounters with a diverse cast of earth Others in a radically open, ‘more-than-human-world’,48 might change the parameters of subjectivity, and the frame of reference for thought, agency and ethics. To take this trajectory of our parabolic tale further, it is useful to bring Stacy Alaimo’s material feminist exploration of transcorporeality as a ‘contact zone’ through which a posthuman ethics might productively be developed, together with the insights of Rosalyn Diprose, whose earlier work posited an ethics based upon the fundamental ‘generosity of intercorporeal existence’ (rather than bounded

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‘individualism’). In dialogue with these interlocutors, I want to suggest that the posthuman encounters engendered by queer ecologies can facilitate the emergence of a ‘transcorporeal generosity’, a radical form of giving between selves and worlds.49 To explore the ramifcations of this further, our tale now turns back to time, transformation, art, love and life. *** In an interview from 1995, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres spoke of caring for his lover Ross Laycock as he died of an AIDS-related illness four years earlier: I would say that when he was becoming less of a person I was loving him more. Every lesion he got, I loved him more. Until the last second, I told him ‘I want to be there until your last breath’, and I was there to his last breath.50 As Gonzalez-Torres recounted this tale of love and loss, he was himself HIV-positive and would die of AIDS-related complications less than a year later, aged 38. In little more than a decade before his death in 1996, Gonzalez-Torres produced a body of work that is now seen as pivotal to the collaborative, participatory and ‘relational’ aesthetics that emerged as a central feature of late 20th century art. Critical responses to the work of Gonzalez-Torres attest to its legacy and to the artist’s nuanced use of sparing imagery and everyday materials to invoke deeply moving personal and collective experiences of love, grief and mourning, without losing sight of the particular politics of its production within the gay and lesbian community in the United States during the height of the AIDS crisis.51 Gonzalez-Torres, however, was not simply a ‘queer artist’, if by that is implied a reductive intention to read his works as representations of an essential identity.52 Rather, the work was profoundly affective and dialogic; meanings were made in and through strange encounters between the bodies of viewers and the oft-quotidian materials placed into proximity with them, like gifts offered between friends or lovers. The works materialized queer desire as emergent, open and intercorporeal, or, as Nancy Spector described the candy spill portraits:‘Parts of one “body” entering the willing mouths of other bodies, the sugary candy spills invoke . . . eroticism as the transgression of corporeal boundaries’.53 But while the candy spills materialize the potential to transgress normative boundaries through the desirable incorporation of difference, the model of incorporation leaves the centrality of the human subject intact.54 Arguably, other works through which Gonzalez-Torres materialized the metamorphic becomings that so poignantly entangled love with loss, desire with death, did not. Between the death of Laycock and his own, Gonzalez-Torres produced fve beaded curtain works: “Untitled” (Chemo) 1991; “Untitled” (Blood) 1992; “Untitled” (Beginning) 1994; “Untitled” (Golden) 1995 and “Untitled” (Water) 1995. Simple and compelling, these decorative room dividers made of strung plastic beads of varying colour combinations, invoked kitsch 1960s domestic decor while also hearkening to curtained screens used in public buildings such as museums,

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FIGURE 3.6 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Blood), 1992. Strands of beads and hanging device. Dimensions vary with installation. Photo: Charles Mayer. Installation view: Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 14 Feb–20 May 2012. Curated Jenelle Porter.

© Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

churches and, of course, hospitals. Critics have been swift to note the visceral, medical subtitles, the sexual allusions, and the consequent implication that, in these works, ‘abject’ materials (blood, urine, alkylating elements used in chemotherapy) metaphorically touch and move viewers as they pass through the curtains in the space of the gallery. But listening attentively to Gonzalez-Torres’s expression of love at the edges of life ‘when he was becoming less of a person I was loving him more’, it is possible to hear something other than a metaphor for lingering illness and desire – it is possible to hear the echo of an cosmological intimacy that moves beyond the bounded limits of the human body, or the simply ‘sexual’, toward a metamorphic unfolding of transcorporeal generosity in what Melissa K. Nelson calls the ‘eco-erotic’: In the face of such sensuous ecological encounters, both ordinary and spectacular, I step outside the sense of myself as a contained being. I am no longer a solid center, but part of an unending field of entwined energies.55 Moving beyond metaphor to materialize metamorphosis, the visual and material effects of the shimmering falls of curtained walls provisionally dissolve the bodies they caress. Moving between and though them, entangled in showers of beads, glints of light and waves of gentle white noise, mutable thresholds open between selves

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and other bodies, visually, spatially and haptically. A secure hold on bios – my self, your self, forever bounded and separate – begins to unravel in a strange and ecstatic encounter at the edge. Becoming less of a person, leaving symbol and metaphor behind, falling in love with zoe;56 the possibility exists that these curtained showers materialize, however briefy, ecological intimacies, plateaus or ‘instars’ where metamorphic, nomadic subjects-becoming-other enjoy a brief encounter at the ecstatic edge of the eco-erotic, becoming blood, becoming water, becoming golden [Colour plate 11]. Have you metamorphosed lately? is not a terrifying question within a queer ecology that understands our subjectivity to emerge from, and to dissolve within, a vibrant world of which we are but a small part(icle), nor within the many Indigenous forms of thought where the vitality of the non-human world has long been recognized and engaged. Yet its implications are profound. The sparkling curtains strung by Gonzalez-Torres as an act of love and loss may well have materialized also a threshold on which we can begin to meet the universe halfway.57 Materializing a transcorporeal exchange of vital matter that does not end with and between human others, we are extended through ‘the world, in all its open-ended, inter-relational, transnational, multi-sexed, and trans-species fows of becoming’.58 We are stardust, we are golden . . .59 But that is another tale.

III. Energy: a stardust tale That Brassil’s work brought the arts and the sciences together in a dynamic partnership has long been recognized and lauded by astute critics; take for example, the opening line of the catalogue essay by Sally Couacaud for the artist’s 1990 ACCA retrospective: ‘For more than twenty years Joan Brassil has been making installations – sculptural sites where the realms of art, technology, science, metaphysics and poetry cohabit and converge’.60 Specifcally addressing works from the Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, Couacaud made an even more prescient claim, one that serves to open this tale of stars and dust: Her juxtaposition of potatoes and computer circuits in How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets?, for example, or of earth and trees with Geiger tubes and cosmic rays in Can it be that the (sic) Everlasting is Everchanging? (1978) might be considered by some as opposing dualities of nature and technology, but for Brassil such oppositions do not exist, everything is systemic, part of the fluid inter- connectedness of the universe.61 Brassil’s trilogies did not propose a binary opposition between the arts and the sciences, but instead demonstrated their profound entanglement in the rich coproduction of worlding ecologies. In this sense Brassil’s work provides a distinct parallel to the transnational feminist critique of instrumental, ‘western’ science, whose deadly logic of ‘mastering’ nature underpinned colonial expansion, exploitation and extermination. Ecofeminist scholar and activist, Vandana Shiva, has

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articulated this position with exceptional acuity in her work, using the term ‘reductionist’ to summarise the central issues: I characterise modern western patriarchy’s special epistemological tradition of the ‘scientific revolution’ as ‘reductionist’ because it reduced the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding other knowers and other ways of knowing, and it reduced the capacity of nature to creatively regenerate and renew itself by manipulating it as inert and fragmented matter.62 Transnational feminism’s compelling analysis of scientifc reductionism is not, however, an argument for rejecting science and technology wholesale, but for recasting discourses of scientifc ‘mastery’ toward models of epistemic co-production.63 As a partner discourse in dialogue with other ways of knowing, the sciences offer exceptional insights into the imbrication of the global with the intimate and the interdependence of human and non-human agency. In this sense, Brassil’s entanglement of the arts with the sciences is akin to Sheila Jasanoff ’s arguments for co-production as crucial to the development of inclusive, transnational processes of ‘environmental decision-making’, capable of creating ‘ideas for how to live more lightly on Earth . . . ideas that pay more attention to the values of social cohesion and stewardship than to the ceaseless imperialist exploitation of living and nonliving materials’.64 These ideas point toward an ethics of vital matter and the signifcance of dialogue in the co-production of knowledges; arguably, they also open a critical space for the arts. Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? maintained a deep connection with the methods, materials and techniques of the sciences, and Brassil’s collaborative dialogue with astrophysicists from the University of Sydney who were recording random cosmic showers from pulsars and quasars at S.U.G.A.R. (Sydney University Giant Air Shower Recorder), was pivotal to the realization of the work. S.U.G.A.R. consisted of a central computer mainframe and a grid-like installation of aerials sited throughout the Pilliga Forest, about 100 kilometres from Narrabri. Brassil’s installation realized the wonder that lay at the heart of this experimental facility, and the poetry of its technical instruments sited in an ancient woodland flled with native scrub. In Brassil’s technopoetic encounter with S.U.G.A.R., the scientists listening attentively to the cosmos resounding in the forest were not the masters of the universe, but its ardent stewards. As the cosmic showers found their way into the gallery space in a constellation of technological instruments, saplings, earth and ochre, the work entangled participant spectators within ‘the fuid interconnectedness of the universe’, linking the great with the small as it told its tale of stars and dust.65 Nearly four decades after Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging was frst shown, artist Joanna Hoffmann installed a number of works at Art Laboratory Berlin under the umbrella title [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo (2015). Using 3D stereoscopy, experimental video animation, soundscapes and various forms of digital projection in the gallery space, Hoffmann’s works visualized,

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Joanna Hoffmann, still from the immersive installation [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo, Art Laboratory Berlin, 2015.

FIGURE 3.7

Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

through immersive aesthetic environments and simulated holograms, ideas current in theoretical physics and microbiology. Exploring the existence of interdependent and multidimensional universes existing at extremes of scale, Hoffmann’s project linked the smallest protein particles, themselves born in the nuclei of stars, to the vast dimensions of universes dynamically ‘curled up’ in what are known as CalabiYau manifolds.66 These manifolds describe our entanglement, outside and in, with the stars and the dust of an endlessly unfolding universe, or, as Hoffmann wrote of her video animation Proteios: If the scientific hypothesis about the multi-dimensional nature of the world is true, then Calabi-Yau spaces are everywhere, in each ‘point’ of the space outside as well as inside us . . . There is some optimism in the fact that at the atomic level, inscribed in the cosmic recycling system, we are practically immortal.67 The everlasting is indeed ever changing. The works of Brassil and Hoffmann around which this brief parable orbits elliptically, were produced in very different times and places, yet their affnities are striking. Bringing them together here creates a transversal dialogue (or ‘coyote conversation’) that runs counter to linear histories and strict notions of artistic ‘infuence’ in favour of fgurations that enable new connections to emerge. That is, engaging with Brassil through Hoffmann, and vice versa, may well be a ‘preposterous history’,68 and a convincing mode of ecological thinking. Both artists’ projects worked with science as a partner discourse, and both rejected fxed binary,

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anthropocentric and teleological conventions of knowledge and understanding, articulating a wondrous world comprised of vibrant and mutable matter. Both projects emphasized the cosmic continuity of contingency, the everlasting in the ever changing, and located human agency as one part of a dynamic conversation with the energy of any number of multidimensional universes, great and small [Colour plates 12 and 13]. It is at this point that our tale of stars and dust takes its fnal turn through a critical ecofeminist ethics of fourishing that has important ramifcations for transnational feminisms, transversal politics and the arts. Across a number of felds and disciplines, the call to decolonize science and the politics of ecology, and develop a comprehensive posthuman/vital materialist ethics has become increasingly imperative for transnational feminist thought and activism.69 But what does a posthuman/vital materialist ethics look like? How does it matter? Exploring this question through notions of ecological communities, Chris J. Cuomo returned to, but radically refashioned, the Aristotelian idea of an ethics of fourishing.70 Cuomo’s trajectories are especially interesting here, as she refuses (following Maria Lugones) any discourses of ‘purity’ in her logic, continually crossing borders to seek new affnities and ideas. Her argument is transdisciplinary, positing science as a partner in conversation with other felds, it is transhistorical and transcultural, drawing upon Ancient and contemporary philosophies from a wide geographical frame, and it is never teleological, it is radically open to change. It is also queer and unafraid of the mutable, mix-and-match matter of the cyborg. Cuomo’s confguration of an ecological feminist ethics of fourishing is, in short, akin to the ecologies materialized by Brassil and Hoffmann in their artworks. The matter of kinship is pivotal here, in more than one sense.71 Cuomo suggests that fourishing is always with others, in a ‘community of knowers’. This sense of an epistemic community is one she shares with Nira Yuval-Davis, who, in developing her concept of transversal political solidarity, posits dialogue as central to the formation of epistemic communities.72 Premised upon solidarities and affnities rather than essential identities,73 the kinships developed through radically open dialogues with/in difference are cyborg confgurations, resistant to myths of origin (blood and soil), capable of creating connections across geographies and histories, responsive and responsible. Ethically, the transcorporeal generosity of critical ecofeminist thinking opens the potential of kinship to extend beyond the limits of the human; politically, ecological thinking suggests solidarities created through responsive and responsible ways of knowing and imagining the world. Materializing affnities between the stars and the dust, the protean matter of ‘life itself ’ and the fuid interconnections between human and non-human agency in the world, places stewardship and care at the heart of an ethics of fourishing. We do not fourish without the stars and the dust. In her explication of fourishing, Cuomo seeks ‘inspiration’, arguing that we need to create ‘meaningful models’ that might allow us to proceed in the world ‘with as much respect as possible’, and in so doing, develop the relationships of interdependence upon which transnational ecological communities depend:

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But I also need inspiration . . . images of flourishing. . . . Ideas and images that help figure the look and the feel of inhabiting spaces in between nature/ culture, gender, racial formations, animal bodies. Ways of figuring out how to make this inhabitation visible, identifiable, meaningful’.74 The transversal map drawn by Can It Be that Everlasting is Everchanging? is as astutely ethical as it is political, connecting multiple dimensions of historical and geopolitical understandings of space, time and energy without homogenizing them.75 Pre- and post-contact histories converge with geological and cosmic temporal registers; the globe of the ‘global’ transforms into the world of the ‘cosmos’,76 a space in which differences of scale do not need to be fattened or unitized to be connected meaningfully. Visually, materially and spatially, the work invites spectators to encounter affective affnities between the tilled soil and the cosmic showers, the native saplings and the experimental instruments, Indigenous Dreaming and contemporary technologies. Brassil’s ‘20th Century Dreaming’, is a poetic invocation of the possibility to know, imagine and inhabit the world in many different ways at once. These transformative, contingent connections invite the possibility of fourishing between and across the global and the intimate. And thus our parable draws to a close, with inspiration from a work of art.

Afterword: consider the fungi at the interface Making connections between the global and the intimate is crucial to transnational feminist ecological praxis as it seeks to draw the coordinates of a transversal, ethicopolitical ecology of entanglement. Why should I respond to the world and at what scale? How can we engender response and responsibility beyond the immediacy of individual experience? Perhaps the answer resides with a mushroom at the end of the world . . .77 Mycorrhizal networks, or the underground networks of fungi that operate at the interface between plants, animals, the soil, the elements and the energy of the sun, may be the most extraordinary interspecies communication network on our planet. Yet there is little celebration of the fungi at the interface as their profound interdependence betwixt and between multiple species and the ‘inanimate’ matter of the earth places them beyond the anthropogenic tendency to herald individual organisms, animals and plants we can recognize, however mistakenly, as singular entities. Recently, however, there has been a spate of mushroom-hunting, and a rise in interest in these denizens of the forests and the dunes, precisely for their life at the interval, their role in creating the affnities and maintaining the networks that we all need to live, together, on this planet. In 2018, Art Laboratory Berlin announced a two-year collaborative art and science project, Mind the Fungi, to explore the vital role played by the mycorrhizal networks and local mushrooms to both communitybuilding and fungal bioscience.78 The project is co-designed, artist and academic led, and develops a community of ‘citizen scientists’ at its core. Happily, it seems that those of us interested in the fungi communicating at the interface are no longer alone.79

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FIGURE 3.8 Joan Brassil, Consider the Fungi at the Interface, 1986, from the Trilogy Energy as a Delicate Contract, 1981–86; video projection, shaped perspex screens, shaped plastic tubing (electronically manipulated at random intervals), sand. Installation view at the Sydney Biennale, 1986.

Image reproduced courtesy of the family of Joan Brassil.

Between 1981 and 1986, Brassil produced the Trilogy Energy as a Delicate Contract; the title shared by the third work in the Trilogy, and an accompanying poem, was called Consider the Fungi at the Interface (1986): Consider the Fungi, at the Interface, of Earth and Primal Life. Consider the Fungi at the Interface, holding the dunes in place, the translucent forms the intricate threads in laboratory light of ultra blue. Consider the Fungi at the Interface, ranging along roots

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transferring the phosphorous to the living cell, – a chemical key to the stuff of Life consider the Fungi at the Interface.80 Brassil’s trilogies were, at once, eccentric and entangled, materialized at the edge. Hers was a practice demonstrably linked to a locus in the Global South, produced by a woman of European settler descent, unusually alert to Indigenous cosmologies and keenly aware of the brutal forms of exploitation that underpinned the colonizing concept of terra nullius. Hers was a practice that simultaneously explored pre-contact and settler histories through a vital materialism that found wonder in science and technology. Hers was a singular practice undertaken through collaborations and within creative communities. Hers was a practice that engaged the infnitude of time, made manifest by the Indigenous stewardship of the land, and the scientifc measurement of the heavens, alike. Hers was a practice that invoked our interdependent entanglement with/in the elements of a vital universe. Hers was a practice that embraced the contingency of life’s energy, traversing with equal force through human and non-human bodies, trees and fungi, grains of sand and the most distant of stars. The rest is a tale for another day.

Notes 1 Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, p. xxiii. 2 Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 5. 3 Three sources tracing the strong historical links between feminism, the women’s movement and environmental activism will suffice: Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publications and London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1993; Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, London and New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1997; Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action, London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Sturgeon is especially focused on the US movement, while Salleh builds a more international picture of the intersections. 4 Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures, op. cit., p. 23. 5 This is picked up very well by Chris J. Cuomo in her review of Karen Warren’s work, ‘On Ecofeminist Philosophy’, Ethics and the Environment, 7:2, 2002, pp. 1–11, p. 2. The significance of affinity to an anti-essentialist feminist political theory is delineated with great clarity by Moya Lloyd: see Beyond Identity Politics, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005. 6 Gaard astutely noted that asking ‘different questions on both a micro- and macro-level has long been a hallmark of feminist methodology’. Cf. Critical Ecofeminism, op. cit., p. 19. 7 Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner,‘Introduction: The Global and the Intimate’, in The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, pp. 1–27, p. 1. 8 I am following Gaard’s lead in using the term ‘critical ecofeminism’; crucially, the term connects the legacy of earlier ecofeminists, such as Val Plumwood, with the significance of later, decolonizing, race-critical, queer, posthuman and vital materialist feminisms.

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9 Gaard is here glossing the insights of Plumwood (from her volume Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, London and New York: Routledge, 2002); see Critical Ecofeminism, op. cit., p. 16. 10 I am borrowing the apt phrase ‘other Others’ from Chris J. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 4. 11 A particularly potent reminder of the significance of feminisms to the field of the arts and political ecology can be found in the pivotal work of TJ Demos; note, for example, the extent to which feminist enquiry underpins Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016 (cf. ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–29). See also the important online resource WEAD (Women Eco Artists Dialog): www.weadartists.org/. 12 I am indebted to Martin L. Davies for first introducing me to the notion of an ecology of knowledge when we worked together on the co-edited anthology, Breaking the Disciplines: Reconceptions in Knowledge, Art and Culture (Martin L. Davies and Marsha Meskimmon (eds.), London: IB Tauris, 2003); see his essay therein: M.L. Davies,‘Thinking Practice: On the Concept of an Ecology of Knowledge’, pp. 9–34. 13 I trust it will become clear throughout this chapter that I am not making a retrospective claim for Brassil’s art being ‘about ecology’, but rather, that her works are a brilliant exposition of the emergent ideas that have coalesced in the expanded notions of ‘ecological thinking’ and ‘critical ecofeminism’. 14 Probably the three most common terms deployed in the critical literature on Brassil’s practice are science, poetics and wonder. See, for example: Susan Best and Brian Robinson,‘Joan Brassil’s Gondwana and the Cosmos: Listening to dead stars singing’, in Mêtis: Exhibitions of Science and Art, ex.cat., Canberra, Australia, 1999; Susan Best, ‘Wonder and the Cosmos’, in Strangers: A Retrospective of Joan Brassil, ex.cat., Sydney, Australia: Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2015, pp. 5–14; Zoe Sofia, ‘Technoscientific Poeisis: Joan Brassil, Joyce Hinterding, Sarah Waterson’, Continuum, 8:1, 1994, pp. 364–75. 15 When Brassil wrote of her works she capitalised Trilogy; I am following her lead here. 16 The first and third works of the Trilogy were reprised in 1990 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne on the occasion of a retrospective for the Fourth Australian Sculpture Triennial, entitled Joan Brassil: The Resonant Image. The works included in the 1990 show were further incorporated into Brassil’s successful submission for the award of a Doctorate of Contemporary Art (DCA) in 1991 at the University of Wollongong, where the title of her written thesis was The poetic vision. That document is a central source, as it is the only detailed account of the early Trilogies written by Brassil. 17 In the first showing of the work, and in Brassil’s DCA, the title is given as: Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? When it was shown at ACCA in 1990, it subtly shifted in the catalogue to Can it be that the Everlasting is Everchanging?, and when it was most recently reinstalled in the 2015 show, Strangers: A Retrospective of Joan Brassil held at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, another slight shift in the title occurred – Can it be the Everlasting is Everchanging? See Campbelltown Arts Centre, Strangers: A Retrospective of Joan Brassil, 2015, p. 77. I will use the first title of the work here. 18 It was through her long-term collaboration with Professor Brian Robinson, a radioastronomer at Parkes Observatory in Canberra with a special interest in pulsars, that Brassil came to visit Narrabri. 19 In later versions, including the one reproduced here, the soil ground was replaced by a mirrored plane. 20 Brassil, The Poetic Vision, op. cit., p. 15. 21 Brassil engaged with Indigenous cultural knowledges and traditions of articulating space and time throughout her career, travelling to work with Aboriginal Australians in the Kimberley region and developing nuanced narratives of contact history in a number of her later Trilogies. I would argue that there is a parallel between Brassil’s mode of engagement with Indigenous culture and Chris J. Cuomo’s assessment of Karen Warren’s respectful dialogues with Indigenous understandings of trans-species ecologies: ‘Warren draws on indigenous sources of knowledge not simply because she holds a theory of oppression (because they are historically oppressed or underrated), but because they offer

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25 26 27

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30 31

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unique and vital wisdom concerning human-animal connection and communication’. (Chris J. Cuomo, ‘On Ecofeminist Philosophy’, Ethics and the Environment, 7:2, 2002, pp. 1–11, p. 11; my italics). See his obituary by Bill Tango, Astronomy & Geophysics, 47:4, August 2006, p. 4.38. Doreen Massey,‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, June 1991, pp. 24–9, p. 28. Recognition of Indigenous knowledge and understandings of astronomy, has only lately emerged in the scientific community: see Ray Norris and Cilla Norris, Emu Dreaming: An Introduction to Australian Aboriginal Astronomy, Baulkham Hill, NSW: Emu Dreaming, 2014. Kingsley Palmer, ‘Aborigines and Atomic Testing in South Australia’, Aboriginal History, 14:2, 1990, pp. 197–207, Beale cited, p. 198 from The report of the Royal Commission into British nuclear tests in Australia, vol.2, Canberra, 1985. For an excellent overview, see the website Black Mist Burnt Country (https://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/), documenting the national touring exhibition, Black Mist Burnt Country: Testing the Bomb – Maralinga and Australian Art (2016–2019). I am grateful to Catherine Speck, who, on finding that I was writing about Scarce’s work, shared her unpublished text on art and Maralinga with me: Catherine Speck,‘“Thunder Raining Poison”: How Contemporary Aboriginal Artists Are Responding to the Nuclear Bomb Tests of the Cold War Era’, conference paper delivered at Pictures of War: The Still Image in Conflict since 1945, Manchester Metropolitan University, 23–25 May 2018; and a revised version at War, Art and Visual Culture Symposium, SH Ervin Gallery Sydney, 25 February, 2019. There is an extended context around subsistence crops and land use in eco-art and writing: food crops, ballast seeds and glasshouses have been central to art exploring the legacies of colonial expansion and global agriculture (e.g. the work of Agnes Denes, Maria Thereza Alves and Janet Laurence); likewise, guerrilla gardening projects, seed dispensaries, foraging and planting to return biodiversity to local spaces have become central acts of ecovention (e.g. Gaye and Nandita Sharma (eating in public) and Anne Marie Culhane Fruit Routes); and for a personal engagement with the power politics of land use, see the fascinating account by Lucy Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, New York: The New Press, 2014. I discussed these ideas about time at some length in chapter 9 of Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, London and New York: Routledge, 2003. See also, the essay by Kali Simmons,‘Reorientations; or, An Indigenous Feminist Reflection on the Anthropocene’, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58:2, Winter 2019, pp. 174–9 in which she reminds that forgetting the histories of Empire in the Anthropocene is disastrous for Indigenous people as it makes everywhere ‘empty space’. See the Art Basel online catalogue for the exhibition of 2015: www.artbasel.com/catalog/ artwork/14920/Yhonnie-Scarce-Breakaway. Catriona Moore,‘Not Just a Pretty Picture: Art as Ecological Communication’, in Water Wind Art and Debate: How Environmental Concerns Impact on Disciplinary Research, edited by Gavin Birch, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007, pp. 345–92, p. 392. Significantly, Moore’s excellent survey essay located Brassil’s work in relation to that of Janet Laurence, Joyce Hinterding and Joan Grounds, confirming Brassil’s strong contextual links with feminist, ecological and environmental art practices. Anecdotally, I first met Brassil in the company of Laurence, and on that occasion, we spoke of Laurence’s high-profile ecovention for the Sydney Olympic Park, Into the Light (2000), and her then-current glasshouse works. See Julie Newington’s brilliant overview of feminist art practices in Australia: ‘Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia’, in A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019, pp. 17–36. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. In spring 2000, a Special Issue of Hypatia entitled Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy, surveyed more than a decade of Australian feminist philosophy, arguing

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36

37 38

39 40

41

42 43

44 45

for its specific contribution to feminist thought on a world scale. Contributors included Genevieve Lloyd, Moira Gatens, Rosalyn Diprose and Claire Colebrook, and discussions of the work of Elizabeth Grosz. Significantly, the issue also contained an article by Barbara Bolt, pivotal to the development of new materialist thinking in art practice, and Zoe Sofia, author of a key text from 1994 in which she described Brassil’s practice as ‘technoscientific poiesis’. Just prior to citing bell hooks in the Acknowledgements of Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Plumwood gives thanks to the “newly emerging wing of the ‘Invisible College’”, the new voices slowly changing the all-white, all-male philosophical tradition of the past 2000 years; in the bibliography, citations include Lloyd, Gatens, Grosz and Deborah Rose Bird in addition to Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Starhawk, Vandana Shiva, Murray Bookchin and Peter Kropotkin. Routley, Richard and Val Routley, The Fight for the Forests: The Takeover of Australian Forests for Pines, Wood Chips and Intensive Forestry, Canberra: Australian National University Research Press, 1973; the volume went to three editions in as many years. NB: Plumwood published in her married surname at the time. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938, University of Adelaide online version: https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/index.html See Section 3. This is the same text in which Woolf declared her feminist cosmopolitanism (see Chapter 2). Note Nina Wakeford’s evocative performance piece on Greenham as a queer site: ‘an apprenticeship in queer I believe it was’ see: https://readinginternational.org/programme/ performance-nina-wakeford-an-apprenticeship-in-queer-i-believe-it-was/ In addition, Julia Bryan Wilson’s ‘Aftermath: Two Queer Artists Respond to Nuclear Spaces’, in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, edited by Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015, pp. 77–92 begins to explore aspects of the sexualization of nuclear warfare and some of the links between nature, contamination, queer and nuclear arms. Brassil, The Poetic Vision, op. cit., p. 21. Even a very brief survey demonstrates a widespread, cross-cultural interest in shapeshifting and metamorphosis: Indigenous tales from the Americas, Asia and Africa, the epic poetry of Ovid, well-known modern and contemporary art and literature such as the work of Franz Kafka, Leonor Fini, the Magic Realists, Angela Carter and A Igoni Barrett. Cf. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity, 2002; Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity, 2013; Rosi Braidotti, ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’, Theory, Culture and Society, special issue,‘Transversal Posthumanities’, May 2018, pp. 1–31. Braidotti,‘A Theoretical Framework’, op. cit., p. 3. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, op. cit., p. 118. Significantly, Braidotti makes explicit reference to using lengthy bibliographies and multiple citations as part of a project to make visible the intellectual community of ‘others’ with whom her work is in dialogue. See Braidotti, ‘A Theoretical Framework’, op. cit., p. 3. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 164. In addition to Grosz, Braidotti and Gaard, see, especially: Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics and Desire, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010; Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, eds., Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Joanne Barker, ed., Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017. There is a wonderful parallel between Audre Lorde and Melissa K Nelson here (despite the time gap between their writing) on the (eco)erotic being far more significant than any limited and commodified concept of the ‘sexual’; see: Audre Lorde,‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider:

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50 51

52 53 54 55 56

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Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley: Crossing Press, (1984) 2007, pp. 53–9 and Melissa K. Nelson, ‘Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, in Critically Sovereign, op. cit., pp. 229–60. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, op. cit., p. 159. Gaard traces a number of these ecosexual human-world encounters in the introduction to Critical Ecofeminism, op. cit., and recognizes the pivotal role of Indigenous thought to neo-materialist explorations of human and non-human agency. Stacy Alaimo, ‘Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature’, in Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 237–64, p. 238. Stacy Alaimo,‘Trans-Corporeal Feminisms’, op. cit. and Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, Albany: SUNY Press, 2002 (esp. pp. 5, 69). In her work, Diprose develops the notion of corporeal generosity by exploring human interdependence, but her insights lend themselves well to the interdependence between human and non-human agents as a basis for an extended ethical construction and I hope that she and Alaimo would find my expansion of their ideas through the present tripartite dialogue in no way a disservice. Fisun Güner, ‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Playfully Teasing, Deadly Serious’, The Guardian, Weds 18 May 2016. Available at: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/18/ felix-gonzalez-torres-playfully-teasing-deadly-serious. Since the early 1990s, the work of Gonzalez-Torres has been exhibited widely (including his posthumous selection to represent the US in the Venice Biennale in 2007) and subject to much critical attention, the majority of which repeats a few central points: that his work was pivotal to the development of ‘relational aesthetics’; that it spoke with exceptional resonance to the AIDS crisis of the period in its expression of deep personal and community loss; that it deployed a post-minimal gallery aesthetic to materialize queer subject positions. See, for example: Robert Storr,‘Setting Traps for the Mind and Heart’, Art in America, 84:1, January 1996, p. 70; Joe Scanlan, ‘The Uses of Disorder’, Artforum International, 48:6, February 2010, pp. 162–9, 226; Catherine Taft, ‘Eduardo Consuegra’, Artforum International, 50:1, September 2011, pp. 354–5; Lauren Hinkson, ‘Untitled (Golden)’, Guggenheim Collection. Available at: www.guggenheim.org/artwork/22508; Taylor Worley,‘From Hostility to Hospitality’, Curator Magazine, May 2015. Available at: www.curatormagazine.com/taylorworley/play-at-your-own-risk/. Well-versed in feminist, queer and poststructuralist theory and politics, Gonzalez-Torres himself resisted such reductive readings of his work: see Nancy Spector, Felix GonzalezTorres, ex. cat., New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995, p. 73. Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, op. cit., p. 150. Alaimo, ‘Trans-Corporeal Feminisms’, op. cit., p. 254: ‘for the most part, the model of incorporation emphasizes the outline of the human – food disappears into the human body, which remains solidly bounded’. Melissa K. Nelson, ‘Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, edited by Joanne Barker, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 229–60, p. 230. Cf. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, op. cit., p. 132; Jami Weinstein, ‘Posthumously Queer’, in ‘Dossier: Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2–3, 2015, pp. 236–8. Note that Weinstein posits moving from ‘bios theoretikos’, to ‘zoe theoretikos’. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Braidotti,‘A Theoretical Framework’, op. cit., p. 19. Lyrics from Joni Mitchell, Woodstock, 1970. Sally Couacaud, ‘Joan Brassil: The Resonant Image’, catalogue essay, ACCA, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 14–20, p. 14. Couacaud,‘Joan Brassil: The Resonant Image’, op. cit., p. 17.

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62 Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books, 1988, p. 22. Note that in her work, Shiva drew on other feminist critics of instrumental science, such as Sandra Harding, Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Fox Keller, creating an epistemic community of affinity as central to ecofeminism. 63 Sheila Jasanoff, States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, edited by S. Jasanoff, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 258. Jasanoff also says (p. 5) ‘As an interpretive framework, co-production begs for illustration rather than proof ’. 64 We saw this in detail in the first chapter of this volume. 65 Though it is not my intention to trace the affinities between the work of Brassil and that of Agnes Denes in any detail here, it is important to note Denes’s long term project on dust: published in her Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter, Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1989. The book brings a body of Denes’s ‘visual philosophy’ and environmental arts activism from the 1970s and 1980s together, linking ‘human dust’ with other dust, from the noble gases,‘happy dusts’ (hallucinogens), and poison, to medicines, nuclear ash, cosmic dust and the dust from the deaths of stars. 66 This is the most accessible definition of the Calabi-Yau manifold that I have found: www. quora.com/What-is-a-Calabi-Yau-manifold. On a related tangential note, Karen Barad has explored the ‘infinite alterity of the self ’ using quantum field theory (QFT) in ways resonant with Hoffmann’s work: ‘Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2–3, June 2015, pp. 387–422. 67 Joanna Hoffmann-Dietrich,‘Hidden Topology of Life: Life and Space’, ISEA 2013 Sydney, reprinted in Strona, pp. 1–4; available as a pdf on Hoffmann’s website: www.johoffmann. com. Hoffmann is a Professor at the University of Art in Poznan, Poland, where she is engaged in a number of interdisciplinary arts and sciences projects and research groups. 68 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 69 Cf. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010; Jinthana Haritawarn, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places, London: Pluto Press, 2015; Kim TallBear, ‘An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human’, in ‘Dossier: Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2–3, 2015, pp. 230–5. 70 Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, op. cit., pp. 62–80. 71 The kinds of kinship envisaged here do not rely on blood ties, but rather, denizen solidarities, made across and between conventional notions of ‘lineage’. They are in keeping with Donna Haraway’s invocation of the ‘coyote’ in her early work (see Chapter 1) and her extraordinary figurations of ‘oddkin’ in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016. 72 Yuval-Davis, ‘Dialogical Epistemology: An Intersectional Resistance to the “Oppression Olympics”’, Gender and Society, 26:1 (Patricia Hill Collins Symposium Issue), February 2012, pp. 46–54. 73 For more on the political potential of a post-identitarian subject, see Moya Lloyd, Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005. Lloyd also glosses the significance of affinity as a mechanism for coalition-building. 74 Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, op. cit., p. 82. 75 I have elsewhere written about this work in the context of non-linear time, Terra Nullius and the potential of art as a decolonizing practice. See Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, chapter 9. 76 This important differentiation between the cosmos and the global is one that I would attribute to Nikos Papastergiadis; see, for a brief exposition: www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ ias/conversations/ 77 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. This volume is part of a collective cultural anthropology project that writes ethnography otherwise – in many

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voices, as a co-production of knowledge through dialogue, in varied print and online genres (see www.matsutakeworlds.org). It is, for the mushroom it uses as a lynch pin in its investigation, an exemplary mode of ecological thinking. 78 See the online archive for Art Laboratory Berlin: www.artlaboratory-berlin.org/html/ eng-Mind-the-Fungi.htm. 79 I was delighted to find someone else thinking about fungi when Elspeth Mitchell and Lenka Vráblíková delivered their wonderful paper on taking strike action against casualization, developing alternative feminist pedagogies and mushroom-hunting in ‘Out of Office: Working Feminist Spaces in Troubled Times’ at a session of the annual conference of the Association for Art History that I co-convened with my colleague Hilary Robinson. 80 Brassil, The Poetic Vision, op. cit., p. 29.

4 SEXUAL VIOLENCE, STRUCTURAL SILENCE AND TRANSVERSAL SOLIDARITY

#Hearmetoo1: intersectional subjects, affective solidarities Indeed, women’s lives rest upon a continuum of danger. This does not mean that all women occupy the same position in relation to safety and violence. Many other features of their lives, such as class, race, sexual orientation, physical abilities, or direct experience with serious violence, will mean that their circumstances differ.2

In 1982, the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, published its 15th issue under the rubric ‘Racism is the Issue’. An article entitled ‘Race? Sex? Class? Prejudice in the Workplace’, ran over three pages of the issue (pages 24–26). The article was comprised of excerpts from oral-history workshops held with members of District 1199 of the New York Health and Human Services Union.3 As the start of the article makes clear, the members of District 1199 were ‘primarily Black, Hispanic and female’.4 In the article, union members described the everyday incidents of racism, sexism and class discrimination that they experienced while working as housekeepers, social workers, technicians, nurses and kitchen staff in hospitals and care facilities in New York. Though the individual instances of discrimination faced by the members of District 1199 were nuanced by differences of class, race, educational and economic level, the ubiquity of these everyday experiences clearly delineated ‘a continuum of danger’ recognizable to women from across a wide spectrum of social and cultural positions. The last words of the article are a poignant reminder of the importance of solidarity in resisting the divisive logic of discrimination: ‘It’s all there just to divide us, objectively speaking. That’s what it’s there for and that’s what it does’. These fnal lines fall as a full stop at the bottom of the article’s third page (verso, page 26), but a small, illustrated motif of a medicine bottle at the top of the page extends just slightly into the crease that meets the left-hand corner of the next page (recto, page 27), indicating a link between the article and the journal’s following page. On this page appeared the text-image work Untitled (1982) by Lorna Simpson.

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Lorna Simpson, Untitled, in ‘Racism is the Issue’, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, issue 15, 1982.

FIGURE 4.1

Reproduced by kind permission of a representative of the Heresies collective.

Visually, Simpson’s piece acts as the end of a second double-page spread, a creative counterpart to the accounts of the Members of 1199.5 This is a ftting space for Simpson’s work in more ways than one. Untitled, as it appeared in Heresies, was a remediated version of a mixed media work that Simpson had installed in a group show earlier that year entitled Working Women, Working Artists, Working Together. That show was, like the oral-history project from which the Heresies article came, one of the creative collaborations organized through the Bread and Roses6 programme run by District 1199.

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Working Women, Working Artists, Working Together, co-organized by Lucy Lippard and Candace Hill-Montgomery,7 used the process of making art collaboratively to facilitate dialogues, and to create solidarities, between the participants in the project as working women, without occluding signifcant differences, particularly of race, class and immigration status, within the group. Working together across a range of media (installation, flm, storytelling, performance), the artists and the participating members of 1199 discovered deep affnities in their perspectives on issues facing working women – from wages, household labour and childcare, to sex work and sexual violence. Simpson’s work for the show was a ‘fabric sculpture’ comprised of a woman’s dress on a hanger, a slip, some lace, an opened portable photo-frame, and, attached along the length of the dress, delicate strips of paper on which a poignant narrative text unfolded a tale of migrant labour, economic precarity, sexual and racial violence, public silence and private solidarities forged between women. In their joint review of the show for Woman’s Art Journal in 1982, Lippard and Hill-Montgomery described the work and indicated that a personal narrative lay at its heart: Lorna Simpson’s tender memoir of her relationship with Irene Silva, a domestic worker her own age, far from home and in need of support and friendship, took the form of a fabric sculpture, a lacy, delicately textured dress with a poetic text that is its verbal counterpart.8 In Heresies, the fabric sculpture has been transformed into a photograph and its verbal counterpart has been reprinted at the side of the image to ensure its legibility. In the caption, Simpson shared credits for the piece with ‘Irene and Rejendra’ as well as acknowledging the artist who produced the photograph, Jerry Kearns, whom Simpson met while an intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Simpson’s Untitled sits at the nexus of a range of transversal dialogues with/in difference: the remembered personal dialogue between Simpson and Silva, extended in dialogue with Rejendra while making the work, the dialogues between the women heath care workers of District 1199 and the women art workers who collaborated in the Bread and Roses event, and the dialogues between white and women of colour feminists that constituted the complex and sometimes agonistic journey toward the publication of issue 15 of Heresies. Arguably, these immediate dialogues converse more broadly with transnational feminisms, transversal politics and the arts where these converge in the struggle to end sex and gender-based violence by forging cross-cultural and affective feminist solidarities. Sexual violence is the litmus test of transnational feminist solidarity-building, situated, as it is, both as a ‘universal’ structural continuum that underpins social, economic and ecological injustice globally, and, as highly specifc acts of personal violence manifest in widely disparate ‘local’ forms. In other words, the imbrication of the global with the intimate9 is nowhere more brutally evident than in the case of sexual violence, and for transnational feminists seeking to end such violence, articulating the particularities of the intersectional scaffolding10 that supports a worldwide pattern of sex and gender-based injustice and inequality is imperative.

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Transnational feminist campaigns to end violence against women and girls commonly deploy multidimensional strategies that support and maintain struggles undertaken locally through solidarities forged nationally, inter/transnationally and globally. Likewise, transnational feminist thought eschews top-down master theories of oppression in favour of examining critically the multiple, discrete and overlapping experiences that constitute situated and intersectional forms of domination.11 This is especially important in the case of sexual violence where the pressure upon survivors to remain silent is still widespread and those who do speak out can fnd themselves unheard, disbelieved or even subject to further violence. Hearing, and believing the voices of survivors in their specifcity is not an optional extra in transnational feminist solidarity-building; it is an imperative frst step. And in the struggle to end sexual violence, the importance of solidarity networks that operate within and across geopolitical borders can hardly be over-emphasized.12 To begin to unpack the dynamic interrelationships between the global and the intimate that enable transnational feminist solidarities to be forged in and through transversal dialogues – practices of hearing and believing that cut across difference – it is useful here to explore in greater detail Simpson’s Untitled in Heresies 15. The tale recounted in the work is simple, yet powerful, intimate in its detail and global in its reach. In frst-person, Simpson tells of the bond she forged with a young migrant maid employed by a family whom the artist was visiting. One evening, the maid arrived late to the house with ‘scratches on her breasts and above her eye, which was swollen’. In a few deftly drawn lines of text we understand precisely what has happened: this was not her fault. She should feel anger and want to kill. Between our silences we knew why this had happened: our skin considered ‘exotic’, targeted for brutal fantasies in cultures that interpret us as an orifice to be filled with nightmare.13 The lines being drawn by the tale place this instance of sexual assault within a wider scaffolding, the scaffolding of a rape culture defned by an intrinsic and constitutive intersectionality, enforced through a conspiracy of silence. The sexual violence materialized in Untitled reinforces the structural subordination of the young maid as a woman, as an economically dependent migrant, and as a racial other, at once. The work is premised upon interconnected relationships between multiple levels of ‘organizational, intersubjective, experiential and representational’14 oppression made manifest by this one intimate, and yet universal, tale. The silence that ensues is also structural; the maid and the artist are ‘strangers in a foreign land’, linguistically, as well as culturally, separated. The family resist having to hear from their young employee, inviting her to ‘calm herself ’ by watching a TV comedy with them, rather than to speak. But more to the point:‘There is no one to call in the face of such an emergency’.15 Signifcantly, Untitled is not just a narrative text, but also a scripto-visual artwork in which relationships drawn between the text and the image are critical to its potential to engage diverse viewer/readers in and through aesthetic forms

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of meaning production. The dress is neither silent, nor does it communicate in words; its registers are haptic, corporeal and affective. This is an ordinary printed dress, under which is a plain silk slip. It is the sort of dress that a young woman working far from home could afford and might wear on a daily basis. The dress is soft, malleable and dishevelled; it has been handled. Crucially, in a culture bent on victim-blaming, the dress and slip are instantly recognizable as ‘modest’.16 But more than this, arguably, Untitled engenders a form of responsive and corporeally engaged reading and viewing that connects the global with the intimate by bringing viewer/readers up close to the subject of the tale being unfolded through the work. Clearly, given the scale of the written narrative on the strips of paper attached to the dress, this proximity would have been literal in the space of the gallery – the text could only have been read by viewers standing close to the dress, thus risking already an embodied relationship with the work and its story. In Heresies, the reader’s proximity is again engendered by scale, the scale of the page being read (its pages turned by hand), and the intimate haptic visuality of the photographic image. Looking at the detail of the pattern on the fabric, the decoration on the picture frame, the folds and waves at the hem of the skirt and the slip, we are brought into a material relationship with this thin, soft dress – we know how it feels. Our bodies are called upon in understanding this work, and thus, arguably, the very strategies that provoke an aesthetic response open the possibility of an ethical one. The tale that unfolds in Untitled does not end solely with violence and silence, but with the possibility of embodied solidarities forged between diverse women. Simpson’s tale pivots on holding the maid who needed ‘closeness, to be embraced, to feel protected’. The words, ‘I wanted to hold her longer’ appear twice in the text, at the end and, critically, in an earlier line that makes clear that the unvoiced story of the assault has been heard and believed.17 And it is here that the work of art, as a visual, visceral and affective form of materializing meaning, imaginatively entangles viewer/readers within the frame of the tale being told, rather than facilitating them in maintaining a disembodied distance from it. The imaginative tactility at the heart of the work forges solidarities across distances of language, culture and economic level; the work brings viewer/readers close enough to touch and be touched. This has signifcant ramifcations. As we follow Simpson’s visual and narrative lead, we are brought closer to the experience of an/other, or as Seyla Benhabib would say, we move from the ‘generalized to the concrete other’.18 For Benhabib, this difference is critical to ethics, as only concrete others, realized and recognized in their difference, generate ethical responsibility, care and the possibility of justice; only concrete others can be heard. Generalized others, by contrast, provide a screen onto which meanings are projected from outside. Simpson’s Untitled was made in dialogue with Irene and Rejendra, not about them. These transversal dialogues are important to the work, as is the fact that we are not offered a ‘body’ visually (as evidence, as object) onto which to project further, epistemic, violence.19 Instead, the work brings viewer/readers into a concrete conversation with others for whom we bear ethical responsibility20 and with whom we can form affective solidarities, through love, care and generosity.

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The role of art in forging political solidarities was of central signifcance to the two primary organizations whose activities led to the production of Untitled in both its sculptural and scripto-visual versions in 1982 – the Bread and Roses programme of District 1199 and the Heresies collective. District 1199 has an established track record of both national and international-level organizing focused upon connecting trade unionism with other campaigns for social and economic justice. In particular, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, its members were engaged actively in struggles for civil rights (Martin Luther King and later, Coretta Scott King, both had links with District 1199), as well as feminist and anti-war activism.21 The arts consistently played an important role in its organizing and in later educational campaigns, for example, to recognize the signifcance of women of colour in the political history of the United States.22 Indeed, in many senses, it is hardly surprising that the Bread and Roses programme brought members of District 1199 together with feminist activist artists similarly committed to national and international struggles against racism, sexism, militarism, environmental and economic injustice. Likewise, the history of Heresies is a case study in the diffcult, but dedicated practices of dialogue required by feminist solidarity building, and in the development of the arts as a feminist activist platform. It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide a history of the Heresies collective or the publication,23 but a few particular points about Issue 15, the signifcance of creative feminist journals, and the feminist bookstore movement, in the context of a developing transnational feminist dialogue and campaigns to end sexual violence on a global scale are signifcant here. Issue 15 opens with a statement from the editorial team taken from a taped conversation charting the development of the issue. The conversation is full and frank; some members refer back to issue 8 (Third World Women), voicing concerns raised at that time that the Heresies collective were white, racist feminists. Others are vocal in their insistence that terms such as ‘ethnocentrism’ have come to the fore to occlude the realities of racism, and that US-based feminisms have yet to engage fully with the legacies of American exceptionalism. The discussions, dialogues and debates that forged Issue 15 were, clearly, not easy, and aspects of the production caused tension and disagreements to emerge between the editors. But such a commitment to solidarity-building in and through difference is never easy.24 What Heresies effected through this volume, and others dedicated to contentious and emotionally charged questions such as ecological destruction (issue 13) and women and violence (issue 6), was to open a space in which a feminist epistemic community could form. Heresies was not alone in providing such a space and many feminist publications that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s took the risk of articulating differences between women, becoming important sites for early explorations in transnational feminist theory as well as feminist interventions into the arts. Particularly in the work of lesbian and queer feminists, and feminists of colour, well-defned transnational feminist political perspectives were frequently accompanied by substantive discussions of genre and media, demonstrating the integral relationships drawn at this time between feminist political transformation, creativity and the arts.25

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The feminist bookstore movement took this a step further by creating important institutional networks between feminist scholars, writers and readers at a truly global scale. In her ground-breaking study, Kristen Hogan traced the emergence of a fully transnational network of bookstores (and ‘bookwomen’) through the circulation of the Feminist Bookstores Newsletter, biannual international conferences and particular creative intellectual practices, such as what she calls the ‘feminist shelf ’.26 The feminist shelf describes a number of linked practices undertaken by ‘bookwomen’ through which they mapped a wide range of global feminist discourse and debate by means of the intimate activities of maintaining the stores as vibrant and vital spaces of connection for readers. Practices as quotidian as regularly rearranging the books on the shelves, renaming sections of the stores, drawing hard-copy maps for customers to use in browsing, and creating sectioned and annotated bibliographies that were circulated in newsletters and leafets, continually created new thematic and intellectual affnities between the books, their ideas and their readers. Though not a bookstore, arguably Heresies participated in this culture of the feminist shelf, graphically creating a burgeoning transnational network of connections within its pages and consistently including reading lists and creative bibliographies in its issues. Simpson came of age as an artist in this milieu, and her work found its frst home within an extended, race-critical feminist epistemic community in which ideas pivotal to transnational feminisms and the arts were widely deployed and debated.27 Untitled operated within the affective economies28 created by these interlinked contexts and, as I have been suggesting throughout this discussion, created the conditions for viewer/readers to forge affective solidarities29 across conventional social, economic and cultural lines. Such solidarities underpin the transversal politics of transnational feminisms, enabling voices to be heard and silences, at last, to be broken.

Silence breakers30: imagination and international justice Viewed together, these explorations show gender, war and militarism as conceptually interdependent, empirically international, intrinsically intersectional, and in need of academically interdisciplinary analysis.31

In the summer of 2015, Alketa Xhafa Mripa’s community activist art project, Thinking of you32 opened in a football stadium in Prishtina, Kosova.33 The scale of the work was striking; strung on dozens of clotheslines suspended over the length and breadth of the football pitch were thousands of dresses and skirts donated by women and men from across Kosova and, as news of the project spread, internationally. Each item of clothing was brought by, or in memory of, a woman who had experienced rape during the Kosovan War of 1998–9. Each piece of clothing brought to the work came with a story; collectively, the project broke the conspiracy of silence that had for more than a decade surrounded the sexual violence that was an intrinsic part of the Kosovan confict. That an activist art project was able to play a signifcant role in breaking this silence by providing a space in which to hold some

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Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Art installation Thinking of you, 2015.

Photograph by Jetmir Idrizi. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

of the diffcult and painful conversations needed to rebuild a sense of community, attests again to the vital role of imagination and creativity in transnational feminist work to end sexual violence. The impetus for Thinking of you came from a TV interview that Xhafa Mripa saw in 2013. In the interview, a woman testifed both to her experience of sexual assault during the Kosovan War and to her subsequent silence, borne of personal shame and the potential social stigma that her rape might bring to her family. Signifcantly, the testimony of the woman who broke her silence was heard by Xhafa Mripa and she was compelled to respond: I knew she was not alone. . . . I knew I needed to act. I wanted these women to break their silence. I wanted to fight the stigma. I wanted them to know:‘I am “Thinking of you” – you are not alone’.34 Xhafa Mripa here describes an ethical call and response, a moment in which volition is compelled by hearing the voice of the other: response-ability demands responsibility.35 Crucially, in Thinking of you the response was the development of a collaborative activist art project designed to further break silence, foster transversal dialogue and create communities in solidarity with survivors – ‘you are not alone’.36 The collaborative, dialogic nature of the work was not an afterthought, but integral to its potential to generate meaning. The work did not speak for or represent generalized others, but rather, opened a space in which the experiences of many, differently situated and concrete others could be articulated and heard.

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Understanding that the corrosive structural silence surrounding the deployment of rape and other forms of sexual violence in warfare extends beyond victims and survivors to engulf, and often destroy, families, kinship networks and communities as a whole, Thinking of you was designed as an inclusive space in which both survivors and those wishing to remember a victim or survivor, could come together in offering an item of clothing. Explicitly, this included men, as Xhafa Mripa wrote:37 I wanted to bring this issue into the man’s world, to a public place . . . . No longer would the voices be hidden behind a curtain. Across Kosova, men and women, young and old, came forward to donate a skirt. . . . By making everyone part of the installation, by the very act of going to each city and collecting the skirts, the piece took on a life of its own. It became a journey of listening to the stories from all over Kosova.38 Creating transversal dialogues between survivors and loved ones, women and men, is a powerful riposte to the devastating legacy of sexual violence mobilized in warfare as a tool for community destruction and ‘ethnic cleansing’. Extreme violence and trauma, compounded by shame, stigma and silence, creates a destructive momentum that begets further violence and unravels ethical and social bonds. Women and children suffer most from these repetitive patterns of aggressive, militarized masculinity

Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Participants donating clothes for the art installation Thinking of you, 2015.

FIGURE 4.3

Photograph by Jetmir Idrizi. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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and sexualized violence.39 The Bosnian and Kosovan Wars that erupted during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia are a particularly poignant instance of this cycle of brutality and, along with the confict in Rwanda in 1994, were central to the frst formal recognition of rape as a war crime in international law.40 Pivotal to the ruling made in 2001 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were the testimonies of survivors who broke their silence. While the recognition of rape as a war crime is a major victory for transnational feminist campaigns against global sexual violence, Thinking of you attests to the fact that effecting a change in the cultural imaginary can take longer than prosecuting a legal case, even at international level. It also requires a different dynamic. In 2013, when the work was begun, women and men in Kosova were still not openly speaking of the experience of survivors, more than a decade after the legal recognition had been won. Participating, actively, in the process of making Thinking of you, created a much-needed space in which to remember, mourn, and honour victims and survivors at a personal level; when realized as a full-scale installation in Prishtina, the work became a site for public debate and recognition that moved the intimate frmly into the global political arena.41 Thinking of you is not the only feminist activist artwork to seek to place the issue of rape in warfare on the international agenda.42 Since the 1990s, Yoshiko Shimada has been making work focused on the forced sex slavery, principally of abducted Korean girls, practiced in Japanese military brothels of the Second World War.43 The so-called ‘Korean comfort women’ continue to be the subject of activist artworks, particularly the Statues of Peace, famously located opposite the Japanese embassy in Seoul and in cities in the United States with large Asian populations. More recently, New York based artist, Chang-Jin Lee, has documented the wider, pan-Asian context of the survivors of Japan’s military sex slavery in her project Comfort Women Wanted (since 2007).44 Raising the issue of Japanese sexual slavery during the Second World War at this point is neither a non sequitur, nor an attempt to draw a crude, general comparison between any or all acts of sexual violence in war and military confict. Rather, it permits a number of important points to be made concerning the historical development of transnational feminist activist networks against sexual violence and the signifcance within such campaigns of creating spaces in which the experiences of survivors could be shared. The prominence of contemporary feminist networks focused on ending violence against women and girls worldwide might make it seem that this has always provided a focal point for transnational feminist activism, but that is not the case. It was during the 1980s that a number of earlier, disparate, but powerful, local and regional campaigns began to consolidate as a worldwide strategy against sex and gender-based violence. In particular, European and North American activism focused on domestic violence and rape, Latin American feminists’ struggles to end the rape and torture of political prisoners, and East Asian activism focused on sexual slavery in Japanese military brothels (the ‘comfort women’) were central to the development of a global platform for feminist networking and activism.45 Quickly

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linking to South Asian campaigns around dowry-deaths and widow-burning, and African women’s work to stop genital mutilation and the ‘corrective rape’46 of lesbians, the transnational feminist platform on ending all forms of violence against women and girls spread like wildfre, becoming by the time of the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995,‘the most important international women’s issue’ and ‘common advocacy position’.47 As a platform for collective action, the defnition of violence against women and girls is broad and inclusive, but central to it are the voices of survivors. In breaking the stranglehold of shame, stigma, fear and silence, their shared, heard and believed testimony, enables cross-cultural affnities and global commonalities to emerge across and between specifc instances and intimate personal narratives.48 Creating platforms for sharing these experiences is central to transnational feminist solidarity-building against sexual violence and, importantly, this imaginative and affective work brings with it real, material change. The local ‘comfort women’ campaigns reached international audiences through feminist networking, publications and activist art and, arguably, the pressure this inspired from the international community has been critical to the few concessions and reparations made by the Japanese government to date. As evidenced by the attention of the international press, the message conveyed by Thinking of you was similarly resonant beyond its immediate context. Arguably, its ability to speak as eloquently at the global level as it had at the local, was a consequence of its work as art, its materialization of meaning through corporeally affective strategies. Like Simpson’s Untitled (1982), the work made use of the most quotidian materials – dresses and skirts – to materialize its tale. These familiar objects bear the traces of those who have worn them, and each skirt or dress was brought to the installation by the hand of someone touched by violence. Row upon row, dress upon dress, hand upon hand, the fesh of the fabric enables us to engage viscerally with the scale of otherwise incomprehensible events by drawing affnities between our bodies and the material traces of so many others. Thinking of you connects the global and the intimate in a public gesture of transnational feminist solidarity that emerges through and with the embodied presence of concrete others.49 This is especially important in the context of sexual violence where both genuine and sensationalized concern can override the interests of survivors in the production of ‘saviour’ and/or salacious narratives from outside.50 To hear the call for justice raised by the silence breakers does not require us to dissect every detail of their stories; indeed, Thinking of you protected the narratives that had been shared in the intimacy of the collaborative production of the work. In the act of giving and hanging their dresses and skirts, the survivors of a seemingly unspeakable violence, and a community touched by their experience, came together to break the silence in their own terms. Their bodies and testimonies were not laid bare to the world; rather, the overwhelming evidence of their experience was made palpable in the waves of coloured fabric that swept across the grass as the thousands of skirts and dresses ebbed and fowed as one in the swell of a Kosovan summer breeze [Colour plate 14].

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Witnessing to silence51: listening and responding Thus an epistemology capable of engaging with particularity will unsettle the epistemic subject, require him and now her (for the generic self dissolves) to come out of the shadows, to engage in ways that put her/his subjectivity also on the line, and to assume responsibility for what and how he/she claims to know.52

On 25 November 2015, the Plaza Belmonte, an open-air theatre and bullring in the city of Quito, Ecuador, became the site of a participatory performance work, De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand), conceived and convened by Suzanne Lacy in collaboration with a large and diverse range of individuals, civic agencies, local, national and international partners.53 The performance was striking in its scope and scale; some 1500 people gathered in the venue to listen to letters read aloud by more than 300 participant-performers, most of whom were local men, including police offcers and other city offcials. Accompanied by Quito’s city band, the frst three Acts of the piece took place within the ring, where the assembled performers spoke the words of local women and girls taken from thousands54 of hand-written letters; the letters recounted the everyday brutality of the women’s experiences of sexual and domestic violence. In dynamic shifts of volume and emphasis, the letters of the frst three Acts were read, in turns, individually, with each word and infection audible, and simultaneously, such that the collective voices in the space rose to a veritable cacophony in the space. As dusk fell, the fourth and fnal Act commenced with the readers moving into the audience. Accompanied by Mediators, the men approached small groups

FIGURE 4.4

Suzanne Lacy, still from the performance De tu Puño y Letra, 2014–15.

Photograph by Christoph Hirtz. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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of people to ask whether they might read them a letter. In these intimate, candle-lit reading groups, each letter’s tale became the nexus of a dialogue, opening a space through which to articulate and negotiate individual and cultural understandings of sexual violence. The letters from which the words of the performance in the Plaza Belmonte were drawn, came from the Cartas de Mujeres, a multi-agency, activist campaign launched in Quito four years earlier, also on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.55 As a transnational feminist development campaign, Cartas de Mujeres was a joint effort between UN Women, the City of Quito and the German Agency for International Cooperation (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)) in Ecuador, facilitated with the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito. Within its frst year, the project’s writing workshops in malls, community centres and other public spaces in and around Quito had generated thousands of letters; by 2012, Cartas de Mujeres had extended to Guayakil, also in Ecuador, and Lima, Peru. Signifcantly, a GIZ document from 2013 described the campaign’s successes in terms of the personal lives of survivors, the development of public policy and the possibility of transforming the future by ‘breaking the cycle of violence’.56 Arguably, breaking this cycle of violence was also central to Lacy’s engagement with the project in Quito. In a telling description of the project, Lacy drew vital connections between the political potential of the project and its underlying aesthetic and methodological concerns. De tu Puño y Letra is: a form of Social, Public, Practice Art that combines various expressive media and artistic explorations with concrete actions; that engages with broad partnerships inside and outside the arts; and one that addresses substantial matters of public importance as defined through a participatory methodology. Surely one of the most important, and visible global issues of our times is that of violence against women and children.57 Taking De tu Puño y Letra as the fnal case study in this chapter brings its arguments full circle. The work reiterates the continuum of violence that characterizes the experiences of women and children throughout the world, along with the intersectional dynamics of analysis that any transnational feminist action against such violence requires. It further emphasizes the power of speaking, and being heard, in creating feminist solidarities to counteract the conspiracy of silence that upholds the continuum of violence. It demonstrates the profound imbrication of the intimate with/in the global, and unravels the binary logic that would oppose the personal and the political. In short, it is an exemplary instance of mapping transnational feminist thought and activism with/in a transversal politics of art. Critical to the argument being pursued here, however, is that De tu Puño y Letra, does more than simply represent the global issue of sexual violence or demonstrate the political commitment of Lacy and her collaborators. Returning to the comments of Lorraine Code with which this section opened, I am arguing more strongly that De tu Puño y Letra materializes the potential of the arts to create

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the kind of ‘epistemology capable of engaging with particularity’ that can so profoundly ‘unsettle the epistemic subject’ that they must put their subjectivity ‘on the line, and . . . assume responsibility for what and how he/she claims to know’. Attending more closely to the means by which De tu Puño y Letra enabled differently situated subjects to explore, dialogically, what, how, and from where, they had come to know and make sense of the continuum of sexual violence underpinning their collective experience of the world, is pivotal to this argument. It is also imperative in recognizing the contribution of the work, as art, to the transformative politics of transnational feminisms. When Lacy arrived in Quito in 2014, there was already an active transnational feminist development partnership working with individuals and agencies locally and nationally to tackle the widespread problem of sexual and domestic violence, as demonstrated by the public interventions facilitated by the Cartas de Mujeres campaign. De tu Puño y Letra was developed in partnership with this ongoing work, and extended its reach by creating new links with international arts organizations and other civic agencies. Lacy’s extensive experience, over many years of working successfully, and ethically, with communities has enabled her to develop and articulate with great eloquence, a sensitive and highly nuanced participatory methodology which focuses on working with, rather than displacing, existing local networks.58 This is important for a number of reasons, most obviously because it enables the establishment of a strong local infrastructure capable of maintaining momentum over a sustained period of time – a necessary perquisite to producing long-lasting change. In addition, Lacy’s engagement with/in diverse communities through dialogue and partnership ensures that her authorship is not constituted in such a way as to commit a further act of epistemic violence by imposing a ‘master’ narrative from above. As a white, US-based feminist artist, coming to the Global South to work with victims and survivors of sexual violence, Lacy’s non-dominative methodology was particularly critical to the ethical substance of De tu Puño y Letra. Indeed, an important aspect of the work’s transformative potential hinges on the project’s methodology and the fact that Lacy, and other project partners from wealthier, and more ‘secure’, nations, put their ‘subjectivity on the line’ and assumed responsibility for what and how they claimed to know. Lacy’s self-refective, dialogic methodology thus explicitly distributes authorship,59 empowers partners, creates epistemic communities and builds relationships through the processes of co-designing and co-producing multifaceted activist art interventions. It also brings critical pedagogies and education to the fore. De tu Puño y Letra was underpinned by educational initiatives, including the implementation of a curriculum on family violence within the Universidad de Las Américas (UDLA) Medical School, and a range of community workshops, through which participants both explored their own relationships to sexual violence and, gradually gaining in confdence, came to play key roles within the co-design of the performance. The transversal dialogues at the heart of Lacy’s methodology thus forged the work both as a specifc intervention into local gendered dynamics, and as a transnational work of ‘Social, Public, Practice Art’, at once. Entwining the intimate with/

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in the global, the knowledges produced by the work are not disembodied, master discourses, but entangled epistemologies capable of engaging with particularity and enabling diverse and situated perspectives to be voiced and heard. If the methodological framework of De tu Puño y Letra was bound to its social, ethical and political effcacy, so too were its aesthetic strategies profoundly entwined with its potential to unsettle the epistemic scaffolding of sexual violence and transform the cultural imaginary.60 From the outset, Lacy shared with her partners from the Cartas de Mujeres campaign two aims: to raise public awareness of the present extent of violence against women and children, and to change cultural norms and attitudes for the future.61 Coming to Quito three years after the campaign had begun, Lacy saw the thousands of hand-written letters as ‘an unanswered plea for action’,62 a call without, as yet, a response. In an important sense, the aesthetic strategies deployed by De tu Puño y Letra were designed to generate that absent response, to facilitate forms of listening that could, and would, compel action. Arguably, it was here that Lacy’s extensive experience of convening major public art projects using dynamic modes of aesthetic participation to materialize feminist solidarities across difference truly came into its own. As Lucia Fabio so astutely observed, ‘Following her activist work around violence against women in the 1970s, Lacy shifted her focus to amplifying women’s individual stories and lived experiences in increasingly complex performances’.63 In De tu Puño y Letra, Lacy amplifed the voices of the women who, by their own hand, attested to the brutality they had experienced at the hands of others. Over four Acts, the sound of their words rose and fell through the embodied voices of the performers in the ring; the tales testifed both to the quotidian continuum of the violence they had experienced, and to the many occasions on which it spiralled into unimaginable horror. Solitary and collective voices amplifed the affnities between and across each letter’s tale, transforming the unspeakable into the spoken, and breaking the structural silence that naturalizes sexual violence such that its ordinary everydayness renders it unheard and invisible. But that is not all. De tu Puño y Letra provided the possibility to hear, believe and respond to the call sounded by the letters by materializing a number of different modes of listening within the space of the performance.64 There is the attentive, yet public, listening that occurs as particular letters are read aloud, in solo voice, to all participants in the space. Listening in this mode interpellates members of the audience as witnesses or bystanders; hearing the call, listeners may believe and respond, or turn away. This contrasts with the sonic swell that engulfs listeners as many voices are raised to read letters in unison. With so many voices breaking the silence in the public space of the Plaza Belmonte, it becomes diffcult to turn away from the weight of the collective testimony, or fail to believe that these events have happened. Both strategies amplify the public, political and global implications of each personal story, and every intimate tale contributes its particular timbre to the continuum of brutality that comprises global sexual violence. However, the experience of hearing the weight of this testimony in the open performance space of the ring verges on the unbearable; like the innumerable

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images of suffering refugees and victims of global confict, famine or disease that circulate with alarming regularity in contemporary media, it is possible to know, in the abstract, that events are happening, without answering their implicit plea for action. The fnal Act of the performance offered a different listening space, as readers and mediators spoke and listened with small groups in the audience. The spaces created by this action were less ‘public’ and more intimate; readers and mediators requested permission to join members of the audience in their spaces, where, by candlelight, the words of the letters became part of a shared conversation between readers, mediators and audience members, who both listened and spoke in return. In the affective consonance generated between readers and listeners invited to hear and respond, an active form of embodied listening65 created the possibility for a safe space of responsibility and situated solidarity to emerge. This third form of listening – an active, dialogic, kinaesthetic listening – brings the political back to the personal in the performance in such a way as to reconnect knowing with believing, response-ability with responsibility. I would argue that it shares important qualities with what Code has called ‘good listening’: Good listening is often as tactile, and visual, as it is auditory; thus neither disembodied nor closed to affect, and neither purely objective nor perfectly rational. . . . In creating palpably safe discursive spaces, it invites and honors trust; and it opens the way for (reconfigured) modes of knowing.66

FIGURE 4.5

Suzanne Lacy, still from the performance De tu Puño y Letra, 2014–15.

Photograph by Christoph Hirtz. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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Good listening is fully sensory; it is aesthetic and corporeal, situated and responsive. It is also vulnerable, it takes risks, it puts subjectivity ‘on the line’ and it makes each and all of us responsible for what, how and from where we know, imagine and act in the world. Good listening is pivotal to hearing, believing and answering the call of the silence breakers. De tu Puño y Letra constructed speaking, listening and hearing in visual, spatial and bodily encounters that brought diverse individuals and groups together in partnership, dialogue and solidarity. From public testimony to intimate responses in safe discursive spaces, the voices of the women who wrote the Cartas de Mujeres came to belong to each and to all of the participant/listeners in the work. This brings us to a fnal point concerning a very different form of structural silence. In her pivotal work on the cultural scaffolding of sexual violence worldwide, Nicola Gavey made the salient point that the future will continue to replicate the past lest we develop effective ways to ‘recodify’ constructions of gender and sexuality away from the continuum of violence that so dominates the ‘popular imagination’.67 Changing the cultural imaginary and breaking the cycle of violence are neither abstract nor disembodied activities, and both depend upon silence breaking and solidarity building. However, responsibility for breaking the silence and building transversal solidarities does not belong solely to women, despite the disproportionate effects of sexual violence on women and girls worldwide. It is not just the silence of shame and stigma carried by survivors that enables sexual violence to continue, but also the corrosive silence of complicity: The men who rape and violate women count on other men’s solidarity; they expect men [who do not participate] to keep quiet. This is what is missing, the positive male role models who will stand next to women to address the issue of violence in society and violence against women.68 The participant performers of De tu Puño y Letra, standing in the ring to raise their voices in solidarity with the women whose handwritten letters they read aloud, were almost exclusively male [Colour plate 15].69 Through the project, these men had come together to participate in a number of workshops on masculinity and violence,70 and each had ‘adopted’ an anonymous letter from the Cartas de Mujeres. Over months of shared discussion, dialogue and attentive listening to the words of the survivors, the participants put their unmarked, masculine-normative subject positions ‘on the line’ and took responsibility for the letters, the women who wrote them, and transforming the future. This is an active and ethically motivated listening, along the lines described by Deborah Bird Rose in her work on trans-species responsibility:‘I am proposing that listening, and more broadly, paying attention, should also be considered as an active verb. . . . To pay attention is to exercise intelligence, to know so as to be able to interact’.71 The men reading the letters learned how to listen attentively, how to know otherwise and how to stand in solidarity with victims and survivors to break the silence and bear witness, in their bodies, in their mouths, and by their own hands – to a future where the fst will be stopped by the letter.

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Effecting transformative changes in the material-discursive and imaginative constitution of gender and sexuality, transnational feminisms must engage with the toxic links that currently intertwine men, masculinities and violence. This is not easy; it moves beyond preaching to the converted and sounds a clarion call to each and to all to put our subjectivities on the line and respond. In responding to the Cartas de Mujeres by situating men and masculinities centrally within a transnational feminist campaign against sexual violence, De tu Puño y Letra heard and answered the voices of survivors, raised awareness and built truly multidimensional solidarities through transversal dialogues. In so doing, Lacy’s collaborative social and public practice provided a profound demonstration of the potential of transnational feminist thought and activism, materialized through the arts, to open the possibility to know, imagine and transform the world, together, by our own hands.

Notes 1 This is the hashtag for the UN Secretary General’s campaign from 2018, UNiTE to End Violence Against Women: www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2018/11/mediaadvisory-orange-the-world-hearmetoo. 2 Elizabeth Anne Stanko,‘Ordinary Fear: Women, Violence and Personal Safety’, in Violence against Women: The Bloody Footprints (A Gender and Society Reader), edited by Pauline B Bart, Eileen Geil Moran, Newbury Park, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993, pp. 155–64, p. 161. 3 Local 1199 was founded in 1932 as a mostly white and Jewish organization of pharmacists; it grew in strength throughout the 1950s and 1960s when its membership extended to include large numbers of hospital and nursing home care workers, most of whom were African-American and Latina women. Following a period of internal disruption, Local 1199 merged with SEIU to become 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest healthcare union in the United States. Information on the history of District 1199 can be found at www.1199seiu.org/history 4 Members of District 1199, ‘Race? Sex? Class? Prejudice in the Workplace’, Heresies, 15, 1982, pp. 24–6. The preface to the excerpts explains the creative context of the oralhistory project, through which the words of the union members were developed into a verbatim musical revue entitled ‘Take Care’, that was, at the time of publication, touring hospitals all across the US (p. 24). 5 Untitled is not an illustration to the text and it has its own entry in the issue’s table of contents. 6 The Bread and Roses Cultural Project of Local 1199 was founded in 1979 by Moe Foner: cf. Bread and Roses Cultural Project: https://artforsocialchangetoolkit.wordpress.com/ arts-in-action/bread-and-roses-cultural-project/ In addition, the phrase ‘Bread and Roses’ has a long history within women’s trade unionism and feminist activism. It is attributed to the Polish-American suffragette Rose Schneidermann who, in 1911, said ‘The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too’. It has not gone out of circulation in feminist and women’s labour activism since (see the 2019 Women’s March theme) and, importantly, connects education and creative personal development with struggles for economic and social justice. See: www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/womens-march-2019london-rose-schneiderman-bread-and-roses-theme-costumes-a8736361.html 7 The artists who took part in the project included: Jerri Allyn, Vanalyne Green, Candace Hill-Murray, Susan Lindeman, Sandra Payne, Ntozake Shange, Lorna Simpson, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cecilia Vicuna; Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project Records, Collection Number: 5929 Box 3, Folder 9. Working Women, Working Artists, Working Together.

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8 Lucy Lippard and Candace Hill-Montgomery, ‘Working Women/Working Artists/ Working Together’, Woman’s Art Journal, 3:1, Spring/Summer 1982, pp. 19–20, p. 20. 9 Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. The arguments of Pratt and Rosner are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. 10 I am following Nicola Gavey in using the very apt term ‘scaffolding’: see her Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape, London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 11 Aneeth Kaur Hundle, Ioana Szeman and Joanna Pares Hoare, ‘What Is the Transnational in Transnational Feminist Research?’, Feminist Review (special issue on transnational feminisms), 121, 2019, pp. 3–8, p. 4. 12 Tina Sideris,‘Problems of Identity, Solidarity and Reconciliation’, in The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, edited by Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay and Meredith Turshen, London and New York: Zed Books, 2001, pp. 46–62, p. 56. 13 This particular passage, bringing together the brutality of racist rape fantasies and the issues facing migrant and non-migrant women of colour in domestic service is strongly resonant with the compelling arguments made by Patricia Hill Collins in ‘The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood’, in Violence against Women, edited by Pauline B. Bart and Eileen Geil Moran, op. cit., pp. 85–104. 14 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13:3, 2006, pp. 193–209, p. 198. 15 Quote from Untitled. The statistics on global sexual violence, including reporting and prosecution, as well as the vulnerability of migrant women are appalling; for a statistical overview see UN Women: www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/endingviolence-against-women/facts-and-figures. 16 Lest we think that attitudes to victims of sexual assault have changed so much that asking the loaded question ‘What was she wearing?’ would be universally condemned, note that the 2018 Belgian exhibition, Is it my fault?, in which the clothes worn by women when assaulted and raped were displayed, made headlines for tackling these still persistent perspectives: www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42633751. 17 The practice-led doctoral research of Vanessa Godden, whose work eloquently explores the entanglements between race and rape, reinforces the profound link between being seen, heard and believed, and creating bonds of solidarity. Vanessa Godden, Embodying Entanglement, PhD Thesis, Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne, 2019. 18 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, pp. 161–8. 19 Simpson’s refusal to objectify Black women’s bodies has been noted elsewhere, see, for example: Huey Copeland,‘“Bye, Bye Black Girl”: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat’, Art Journal, Summer 2005, pp. 62–77. 20 Though a detailed discussion of Rebecca Belmore’s 2002 performance work Vigil, and the video installation developed from it, The Named and The Unnamed, resides beyond the limits of this particular chapter, its strategies for materializing the stories of the many Indigenous Canadian women whose rapes, murders and ‘disappearances’ go, and have gone for generations, unspoken and unpunished, is exceptionally resonant with the arguments being made here. The work’s focus upon the intersectional dynamics of violence against women, the movement from generalized to concrete others, and the structural silence that needs to be overcome in order to form multidimensional solidarities against a cultural continuum of violence, is truly compelling. See, for further discussion: Maggie Tate, ‘Re-Presenting Invisibility: Ghostly Aesthetics in Rebecca Belmore’ s Vigil and The Named and the Unnamed’, Visual Studies, 30:1, 2015, pp. 20–31 and, for a direct, first-person review, Lara Evans, Not Artomatic at: https://notartomatic.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/ rebecca-belmore-vigil-and-the-named-and-the-unnamed/. 21 Steve Early,‘On Culturing a Union’, The Nation, 12 September 2002. Available at: www. thenation.com/article/culturing-union/. 22 See the ‘Women of Hope’ projects: Joyce Hansen, Women of Hope: African Americans Who Made a Difference, New York: Scholastic Press, 1998 and Robert Rosenberg, Maria Peralta

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and Moe Foner, Women of Hope: Latinas abriendo camino, 12 groundbreaking Latina Women, Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities, 1996. See: Joan Braderman’s gripping documentary, The Heretics (2009) and the Heresies Film Project organization archive: http://heresiesfilmproject.org/archive/; Michelle Meagher, ‘“Difficult, Messy, Nasty, and Sensational”: Feminist collaboration on Heresies (1977– 1993)’, Feminist Media Studies, 14:4, 2014, pp. 578–92. Cynthia Cockburn, ‘Transversal Politics: A Practice of Peace’, Pacifist Feminism, 22, February 2015, no pages. Julie R. Enszer and Agatha Beins,‘Inter- and Transnational Feminist Theory and Practice in Triple Jeopardy and Conditions’, Women’s Studies, 47:1, 2018, pp. 21–43. Kristen Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Anti-Racism and Feminist Accountability, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Simpson’s working friendship with Carrie Mae Weems, as well as her relationship with Lippard and the Heresies collective, and an awareness of the work of Adrian Piper, Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker, are frequently noted in the literature: cf. Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden and Chrissie Iles, Lorna Simpson, London and New York: Phaidon Press, Ltd., 2002; Joan Simon, Lorna Simpson, Munich, London and New York: Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2013. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 45–6. ‘Affective solidarities’ is a phrase deployed by Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalyn Keller, to describe the bonds made in the digital sphere that manifest in material forms of political action. See their: Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. See the Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2017: https://time.com/time-person-ofthe-year-2017-silence-breakers/ Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, ‘Conclusion: The Interrelationship between Gender, War and Militarism’, in Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Sjoberg and Via, Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO and Oxford: Praeger Security International, 2010, pp. 231–9, p. 231. The artist’s webpages document the work well, including images taken during its production and of the final piece, and the international press response to the work, see: www. alketaxhafamripa.com/thinking-of-you Xhafa Mripa uses the Albanian spelling Kosova; in speaking of this work, I follow her preferred lead. Xhafa Mripa’s statement at: www.alketaxhafamripa.com/thinking-of-you. On the dynamic ethical/aesthetic relationship between response and responsibility see my text: ‘Response and Responsibility: On the Cosmo-Politics of Generosity in Contemporary Asian Art’, in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, edited by Caroline Turner and Michelle Antoinette, Canberra: ANU Press, 2014, pp. 143–59. It is significant to the collaborative nature of the work that it was supported by UN Women. Significantly, Xhafa Mripa had previously made work exploring her relationship to her father that interrogated traditional gender roles, familial relationships and the construction of masculinities. Xhafa Mripa’s statement at: www.alketaxhafamripa.com/thinking-of-you. Slavenka Drakulic, ‘The Rape of Women in Bosnia’, in Women and Violence: Realities and Responses Worldwide, edited by Miranda Davies, London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd., 1994, pp. 176–81; Lepa Mladjenovic,‘Caring at the Same Time: On Feminist Politics during the NATO Bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Ethnic Cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, 1999’, in The Aftermath, edited by Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen, op. cit., pp. 172–88; Agnes Kalungu-Banda,‘Post-Conflict Programmes for Women: Lessons from the Kosovo Women’s Initiative’, in Gender, Peacebuilding and Reconstruction, edited by Caroline Sweetman, Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 2005, pp. 31–40.

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40 See Rosalind Dixon, ‘Rape as a Crime in International Humanitarian Law: Where to from Here?’, European Journal of International Law, 13:3, 2002, pp. 697–719 and A. Saha, ‘Rape as a War Crime: The Position of International Law since World War II’, Journal of East Asia and International Law, 2:2, 2009. Available at: http://journal.yiil.org/home/ archives_v2n_10. 41 Atifete Jahjaga, the third president of Kosova, and the first woman to hold the office, publicly donated the first skirt. 42 Nilima Sheikh’s Terrain, discussed in Chapter 1, raises the spectre of systematic sexual violence during the Partition of India in 1947. 43 Hiroko Hagiwara,‘Comfort Women, Women of Conformity: The Work of Yoshiko Shimada’, in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 253–65. 44 See Comfort Women Wanted at www.changjinlee.net 45 Making connections across different cultural forms of violence is a critical transnational feminist organizing strategy; Dalit women activists seeking to end the Devadasi system in India, framed it in relation to the ‘comfort women’ issue in order to give it greater visibility outside South Asia. See: Purvi Mehta, ‘Dalit Feminism in Tokyo: Analogy and Affiliation in Transnational Dalit Activism’, Feminist Review (special issue on transnational feminisms), 121, 2019, pp. 24–36. 46 I am indebted to conversations with artist and scholar Jean Brundrit, whose remarkable photovoice works with the LGBTQ+ community, and eloquent writing on ‘corrective rape’ in South Africa, first made me aware of this issue. 47 For an excellent and succinct account of this history, see Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activism Beyond Borders, Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. See especially Chapter 5 ‘Networks on Violence Against Women’. (Quotes taken from p. 166). 48 The inclusivity of the term ‘sexual violence’ is important to note, as increasingly, there is greater awareness of how specific forms of violence against the LGBTQ+ community, and the state regulation of sexuality, through religion, law, marriage customs, access to medical attention, etc. serves to exacerbate sex and gender-based violence generally. Art has been used to raise just these nuanced intersectional dynamics; see, for some key examples, the work of Nalini Malani and Amar Kanwar on sexual violence during (and in the wake of) Partition; Zarina Bhimji’s evocative reference to the UK’s use of ‘virginity testing’ of South Asian immigrants (She Loved to Breathe: Pure Silence, 1987); and Susan Thomson’s Ghost Empire films (2013ff) on the continued use of antiquated colonial legal frameworks to discriminate against LGBTQ+ subjects. 49 I have elsewhere written about Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (1992–3), but suffice to say that the deployment of three-part texts (written from the perspective of the victim, perpetrator and bystander) as a tactic through which to entangle international reader/ viewers within the unfolding story of rape in the Bosnian War is a fascinating counterpart to Xhafa Mripa’s later work. See Marsha Meskimmon,‘Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord and Resonant Critical Praxis’, n.paradoxa, 6, June 2000, pp. 12–21. For an excellent development of this argument around Holzer’s work, within very current debates about sexual violence, see: The Unheroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S., curated by Monika Fabijanska, New York: Andrew and Anya Shiva Gallery, 2018. Available at: www.monikafabijanska.com/rape-the-unheroic-act. 50 The Balkan Wars were subject to both such narratives in the international media, with some journalists ‘desperate to help’ and others looking for the most shocking tales to sell stories. See, for example: R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Feminism, Nationalism and Globalism: Representations of Bosnian ‘“War Babies” in the Western Print Media, 1991–2006’, in Gender, War and Militarism, edited by Sjoberg and Via, op. cit., pp. 195–208. 51 In using this phrase, I am referencing the important research platform on the Arts and Human Rights, led by Caroline Turner at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and her co-authored volume: Caroline Turner and Jen Webb, Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

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52 Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 228–9. 53 A full list of the collaborators and institutional partners engaged in the project can be downloaded from Lacy’s website, at www.suzannelacy.com/de-tu-puno-y-letra-2. 54 By the time the performance was developed, the Cartas de Mujeres project (see subsequent paragraphs) had generated over 11,000 letters; local writer Gabriela Ponce produced the script for De tu Puño y Letra from a selection of 1000 of these. Significantly, the vast majority were written by women, but men were not excluded from the invitation to voice their experiences of sexual violence by the project. 55 Documentation of Cartas de Mujeres, is available through the GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) website at: www.giz.de/en/downloads/giz20140311en-letters-from-women-ecuador.pdf and also on the University of San Martin de Porres, Lima, project site on violence against women, at: www.mujereslibresdeviolencia. usmp.edu.pe/catalogo-cartas-de-mujeres-ecuador/. 56 ‘Beyond the numbers, the letter writing itself has become liberating and therapeutic for hundreds of women, and may even signify a turning point for breaking the cycle of violence. Furthermore, in Quito, the letters led city officials to issue a new municipal ordinance to eliminate domestic violence’. See: www.giz.de/en/downloads/giz20140311en-letters-from-women-ecuador.pdf. 57 Taken from Lacy’s website, op. cit.; the capitalization is verbatim, but the italics in the final line are mine. 58 Lacy has, for many years, written and spoken with clarity and precision about her working methods and, importantly, how her projects engage with feminism, activism, community and cultural change in, through, and as art. Her project methodology and her aesthetic strategies are profoundly connected with the feminist political interventions made possible by the works. For a brief survey of her ideas, see: Suzanne Lacy,‘Not New: Reclaiming the Radical in Feminism’, Women Eco-Artists Dialog, 2016, https://directory.weadartists. org/not-new-reclaiming-the-radical-in-feminism; Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995; Suzanne Lacy, Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics and Publics, 1974–2007, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2010. 59 In her insightful catalogue essay, Lucía Sanromán explores the issue of authorship and Lacy’s ‘distributive model of artistic creation’, including the impact of this on Lacy’s legacy within conventional museum and gallery practices. Cf. ‘To Reenact, To Rethink, to Redistribute Suzanne Lacy’, in Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here, edited by Rudolf Frieling, Lucía Sanromán and Dominic Willsdon, San Francisco MOMA with Munich, London and New York: DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2019, pp. 14–23. 60 I was introduced to this project in 2017 when Lacy delivered a memorable keynote at the AAH (Association of Art Historians, UK) annual conference that I co-convened at Loughborough University. The affective and imaginative potential of this piece was brought home to me in that space when, following Lacy’s discussion and a brief screening of the performance, the lights raised to reveal most of the assembled art historians in the audience in tears. 61 ‘The letters serve two main purposes, contributing both to a change in socio-cultural behavior patterns based on gender violence and also to a collective condemnation of this violence’. See: www.giz.de/en/downloads/giz2014-0311en-letters-from-womenecuador.pdf. 62 This statement is made on Lacy’s webpage and further reiterated on the downloadable information sheet for the project. 63 Lucia Fabio,‘Networks’, Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here, op. cit., p. 125. 64 Jennifer Fisher made the point that in the Crystal Quilt (1987), the use of multiple voices destabilized the ‘universalizing and, ultimately closed’ narratives associated with the tableaux vivant format and enhanced what Lacy called the ‘resonance’ of the work. Jennifer Fisher,‘Interperformance: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovic’, Art Journal, 56:4, Winter 1997, pp. 28–33, p. 30.

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65 See the extended discussion in Chapter 1 linking forms of (vulnerable) listening with structures of knowing. 66 Code, Ecological Thinking, op. cit., p. 234. 67 Gavey, Just Sex, op. cit., p. 224. 68 Quote taken from the Swiss Peace Foundation, 1995 cited in Anu Pillay,‘Violence against Women in the Aftermath’, in The Aftermath, edited by Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen, op. cit., pp. 35–45. p. 41. 69 That the cultural links between masculinity and violence (and the passivity of ‘bystander complicity’) needs to be overcome for any significant change to occur emerges time and again in the scholarship on gender, conflict and sexual violence. For one extended examination, see Laura Sjoberg, Gender, War and Conflict, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. This point is also critical to the arguments of Chapter 5 in the present volume. 70 De tu Puño y Letra was designed to include men more centrally in the issue of sexual violence and included a workshop curriculum on masculinity and violence developed by Timm Kroeger of GIZ. 71 Deborah Bird Rose,‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Inter-Actions in the Sentient World’, Environmental Humanities, 3, 2013, pp. 93–109, p. 102.

5 IMAGINING PEACE Art, politics and irenic attention

September 2003, Venice: I am delighted to take a small, white badge, bearing the words IMAGINE PEACE, from Yoko Ono’s installation in Utopia Station and pin it to my shirt. Even now, when I wear it, people smile, wave or speak to me; there is something about that badge that generates joy.

War and peace are feminist issues. While that statement may seem starkly obvious to anyone familiar with feminist campaigning over the past century or so, it yet remains possible to read scholarly accounts of warfare, security, confict and post-confict reconstruction that marginalise the signifcance of gender, and to fnd peacebuilding activities in post-confict zones that sideline women.1 By contrast, transnational feminist thought and activism recognizes the profound links between war, armed confict and the cultural construction of gender, seeing the transformation of gender-based discrimination as crucial to the establishment of a more equitable, and peaceful, future for us all.2 Among the many prominent feminist scholars and activists in the area of peace studies is Cynthia Cockburn, whose participatory action research with women in confict and post-confict zones such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine, spans some three decades. Cockburn is unequivocal in relating gender to war and peace:‘Women’s peace movements, worldwide, are theorizing that gender power relations are signifcant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we “live” gender can be a signifcant resource for peace.’3 More strongly, and of particular signifcance to the arguments of this chapter, Cockburn’s feminist and transnational approaches to peace studies are intimately entwined with her understanding and development of transversal politics as a critical ‘practice of peace’.4 Cockburn has developed her insights into the connections between feminism, transversal politics and peace studies through a number of different projects and

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publications, but the lines of her argument are consistent. Feminist peacebuilding is a contingent and ongoing practice that enables solidarities between and across differentially positioned constituencies to emerge through dialogue, negotiation and what she calls ‘identity work’.5 Identity work, as used by Cockburn, is not a laborious process designed to uncover the true, authentic or essential identities of individuals in a given group, but a sensitive, open-ended method by which members of the group articulate the complexities of their multiple identifcations and are heard and acknowledged by others within the collective. Some aspects of these identifcations are radically different, even politically polarized, whilst others may form the basis of shared understandings; regardless of the differences or similarities, the positions are mutually recognized and, through dialogue, used as a basis for creating solidarities. Transversal practices of peacebuilding thus take account of the intersectional identifcations though which subjects are located differently with respect to power and political agency, but move beyond reifed ‘identity politics’. Forging coalitions in and through difference, transnational feminist practices of peace are never fnished, rather they are continuing, contingent and precarious. As Cockburn eloquently observed:‘transversal politics is a politics of the future perfect tense, “will have become”. . . . But it also contains a cautious conditional tense: if. We “may have become”’.6 Sometimes, affnities formed through dialogue provide a basis for solidarity and signifcant progress toward a collective political aim can be made, but, at other times, there are ‘failures’, instances in which particular divisions are so strongly embedded that they are not able to be overcome or pushed aside in favour of collective action – as yet. It is in light of the temporality of feminist peacebuilding practices that Cockburn makes an exceptionally compelling point, and one that is of particular salience to the argument that I am pursuing in this chapter and, indeed, throughout this volume. In placing her emphasis upon the future perfect tense, the ‘what may become’, Cockburn argues that doing transversal peace politics ‘demands imagination’: Our politics must not just allow space for, but actively generate, flights of fantasy, dreams of possibilities. The traversing is thus not only lateral, it is also traversing into the future (yours and hers). . . . Imagination, then, becomes itself a political practice. Indeed, the imaginary may be the strong card, the joker in the pack.7 Why I fnd this point so compelling is because Cockburn is not an artist, not someone trained to engage in ‘fights of fantasy’, but a renowned social scientist and feminist activist who has conducted feldwork during, and in the aftermath of, extreme instances of armed confict, worked with women who have experienced horrifc violence, and argued with cold, hard facts, that gender, power and militarization are interconnected in the most fundamental sense. Yet, she advocates imagination,‘dreams of possibilities’, as central to transformative and lasting political change. And, in this, she is not alone; a pivotal direction has emerged in recent

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feminist political theory and international relations that takes imagination seriously in studying confict and reconciliation, and this has important ramifcations for thinking about transnational feminisms, art and peace.8 On the 9th of October 2007 on Videy Island in Reykjavik harbour, Yoko Ono’s IMAGINE PEACE TOWER was lit for the frst time. The work, a brilliant beam of light directed into the sky, emanates from a white glass Wishing Well, inscribed with the instruction ‘IMAGINE PEACE’ in 24 languages. The beam is generated solely through renewable geothermic power and its prismatic radiance changes in strength and intensity as it encounters the volatile atmospheric conditions of the Icelandic coast. IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is the centrepiece of an extraordinary range of ongoing projects and performances dedicated to peace that Ono frst initiated with her late husband John Lennon in 1969 through the ‘War is Over’ campaign.9 The body of projects for peace that Ono has developed over nearly fve decades is staggering in extent, but simple and coherent in message: want, wish for, and imagine peace, and it will come. Over the years, there have been many criticisms of Ono’s art, and of her collaborative projects with Lennon, the sharpest of which have often been little more than populist xenophobic chauvinism. Some of the more insidious, however, have been criticisms reliant upon conventional ideas about art and politics that imply, without any sustained argument or evidence, that a move toward the imagination must at best be utopian (read: impossible and elitist), and at worst, idealist (read: powerless to effect change). As discussed earlier, however, transnational feminist scholars working in peace

Yoko Ono, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, 2007. Outdoor sculpture, Videy island, Reykjavik.

FIGURE 5.1

Photograph by Rafael Pinho; Collection of Reykjavik Art Museum. © Yoko Ono, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

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studies do not so swiftly dismiss imagination as an insignifcant political tool – nor will I. In addition, as Ono’s work has at long last come to the fore in critical revisions of the histories of Fluxus, conceptualism, participatory and socially engaged art, the transcultural, feminist, genre-crossing agenda set by her practice has been explored in greater detail, and with this has emerged a more thorough evaluation of her peace work. My engagement with Ono’s multidimensional practice is indebted to this body of excellent and long-awaited critical scholarship, but, while I draw on this material in developing the argument here, I am not replicating its aim to resituate Ono within the cultural and artistic milieu of the post-War global art world.10 My aim, instead, relates to the trajectory of this volume, namely, to explore the signifcant connections that exist between transnational feminisms, transversal politics and the arts. Thus, in what follows, I argue that the works comprising the multifaceted project, IMAGINE PEACE, including the War is Over campaign and several pieces of music Ono composed and/or recorded with Lennon, materialize a transnational feminist transversal politics of peace. I engage with this materialization in three ways: frst, by arguing that IMAGINE PEACE constitutes a transnational feminist advocacy network realized in an aesthetic mode; second, by exploring the articulation of intersectional identifcations that underpin IMAGINE PEACE as an imaginative geography of transcultural partnership; and fnally, by developing the idea of ‘irenic attention’11 as an act of aesthetic transformation that is profoundly ethical, ecological and political in its effects.

Act 1 IMAGINE PEACE I hope someday you’ll join us August 1982, central Pennsylvania: I am travelling with my brother’s University students to an event in Washington; they are older than I am and, to while away the time in the van, one student with a guitar starts up a sing-along. It is fun, but the songs are all ‘in-jokes’, shared between good friends who know each other well. When it comes to my turn to lead a song, I am worried that my choice will mark me as an outsider, younger and not so ‘cool’, but I hear myself sing ‘Imagine there’s no heaven . . . ’ By the next line, everyone in the van is singing with me.

IMAGINE PEACE uses a range of aesthetic strategies to generate multidimensional solidarities between widely disparate individuals and groups. These solidarities are transnational, transcultural and transversal in scope, and their aim is to build a worldwide epistemic community committed to creating the conditions needed for sustainable peace. Arguably, the project can be understood as an arts-based ‘transnational advocacy network’,12 deploying particular temporal, spatial, visual and material dynamics to create connections across conventional histories, geographies and cultures. To explore this idea further, it is useful to turn to IMAGINE PEACE TOWER as a focal point within the wider project. IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is, literally, a time-based artwork; it is illuminated each year on particular dates and for specifc durations. Some of these are

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commemorative (e.g. Lennon’s birth to death dates, 9 October – 8 December), others accord with markers of planetary and/or historical time (e.g. the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, 21 December, New Year’s Eve in the Gregorian calendar, 31 December). Enfolding overlapping spheres of time, the work entangles specifc stories of individuals within the wider histories of nations and cultures and the movement of the cosmos. And there is yet more to the time of IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. The work is, in part, the realization of an instruction piece Ono created in the mid-1960s, entitled ‘Light House’, that Lennon asked her to consider building for him in his garden during one of the couple’s earliest meetings.13 The work described a house whose walls were made entirely of light cast by prisms at sunset. ‘Light House’ is a contingent and ephemeral concept-object; it may appear (or not) based on the changing conditions of the weather and the angle of the light. Ono’s explicit association of the conceptual ‘Light House’ of the 1960s with IMAGINE PEACE TOWER suggests a similarly contingent continuity between the imagined and materialized work of art as an experimental thought. Thus, though IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is embedded in material histories, its continuing realization over time is open-ended, its tense is future perfect; it may appear, it will become. If IMAGINE PEACE TOWER constructs time through fuid and emergent entanglements, it likewise suggests that space is multidimensional and capable of being reconfgured, aesthetically, beyond conventional borders. For a start, the work exists across physical, conceptual and virtual/online sites; it is present as a place, an object, an image, an idea (realized instruction) and a form of interactive communication.14 Additionally, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is a nexus for transnational exchange, effecting imaginative forms of border crossing that enhance fuid connections between people, cultures and ideas. Importantly, this is not the same as saying that the work is part of a globalizing art culture; IMAGINE PEACE TOWER does not fatten geopolitical and cultural differences or assimilate them into an economy of the same. Take, for instance, the integral role played by participants’‘wishes’ within IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. The wishes that are held in trust in the Wishing Well base of the work come from all over the world and have been inscribed in many different languages. The Wishing Well itself translates the instruction to imagine peace into two dozen of these. Some of the wishes have been transported from Ono’s internationally sited Wish Trees, while others have been sent by post, twitter and email directly to Videy Island, following directions available on the work’s website. Additionally, the site provides information to enable people to produce their own Wish Trees wherever they may live. Thus, the double acts of wishing and imagining that reside at the very heart of the project are not constrained by differences of language, but rather animated by their multiplicity and the intersubjective negotiations that defne translation.15 Wish Tree opens a dialogue between and across many different people, places and situations, dissolving fxed authorial control and engendering a shared, transnational, experience of agency. Such a transversal approach to transnational meaning-production creates the conditions through which many differently

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situated makers (of wishes, meanings and art) can each be heard as their voices are amplifed in resonant harmonies. The pivotal place of Wish Tree within IMAGINE PEACE TOWER further emphasizes the transnational scale-making practices that underpin the work. Ono began Wish Tree sometime after 1981, siting the frst tree in 1996,16 and, at present, there have been dozens of installations in various locations around the world. Wish Tree draws upon Ono’s childhood memory of tying wishes written on paper to the branches of trees in temple courtyards in Japan, but this precisely located cultural memory is transformed in the artwork through the generous invitation for each of us to make our own wish, in our own space and time. Yet the installations of Wish Tree do not simply ignore differences of history, place and culture. For example, tree species are carefully selected for installations of the work, with native or naturalized varieties of older trees preferred (e.g. in Sydney six eucalyptus, in Venice, an olive tree). As part of the IMAGINE PEACE billboard project for Washington DC in April 2007, Ono temporarily sited 10 Wish Trees in the city, including potted Japanese cherry trees near the Jefferson Memorial that recalled the gift of the Japanese government to the United States in 1912 of 3000 cherry trees as a mark of friendship between the nations. By contrast, the permanently sited Wish Tree for Washington, hosted by the Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden, is a Japanese dogwood, a tree considered native to Eurasia and North America, especially Japan and the south-eastern United States. Both of these choices heighten

Yoko Ono, Wish Tree for Washington, DC, 2007. Live tree and mixed media; dimensions variable. Gift of the artist, 2007. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

FIGURE 5.2

Photograph by Andrew Williams; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © Yoko Ono, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

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our historical and ecological sensitivity to the specifcity of place, not by isolating or reifying spaces, but by materializing the myriad fows and exchanges between places in the world that come to signify what is ‘native’. IMAGINE PEACE TOWER cuts across genres as readily as it interrogates space: it is a public artwork and an intimate memorial to Ono’s late husband, it is a beacon and rallying point for international peace activism and the repository of more than two million individuals’ private wishes. It is a sculpture, an event, a ‘conceptual’ instruction piece, a happening, an instance of participatory, socially engaged activist art, an archive, a dialogue and a shared act of imagining otherwise. The work’s movement across genres disperses conventional confgurations of authorship. On one hand, it is the work of Ono: its impetus can be traced back to her instruction pieces, her studio contacted curators in Reykjavik to offer the work to the city, and she has been involved in every aspect of its realization and ongoing presence in Iceland. But this is too simplistic; frst, because Ono is consistent in sharing the ‘authorship’ of IMAGINE PEACE in all its manifestations with Lennon (both before and after his death) and, second, because Ono has established a practice over many decades through which the making of art is an act of dialogic communication and mutual becoming between ‘artist’ and ‘participant-spectator’. Ono’s work is not realized through passive consumption, but through an act of engagement that gives agency to her audiences and renders the work perennially ‘unfnished’ – in the process of becoming. While this is not a novel point to make about Ono’s practice, it does have an important bearing upon the transnational, transcultural and translational strategies of IMAGINE PEACE TOWER and this is signifcant to the argument being made here for the work’s central contribution to a transversal politics of peace. For example, in 1999, the journal Soundings dedicated a special issue to transversal politics, arguing that: The idea is to find ways of doing things which involve neither the imposition of a single universal which refuses to recognise that there really are ‘differences’, nor the retreat into those differences as tightly-bound, exclusivist and essentialist; to find creative ways of crossing (and possibly redrawing) the borders that mark significant politicised differences; and to find forms of empathy not based on sameness, ways of shifting which don’t involve tearing up your roots.17 IMAGINE PEACE TOWER resonates strongly with these ideas. The work does not impose a single universal space or time, nor does it insist that we tear up our roots; rather, it plants them in such a way that they cross, and redraw creatively, the mutable borders that describe our differences. Redrawing boundaries to create empathies that cut across differences through imaginative solidarity is not merely a pleasant aside or a happy accident in a transversal politics of peace. By its very nature, war destroys complex and multilateral solidarities operating across geopolitical, cultural and linguistic boundaries and emphasizes limited and excusive notions

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of home, identity and communication.18 By contrast, IMAGINE PEACE is a longterm, complex network of worldwide aesthetic interventions that seek to challenge and change the cultural imaginary by engendering transnational dialogues and solidarities. In addition to the millions of wishes in a well beneath the brilliant beacon that casts its light from Videy Island, IMAGINE PEACE has been materialized through art events and public actions, advertising campaigns in newspapers and on billboards, live and recorded music, books and websites, the distribution of buttons and badges to wear on your clothes and objects to take away from events. I am arguing here that these are profoundly political interventions and that IMAGINE PEACE can rightly be understood to be a feminist, transversal politics of peace, operating as a ‘transnational advocacy network’ by harnessing the affective agency of art. In their research on the impact of transnational activisms on mainstream international politics, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink developed the term ‘transnational advocacy network’ to describe particularly effective forms of crossborder coalition-building and campaigning. Signifcantly, they argued that the 19th- and early 20th-century campaigns for woman suffrage and the abolition of slavery were important precursors to some of the most prominent contemporary transnational advocacy networks and that current networks have strong links to race-critical ecofeminisms and to cross-border environmental and pacifst coalitions in which women play a key role.19 The features that Keck and Sikkink identifed as central to the aims, constitution, practice and success of transnational advocacy networks are remarkably resonant with transnational feminisms, transversal politics and IMAGINE PEACE and it is useful to explore these further here. To start, Keck and Sikkink argue that the primary aim of transnational advocacy networks is the production, exchange and strategic use of information as a source of new ideas, capable of transforming normative discursive positions, themselves argued to be key sites for political intervention. Keck and Sikkink go on to argue that transnational advocacy networks commonly revolve around a ‘principled idea’ (such as equality, justice or peace), a belief that individuals can make a difference, the creative use of information and a strategy of targeted political campaigning. Strategies of targeted campaigning include mobilizing the politics of information, symbols, leverage and accountability, to create agendas, infuence key actors, agencies and processes, change policy and behavior, but most critically, to transform ideas, meanings and ‘cognitive frames’.20 The affnities between the aesthetic strategies deployed across the varied manifestations of IMAGINE PEACE and those described as central to effective transnational advocacy networks are striking. At the centre is a principled idea and the absolute belief that individuals working collectively can and do make a difference, but even more strongly resonant is the emphasis placed on targeted information campaigns that creatively communicate ideas capable of changing fxed meanings and transforming the status quo – knowing differently to imagine otherwise. IMAGINE PEACE has long centred on the creative deployment of information, and this has become even more focused through Ono’s online presence.21 The information at the centre of the project is straightforward: transnational solidarity is

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not simply possible, but necessary if the ‘peace industry’ is to prevail over the violence and destruction (on an earth-wide, ecological scale) of the ‘war industry’.22 Individuals can make a difference, but not alone; working together, we can bring about world peace. Online, these messages are purveyed through a combination of images, songs, videos, tweets and texts by Ono, recommendations for further reading, and an open invitation throughout the site to participate – ‘we hope someday you’ll join us’ – to send messages and wishes, attend gatherings, recommend books, ask questions and view the interactive map to get a sense of how many others around the world are also taking part. The empowering agency of collective thought into action that pervades IMAGINE PEACE is redoubled when tying your tag to Wish Tree, or taking and wearing an IMAGINE PEACE badge, or heading out on a ferry to Videy Island with others who have elected to become a living part of this remarkably durable, transnational advocacy network with/in the arts. Creating transnational solidarities though participatory practices of knowing and imagining that unravel and redraw seemingly fxed geopolitical boundaries and essential identities is pivotal to a feminist transversal politics of peace and to the constellation of works, instructions and actions at the heart of IMAGINE PEACE. And so it is to the central role of an intersectional politics of the personal within the project that we turn our attention at this point.

Act 2 IMAGINE PEACE Nothing to kill or die for 8–9 December 1980, Pittsburgh: I am fourteen years old and a Beatles fan when I hear the news that John Lennon has been shot outside his home in New York City. I watch the fans’ candlelight vigils on the television late into the night and, in the morning, I ask my mother whether I might replace the lighted wreath we have in the window for Christmas with a banner reading ‘Give Peace a Chance’. My mother, a lifelong pacifst, agrees instantly and I set to work.

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER cannot be separated from the memory of John Lennon or from the partnership in life and art that he formed with Yoko Ono. Every aspect of the work, and of IMAGINE PEACE more generally, is intimately, and structurally, entwined with their personal story. This explicit entanglement of their lives and works is neither naïve nor manipulative, rather, it is a strategic and creative positioning that radically interlocks the personal with the political in and through the aesthetic. The imbrication of the personal with/in the political in this instance, however, refuses to become a politics of essence or identity, articulating, instead, the signifcance of difference as a catalyst for aesthetic and political transformation.23 As a positioning strategy linked to a transversal practice of peace, underpinned by a feminist call to end gender-based violence and domination in all its nuanced variations, the entanglement of ‘John and Yoko’, the personal with/in the political, in IMAGINE PEACE could hardly be more apt.

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The entanglement of the personal with the political in IMAGINE PEACE structurally embeds intersectionality, transnational denizenship and a profound reinvention of gender roles within an earth-wide, ecological politics of peace. Ono’s brief but eloquent characterization of her relationship with Lennon, taken from an interview in 2001 with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, provides a rich starting point for this exploration: John and I came from very different places. We were man and woman, we were from the West and the East. Each of us represented totally different social strata as well. We came from extreme opposites. So in some ways, we were very different from each other, but then in another way we were totally together. By the way, we were very aware of that symbolism, and also how people hated us for it. We were two people who transcended the positions they were supposed to adhere to’.24 In this passage, Ono states, then unravels, the conventional binary logic of identity as fxed by essence and origin: the ‘extreme opposites’ of man or woman, West or East. Ono instead articulates the logic of the ‘both/and’, both very different and totally together,embodied and located subjects whose origins and identifcations are materially signifcant, but not determining. This is extended in the passage by her explicit reference to ‘different social strata’, signifying the intersectional dynamics of class, education, economic and cultural capital. Thus, in a few carefully placed words, Ono embeds the particularity of the personal (herself and Lennon) within a transversal politics that acknowledges the dynamism of coalitional difference without reifying identity. It is an iterative positioning in a future perfect tense; transcending the positions to which they ought to have adhered, opened possibilities to think, imagine and live otherwise. Part of the couple’s determination to live otherwise engaged them in a complex web of international border-crossing and denizenship that lasted for many years as they negotiated passport and visa restrictions related to their marriage, domicile, custody of children and political activism.25 These negotiations became part of IMAGINE PEACE and are constitutive of some of its key features, but they also demonstrate the diffculties of trying to live in the world as if its nations and borders were truly permeable – ‘imagine there’s no countries’. Ono and Lennon were thus sensitized to boundaries and borders, and to the bureaucratic mechanisms of state regulation, control, and surveillance associated with them, but they were also wellversed in crossing borders and in turning their personal experiences into political commentary through art: from the Beatles’ song The Ballad of John and Yoko to the establishment of the borderless ‘conceptual country’ of Nutopia on 1st April 1973. Arguably, the imaginative entanglement of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the partnership of Ono and Lennon carried greater weight as a symbolic transcultural exchange than as a legal matter of border restrictions. Their loving partnership symbolized the radical possibility of empathy, care and communication across seemingly intractable political, cultural and ‘racial’ divides, and they used the public interest in their relationship to create artworks and interventions that crossed geopolitical and

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cultural boundaries to promote peace. Following their marriage in 1969, the couple embarked upon a series of well-known actions, subsequently referred to as the War is Over campaign, including Bed-Ins in Amsterdam and Montreal, the announcement of Bagism in Vienna, the recording and release of the song Give Peace a Chance, the Christmas message, ‘War Is Over’, placed on billboards in 12 cities, including New York, London, Montreal, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Berlin, Athens and Paris, and the postal art activist project, ACORN PEACE. The varied elements comprising the War Is Over campaign sowed the seeds for the transnational advocacy network that emerged subsequently under the banner of IMAGINE PEACE; the works drew a transnational map of connections, a visible worldwide movement for peace, that was also a series of specifc, local (even quotidian) actions undertaken by one couple, whose differences brought them together in love, solidarity and collaboration. ACORN PEACE demonstrates the strategic entanglement of the personal with the political with particular resonance. In June, 1968, Ono and Lennon planted two acorns in the grounds of Coventry Cathedral, one toward the East and one toward the West, as a symbol of their loving partnership and their hope for world peace.26 This intimate act was extended in April 1969 into a focused, transnational postal action, when Ono and Lennon sent two acorns in a small box with a personal note to a number of world leaders: Enclosed in this package we are sending you two living sculptures – which are acorns – in the hope that you will plant them in your garden and grow two oak trees for world peace. Yours with love, John and Yoko Ono Lennon.27 An action in future perfect, planting an acorn sends a message of hope for what will become, and in this sense ACORN PEACE prefgures Wish Tree, with its transnational mapping of many small acts of personal wish casting gathered together to signal the power of hope over despair, peace over confict. And by a circuitous route, nearly forty years after ACORN PEACE, we fnd ourselves in Iceland, at IMAGINE PEACE TOWER with millions of wishes in its well. Siting IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland was no more random than planting acorns in Coventry; it is the inscription of an imaginative, denizen cartography within a transversal feminist politics of peace. Iceland is not connected with Ono or Lennon in any traditional sense of ‘home’ or origin, yet it becomes strategically connected to their personal stories through a number of signifcant narrative entanglements created around IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. For example, the website features a link for Videy Island; at the end of the page, a statement by Ono opens by associating Iceland’s place in the world with a call for ecological sustainability as central to world peace: On the map of the Earth planet, Iceland is a country situated in the northern most part of our world. It is an ideal location from which to cover the Earth

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with enlightenment and love. Iceland is a magical and beautiful country. The electrical energy source for the country and for the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is geothermal – water, instead of oil. No pollution. No war. The end of the statement, by contrast, is offered in wholly personal terms:‘I dedicate this tower to John Lennon. My love for you is forever. Yoko Ono’. In an interview with Morgunbladid on the opening of the work, Ono further entwined Videy Island with Lennon and their history together, referring to his fondness for her 1965 piece, ‘Light House’:‘And I’m sure John is very happy to fnally have his light house! The light house he wanted in his garden. Maybe this is his garden’.28 That statement is reprinted at the end of a text by Sigtryggur Magnason, entitled ‘And the World Will Live as One’, published in the Iceland Post volume that accompanies IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. The text is a bricolage of photographs, quotes and Magnason’s gentle commentary, bringing the histories of Iceland, and Reykjavik in particular, together with stories of Ono and Lennon as children in Tokyo, San Francisco and Liverpool, the devastation wrought by the Second World War, and the couple’s transnational partnership as lovers, artists and activists. It is an imaginative intertwining of a variety of spaces and times, ultimately locating IMAGINE PEACE TOWER within the personal narratives of Ono and Lennon. I am arguing that this is not a conceit, but a means by which to think of space and dwelling as a matter of ethically and ecologically inhabiting the world, of making ourselves at home beyond the determinist limits of ‘blood and soil’. IMAGINE PEACE sets earth-wide parameters to our homes, bringing together a consciousness of inhabitation as both imaginative and pragmatic, ethical, ecological and aesthetic. While it may matter where you come from, it does not foreclose upon where you can imaginatively take root – Iceland can become Lennon’s garden. But there is more. Iceland has topped the table as the most peaceful country in the world in the Global Peace Index in every year, bar one (when it was second), since the start of the rankings in 2008. The methodology used includes ‘positive peace’ indicators, such as the acceptance of the rights of others, good relationships with neighbours, high levels of education, equitable resource distribution and freedom of information in addition to the absence of internal and external confict and the degree of militarization.29 Even more tellingly, Iceland has also topped the table for the past nine years in the World Economic Forum’s annual Gender Gap Index, which measures gender equality in four key areas: health, education, economic status and political representation.30 The GPI positive peace indicators and the GGI rankings give substance to the arguments long made by feminist confict studies scholars, such as Janie L. Leatherman, that:‘Where gender injustice is highest in the world, so too are indices of poverty, hunger, state fragility and war’.31 It is increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that gender inequality, sexual and domestic violence are intrinsically connected to warfare, post-confict instability and ‘combative, controlling forms of masculinity’.32 Conversely, gender equity and the active participation of women in leadership and decision-making processes across all social sectors produces, and can sustain, the conditions needed for long-lasting

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peace.33 Establishing gender equity is not solely the preserve of women and girls, nor is it the case that all of the changes required to effect it, reside with them. Rather, it is a matter for all, and many of the key changes needed are to the conventional constructions of masculinities, where these uphold iniquitous power relations between men and women through complex, intersectional imbrications of domination.34 IMAGINE PEACE is the outcome of a partnership in life and art forged by Ono and Lennon across divisions of gender, nation, class, culture and language.35 Their partnership both recognized their differences and, paraphrasing Audre Lorde, ‘made them strengths’, through love, creativity and solidarity.36 And if, as Cockburn argued,‘how we “live” gender can be a signifcant resource for peace’,37 then their lived transformation of gendered power politics into a shared life/art partnership provided a substantial resource for their peace activism. Arguably, this partnership, both in the collaborative production of art and in terms of lived gender roles, has proved to be one of the most diffcult aspects of their project for critics to reconcile, even to the present day.38 Yet the strategic imbrication of the personal within the political in IMAGINE PEACE places that partnership at the very heart of the creative agency of their activism time and again, from their adoption of a shared surname (Ono Lennon) through which they jointly authored their works, to their playful, collaborative events, advertising campaigns and music. Playing out clichéd gender stereotypes, it was more readily accepted that Lennon was participating in the ‘obscure’ art actions of Ono, than that Ono could have any real impact upon the musical creativity of Lennon, despite the fact that Ono had more formal musical training than her husband and had been active and respected in the circles of such renowned composers as John Cage before meeting Lennon. To his credit, Lennon went against the tide of critics and fellow musicians on a number of occasions to make clear that the couple were together as artists and as husband and wife, even acknowledging in an interview of 1971 that Ono had cowritten the song Julia (from the Beatles White Album).39 Yet only in 2017 was it offcially recognized that Ono and Lennon had co-written the song Imagine (1971), despite the obvious connections between the song’s lyrics and Ono’s instruction pieces from the 1960s, their collaboration on the now-famous music flm of the same name from 1972, and Lennon’s explicit statement in an interview from 1980 that they had written the song together.40 This instance is signifcant, as the song provides a critical conceptual link between the War is Over campaign and the more extensive body of works that comprise IMAGINE PEACE. The fact that it was borne of an aesthetic partnership that entangled an intersectional politics of the personal with/in a transversal, feminist activist practice of peace is not merely coincidental, but constitutive. Likewise, the couple’s fnal musical collaboration, Double Fantasy, recorded shortly before Lennon’s death, intertwined both artists’ music to celebrate what many critics saw as their most radical act of gendered reinvention: their mutual decision in 1975 that Lennon would become a ‘househusband’, taking the lead in raising the couple’s son Sean, while Ono managed their fnancial interests outside the home.

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Taking seriously that IMAGINE PEACE structurally entangles the personal within the political to delineate an imaginative geography of transnational coalitionbuilding in and through difference, I want to extend its trajectories by drawing a creative map that connects intersectional partnerships and non-dominative, permeable masculinities with efforts to end violent confict from the home to the street and to the battlefeld. As Cockburn argued so eloquently, transnational feminist peace-building ‘demands imagination’, and requires that we generate ‘dreams of possibilities’ that open the future to what will become. Arguably, the entanglement of ‘John and Yoko’ within IMAGINE PEACE is a form of narrative becoming, rather than a politics of fxed or essential identity. Their collaboration opened the possibility to rethink gender roles and to move from models of domination to partnership. In drawing the lines of my own imaginative narrative entanglement with these ideas, I take my lead from Ono’s reprise of ACORN PEACE on its 40th anniversary. On 2nd May 2009, Ono sent a box with two acorns to Barack and Michelle Obama, accompanied by the following letter: Dear President and Mrs Obama, Enclosed is a pair of living sculptures called ACORN PEACE, which was what my husband, John Lennon, and I had sent to the world’s leaders forty years ago. We asked that the acorns be planted for Peace, as seeds of Peace. This year happens to be the 40th anniversary of that event, and I have decided that it is important to send the ACORN PEACE again to the current world leaders. I hope you will plant them in your garden so that they will grow into two strong oak trees for world peace. With deep respect and love, Yoko Ono Lennon41 Ono’s letter is precise in its salutation, content, closing and signature; she addresses Barack and Michelle Obama as world leaders, and as political partners, for whom she has ‘deep respect’, brings Lennon’s co-authorship of the work to the fore, and signs off using their shared surname. I want to suggest that the imaginative connections drawn between the Obamas and the Ono Lennons through the 2009 reprise of ACORN PEACE are conceptually and politically signifcant. The Obama presidency brought to the White House an exceptionally able and eloquent political couple, whose vital partnership in life is inextricably linked to their public commitment to working for social justice. Their presence in the White House, however, also raised the spectres of racism and xenophobia in the United States, demonstrating that many still fear, rather than welcome, difference. The Obamas remain a powerful symbol of ‘the audacity of hope’42 for a future in which long-held racial and social discrimination in the United States might be overcome to enable a just and diverse US to work in partnership with other nations in the world for peace, equity and ecological sustainability.

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During his presidency, and in the vicious campaign that saw his successor come to power, Barack Obama was attacked many times in highly personal terms for being ‘soft’, a word used to indicate his ‘failure’ to enact a combative masculinity or dominating heteronormativity.43 Central to Obama’s embodiment of a vulnerable, connective masculinity were a number of key features, including his partnership with his wife Michelle, his active co-parenting of two daughters, an acknowledgement of the importance of women’s intellectual, cultural and political contribution at all levels, his dedicated support of LGBTQ+ rights and representation, his relative disinterest in military solutions to political problems and, signifcantly, his unusually unguarded and emotive response to gun crime in the United States.44 On 8 December 1980, John Lennon was shot four times with a handgun at the entrance to the Dakota Building in New York City by a former fan who had become obsessed with ‘making his name’ by killing the artist. Ono was with Lennon as he was shot, and in the hospital where he died shortly thereafter. It was she who broke the news to their 5-year-old son the following morning. In 2016, Barack Obama wept openly at a press conference when recalling the children who died at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, in what now seems to be just one more instance of an endless round of American mass shootings. Toxic, militarized masculinities are inextricably entangled with guns and gun crime in the United States,45 and globally, with sexual and domestic violence, confict, and warfare.46 The men who reject these outmoded forms of masculinity are called ‘soft’ as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, in strength, solidarity and partnership, with women, children and other ‘soft’ men, calling for a non-violent and peaceful world. Finding the means by which to imagine masculinities beyond the straightjacket of violence, domination and death is a critical frst step in living them (and with them) otherwise.47 For a transversal politics of peace, this is both a necessary ‘fight of fantasy’ and an act of audacious, feminist hope that we might engender a world in which equity and peace are realisable. For those who cannot imagine anything other than an infnite escalation of violence in thought, word and deed, this may be called hopelessly utopian, but, as I will argue in the fnal section of this chapter, imagination is not a decorative addition to political transformation, but a critical and material necessity in its becoming.

Act 3 IMAGINE PEACE Above us only sky August 2018 Washington: Riding the Metro with my son, I spot a woman whose tee shirt reads ‘You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one’. On my way out of the train, I tell her I like her shirt and she smiles. My son, on the platform, rolls his eyes and laughs,‘I knew you’d say something about that shirt!’ We are on our way to the Hirshhorn Museum to add our wishes to Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree.

Wishing and imagining reside at the heart of the myriad projects that comprise IMAGINE PEACE, and to some, these seem weak tools through which to transform

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the world, especially a world wracked by violence, confict, ecological devastation and war. Yet, as we have seen, transnational feminists cast imagination as a potential ‘strong card’ in a transformative politics, and look to its central role in building peace. In the fnal Act of this chapter, I want to examine the claims made for imagination as part of a feminist transversal practice of peace, particularly as they are staged in and through the various aesthetic strategies of IMAGINE PEACE. Doing this asks not whether IMAGINE PEACE is political art, but rather how IMAGINE PEACE, as art, can engage political agency and to what effect. Shifting the terms of the debate in this direction is signifcant, as many critical comments on Ono’s peace work quickly move beyond the frame of her practice toward an evaluation of her lifestyle: is she too rich to be an activist, does she buy too many clothes, own too much property, give enough to charity, and so on. Without rehearsing at length the many donations Ono and the Spirit Foundation (co-founded with Lennon) have made over many years to global educational projects, the construction of schools in developing countries, the support of feminist and LGBT+ campaigns, world hunger projects, aid for people affected by ecological disasters and, of course, peace groups and activities, it is fair to say that Ono acts philanthropically to support political causes.48 It is likewise clear that she is aware that her presence can raise the profle of specifc campaigns (her own and those organized by others), and certainly Lennon and Ono together used their celebrity as a way to get media attention for their preferred political causes and art works. This is not merely empty posturing;‘opinion shapers’ are especially signifcant to the strategic information campaigns commonly fostered through transnational advocacy networks, as the desired end result is to change the discursive frame itself.49 However, focusing an analysis of the political agency of IMAGINE PEACE solely on philanthropic fund-raising and celebrity media coverage, tends to occlude the central question of its effcacy as an arts-based transnational feminist politics of peace, and that is the question that drives my engagement with the work here. The artworks that comprise IMAGINE PEACE are much more than a convenient device by which to generate a celebrity media storm. For over half a century, Ono has engaged in a consistent and coherent body of conceptual art practice, deploying a range of materials and aesthetic strategies to explore the intimate interrelationships between selves, others and worlds, as these are creatively mediated through thoughts, sounds, words, gestures, images and objects. Turning this practice toward an active advocacy for peace, Ono’s project fosters an affective mode of engagement with/in the world that is embodied, entangled and profoundly response-able/responsible. By engendering what I am calling here ‘irenic attention’, IMAGINE PEACE participates in a transversal practice of peace through, rather than in spite of, its qualities as art. In her catalogue essay for Ono’s 2012 show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Alexandra Munroe summed up the paradox inherent in the reception of Ono’s peace activist art well, when she wrote: Ono’s pacifism has been dismissed as naïve by the right and not militant enough by the left, for decades. The counter argument to ‘War is over if you

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want it’ is ‘War is over if you win it’. But winning has never been Ono’s goal; provoking change is what she wants her social art to effect. By shifting our perspective just a little, by imagining good, her enduring creative vision opens a wider world of possibility for us all.50 Munroe’s evaluation draws together a deep knowledge of Ono’s work over many years, a measured approach to her biography and to the work of other critics in the feld, as well as a friendship with the artist herself. Not surprisingly, critics and scholars sensitive to Ono’s project frequently make the connection between imagination, change and possibility, in addition to the links between wishing and imagining, love and peace, and the centrality of the ‘instruction’ within Ono’s practice, as a strategy to generate the active participation of the ‘audience’ with and in the works.51 But acknowledging the creative imbrication of love, hope and imagination in the peace projects neither counters the charge that the work is politically ‘naïve’, nor makes it more ‘militant’; in short, it does not explain how the works might be said to engender political agency beyond this binary deadlock. However, unpacking the critical imbrication of these terms and developing their ramifcations through contemporary political philosophy and transnational feminist cultural theory, does enable us to argue the stronger case that IMAGINE PEACE materializes an effective transnational feminist transversal politics of peace through the arts. The articulation of wishing and imagining in Ono’s work provides a useful starting point in arguing this stronger case. In an interview with the curator Kerry Brougher in 2007, Ono was asked how she understood the difference between wishing and imagining in her practice. Her answer linked both processes to ‘imaging’, creating powerful mental images through directed (irenic) attention. However, she located the force of wishing within a ‘negative reality’ (wishing to change or escape from a ‘terrible situation’), contrasting this with imagining peace as stretching toward the open potential of what can become.52 This points to two important trajectories: the affective power of hope within liberatory politics and the introduction of ‘pure possibility’ through the phenomenology of autonomous imagining as a mode of attentive care. Hope is never far from Ono’s invocation of wishing and imagining, nor from transnational feminist activisms.53 In a particularly compelling account of ‘feminist hope’ from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed fgured its signifcance as an affective force for transformation, even as she signalled its limits, when taken as the object of political investment: Politics without hope is impossible and hope without politics is a reification of possibility (and becomes merely religious). . . . The moment of hope is when the ‘not yet’ impresses upon us in the present, such that we must act, politically, to make it our future.54 Feminist and other liberatory political projects are, for Ahmed, both critical and hopeful, grounded by the material legacy of the past and yet working for transformation toward a future marked by pure possibility – wishing and imagining

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combined. Like Cockburn’s transversal practice of peace, hope generates a politics of the future perfect that accepts the contingency of all political emergence – ‘it may become’. In his pivotal phenomenological study of imagining, Edward Casey also pointed to the domain of imagination as one of ‘pure possibility’, the locus of open futurity. For Casey, the ‘possibilizing’ force of imagination is premised on its phenomenological practice, on imagining as an act of intention toward the world, rather than imagination as an object of contemplation.55 Casting imagination as a possibilizing practice has signifcant ramifcations for thinking about the intimate interrelationships between politics, ethics and aesthetics. In their critical contemporary reading of the work of Benedict Spinoza, Collective Imaginings, feminist philosophers Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd offered an exceptionally compelling account of the connections between imagination, affect, subjectivity and responsibility, arguing that ‘sociability is inherently affective’, and that any sense we have of individual identity is already constituted by ‘economies of affect and imagination which bind us to others in relations of joy and sadness, love and hate, co-operation and antagonism’.56 Their exploration of imagination as constitutive of powerful social fctions and subjectivities is particularly signifcant here, as it posits the locus of the political agency of imagination beyond ‘representation’: Imaginative constructions of who and what we are, are ‘materialized’ through the forms of embodiment to which those constructions give rise. The imagination may create fables, fictions or collective ‘illusions’, which have ‘real’ effects, that is, which serve to structure forms of identity, social meaning and value, but which, considered in themselves, are neither true nor false.57 If the arts engender political or ethical agency, it is not by representing a political premise, but by materializing imagination through powerful fctions, or by generating affective economies, through which intersubjective identifcations and forms of intersectional sociability can emerge. Gatens and Lloyd argue strongly for the role of imagination within a decolonizing feminist politics that refuses to reify ‘identity’ as a fxed essence, and radically opens us to more responsible and responsive ways of knowing and living in the world. Their argument makes clear that ‘real’ effects are the outcome of ways of knowing and imagining, and like Cockburn, their argument demonstrates, materially, how transformative politics ‘demand imagination’. One of the most enduring aspects of Ono’s art is its focus upon the affrmative (the ‘yes’), and its corollary formulation in instruction pieces that open possibility through the future perfect (the ‘may be’). As Munroe has argued, the disparity between principally male, mainstream conceptualists’ emphasis upon ‘negation (critique)’ and Ono’s persistent invocation of ‘affrmation (imagination)’ has not always served Ono well in the dominant histories of conceptual art.58 Nor, I would argue, has it mediated against a pre-emptive evaluation of her peace work as ‘naïve’: Many writers kept predicting a doomsday future. John and I kept predicting a very beautiful, open future. . . . At the time we were accused of being

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naïve by other songwriters, artists and underground political people. . . . (but) I think it is very important to keep the dialogue going and keep our future open, not closed.59 From a ‘yes’ at the top of a ladder, to a chessboard whose all white pieces unravel the familiar martial logic underpinning the game,60 Ono’s work keeps the dialogue going through an affrmative criticality that foregrounds new possibilities as it undoes naturalized rules.61 As Kristine Stiles eloquently argued, Ono’s use of the imperative tense of verbs (‘imagine’,‘decide’), in combination with an extraordinary simplicity of means, facilitated ‘calls to action demanding imaginative and decisive behavioural responses’, or, in Ahmed’s formulation, the works bring us to a moment of hope, when the ‘not yet’ impresses upon us such that we must act.62 And, by provoking an imaginative disruption that precisely exposes the limits of current thinking premised upon mastery, domination and control, the work counters the sedimented patterns of thought that support the prosecution of war. This is not a naïve gesture underlined by counter-cultural rhetoric, but a resounding riposte to the criticism that the politics of the works are not ‘militant enough’. Ono’s practice refuses to play by the rules that suggest peace activism should be ‘militant’, rejecting such deadly, polarized logic as ‘the master’s tools’, ill-fashioned to dismantle the master’s house.63 Instead, Ono’s works emphasize the necessity of fnding new tools and methods, and in this way, they resonate not only with the words of Lorde, who so eloquently celebrated women’s solidarity in and through difference, but with those of Virginia Woolf, who, some four decades earlier, invoked collective dreams (imagination) and the creation of new methods as integral to feminist pacifsm: But that would be to dream – to dream the recurring dream that has haunted the human mind since the beginning of time; the dream of peace, the dream of freedom. . . . [W]e can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.64 This strand in feminist pacifst thought has not dwindled in recent years, but gathered momentum as transnational scholars and activists have continued to demonstrate that dominating, combative methods within peacebuilding efforts on the ground, and in the peace movement itself, are counter-productive. Simply put, peace is not engendered through violence, domination and war, or in Ono’s terms, we must ‘surrender to peace’.65 The proposition demonstrated in the fnal turn of this Act is that IMAGINE PEACE cultivates irenic attention by means of a resonant, ‘vibrational practice’. Arguably, in this way the project fnds new words and creates new methods, particular to the arts, toward a feminist transversal practice of peace. In using the phrase ‘vibrational practice’, I am taking my lead from the insights of Nina Sun Eidsheim in Sensing Sound, where she argues for a shift away from a-priori (and

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highly human-centred) categories of sound (for example, as ‘music’ or ‘voice’), to an exploration of the practices of ‘vibration’ and ‘transmission’. In this shift, human bodies become but one material node, entangled in a world alive with a vast array of vibrations/transmissions and, moreover, as Eidsheim argues: In our relationship to sound, we are both in and of vibrations. . . . In this model, we are sound. Like sound, which comes into being through its material transmission, human beings are not stable and knowable prior to entering into a relationship; rather, we unfold and bring each other into being through relationships.66 To describe Ono’s work as a resonant, vibrational practice permits making a number of important connections between and across its material, conceptual, intellectual and political frames, and signifcantly here, provides a fnal connection between IMAGINE PEACE as art, and a feminist transversal practice of peace as ‘relational work’.67 Aesthetically, Ono’s practice is internally iterative and resonant, and not insignifcantly, she described the phrase around which the project coheres,‘imagine peace’, as a mantra.68 Thoughts, ideas and concepts are materialized in words, sounds, gestures, objects and images that repeat through and across differences of time, space and genre. It is also profoundly participatory, maintaining its radical aesthetic contingency through distributed agency; the work emerges in its transmission with/ in, between, through and across many differentially situated, embodied participants. Ono’s work is never fnished, where that term suggests ‘complete’; rather, it always admits of the possibility of further elaboration in future perfect. These aesthetic strategies facilitate the mutual becoming of subjects and worlds in and through directed imagining, irenic attention, where attention is both an embodied, entangled, stretching toward and a mode of care. Not surprisingly, particular forms and materials are perennially reprised within Ono’s practice (music, sound and scores, water, light and sky), and particular gestures, such as the affrmative ‘yes’, the relational instruction, and the resonant smile, emerge time and again, unfolding variations on a theme. Each of these might be understood to manifest a mode of vibrational practice that materializes imagination to create both powerful fctions (the future possibility of peace) and affective economies (intersubjective bonds and solidarities) that have ‘real’ political and ethical effects. Tracing but one line through the vibrant web of Ono’s long and multidimensional practice demonstrates this proposition. Water, sound and light are my way markers along this route, as they have intrinsic connections with vibration, but are also central to Ono’s materialization of agency as inherently intersubjective, and of aesthetics as a force for forging solidarities. Water, sound and light are also pivotal to IMAGINE PEACE and constitutive of the contingent becoming of IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. But each element does more: water fgures the profound interconnectedness between all living beings and the elemental forces of the world,69 sound harmonizes

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Yoko Ono, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, 2007. Outdoor sculpture, Videy island, Reykjavik.

FIGURE 5.3

Photograph by Rafael Pinho; Collection of Reykjavik Art Museum. © Yoko Ono, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

our bodies with other bodies (not only human) in relays of transmission, light/sky invokes hope for possibilities as yet unrealized (or unrealizable as yet).70 These elements come full circle in the practice of ‘vibration’, a practice that has also been pivotal to another resonant and recurrent gesture within Ono’s practice – the smile. In 1967, Ono’s mirrored box, Self-Portrait (1965) became Box of Smile (1967). In the same year, in her notes ‘On Film No. 4’, she wrote: ‘My ultimate goal in flmmaking is to make a flm which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world’.71 In 1968, she produced Film no.5 (Smile) and in 2010, she embarked upon the ongoing, online participatory project, #smilesflm. Smiling also fgures in some of Ono’s most cryptic comments, such as when she issued her frst public statement after Lennon was killed, saying ‘I saw John smiling in the sky’ or when, discussing the Oslo Water Event from 2005, she said:‘I think the water all over the world knows about this and sends its love, smiling . . .’72 For Ono, smiling is an intersubjective transmission of love, empathy and solidarity, effected in and through vibration. Describing Film no.5 (Smile), in which the camera lingers on Lennon’s face in close up as he smiles at Ono, the artist made the connection directly: ‘we were mainly concerned about the vibration the flms send out – the kind that were between us’.73 Ono’s invocation of vibration is, like Eidsheim’s, relational, and underpinned by an understanding of subjectivity as embodied and profoundly entangled with/in the world, such that we can generate, transmit, receive and amplify, affective resonances between ourselves, others and the

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vibrant matter of the cosmos.74 It is also linked specifcally to an aesthetics of light – refections formed when a box opens to the light and a flm that, in her words, could be projected as a ‘light-portrait’. We have come to understand bodies and matter as fxed and inert, but we are in fux; sound, light, vibration cutting through the differences of our ‘containers’, bringing us bodily into connection through our resonant participation in affective economies.75 Moreover, the embodied resonance of smiling is not simply the manifestation of a general ‘optimism’ or the expression of a passing ‘joke’; smiling is linked with a determined practice of care that again invokes the light. Take, as a fnal instance, the telling comments Ono made in an interview in 2012: YO: Many people say that I’m an optimist, but I’m not; I’m a pragmatist and I really think that pragmatically speaking we’re heading towards the light. YO: When I first thought about it (the #smilesfilm project), I was thinking about all the people in the world smiling together and it was just such a high. And I wrote about it in Grapefruit. When John passed away, and I couldn’t smile any more, I really had to think about how to smile. I wanted to be a mother who could smile again, for my son, Sean. JPJ: So it is more about positivity: that you smile to create this sense of connection with other people and begin this incredible bank of positive feeling. YO: Yes . . . JPJ: A joke is a very different thing from a smile. YO: That’s true. Jokes are a head game and a smile is a body game. And it really is important that your body gets that chance to smile.76 That our bodies smile, that we can create vibrations, smiling, and that these will transmit between bodies,77 and between our bodies and the water, the earth and the sky, are constitutive elements of a conceptual aesthetics of affrmation that has developed over many years to form the groundwork for the political practice of IMAGINE PEACE [Colour plate 16]. IMAGINE PEACE seeks to create an affective and epistemic network through waves and matter, energy and transmission, capable of changing the way we think and live. The affective economies that are set up within and between human and non-human agents by the works that comprise IMAGINE PEACE are a way of generating attention, a stretching toward and a caring for, the world. The action is peace, the attention is irenic, and the message is infectious; like a smile, irenic attention focuses the vibrational energy of our bodies toward non-dominative, dialogic possibilities for living differently, for sharing the world with others in ways that enhance peace. From the smallest actions of attention, empathy and care taken in everyday life, to earth-wide political campaigning, IMAGINE PEACE is indicative of the role the arts might play in materializing new methods of non-dominative, ecological thinking within a transnational feminist transversal practice of peace. Its imbrication of the micro within the macro carries an implication: how we care for ourselves and for those whom we love produces the conditions that determine how

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we care for strangers and the earth itself, to whom and which we are generously connected. Moving toward a time of peace stretches us to become responsible for, and response-able to, others, creating the imaginative solidarities that enable a future to emerge that is more than the endless repetition of the past.

After words, IMAGINE PEACE78 17 October 2018 Videy Island, Reykjavik: The group who have come to see IMAGINE PEACE TOWER are from all over the world; the anticipation on the ferry to Videy is palpable. When the beam of light comes into view, everyone goes quiet – watching, smiling. Standing at the base of the work with my son, I am looking at the sky. The blue light is playing against a few clouds in the cold, night air, when a shooting star cuts across our view. The guide says ‘Make a wish!’ . . . I already have.

Notes 1 On the struggle to bring a gendered perspective to bear on mainstream international relations (IR) see, for example, Maria O’Reilly, ‘Gender and Peacebuilding’, in Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding, edited by Roger MacGinty, London and New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 57–68 and the first chapter of Seema Shekhawat’s book Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir: Invisible Stakeholders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Research commissioned by UN Women is particularly sharp on the issue of women being marginalized in conflict and post-conflict negotiations; see ‘Young Women in Peace and Security’. Available at: www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/peace-and-security/ young-women-in-peace-and-security. 2 There is a very strong transnational feminist literature in peace studies; see for example: Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict, London: Zed Books, 1998 and From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis, London: Zed Books, 2007; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007; Betty Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. For a very good overview, see: Catia Cecilia Confortini,‘Feminist Contributions and Challenges to Peace Studies’, International Studies, March 2010. Available at: http://internationalstudies.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-47 (accessed November 2017). 3 Cynthia Cockburn,‘War and Security, Women and Gender: An Overview of the Issues’, Gender and Development, 21:3, 2013, pp. 433–52, p. 433. 4 Cynthia Cockburn, ‘Transversal Politics: A Practice of Peace’, Pacifist Feminism, 22, February 2015, no pages. This text comes some 16 years after Cockburn first links transversal politics with feminist practices of peacebuilding in her work. 5 Cockburn,‘Transversal Politics’, op. cit. 6 Cockburn,‘Transversal Politics’, op. cit. 7 Cockburn,‘Transversal Politics’, op. cit. Cockburn is not alone among peace campaigners; Code Pink similarly places imagination at the centre of its work, see ‘A Local Peace Economy’. Available at: www.codepink.org. 8 See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics,Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1998;Moya Lloyd,Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005; Sylvia Falcón and J.C. Nash, ‘Shifting Analytics and Linking Theories: A Conversation

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9

10 11

12 13

about the “Meaning-Making” of Intersectionality and Transnational Feminism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 March 2015, pp. 1–10. In this chapter, I will follow Ono’s lead and collect these loosely under the rubric of IMAGINE PEACE: ‘In 1969, John and I started my ‘War Is Over’ campaign, and I have continued to use that work in various ways into the present. But more importantly, the work has progressed into IMAGINE PEACE – and into IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland’. (NB: Ono usually has her titles in capital letters, but rarely in italics as they are in this interview). Quote taken from Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist,‘Interview with Yoko Ono’, in Yoko Ono: To the Light (ex.cat.), London: Serpentine Gallery and Koenig Books, 2012, pp. 34–40, p. 40. The revisionist scholarship establishes Ono’s legacy in no uncertain terms and I take it as read that she played an important role in post-war international art circles. In using the term ‘irenic attention’, I am drawing upon the derivation of both terms from the Greek: attention, to stretch toward, and irenic, the time of peace. Over time, the term ‘attention’ has incorporated a further valence that is significant to my argument: a mode of care. I take this term directly from the work of Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, op. cit. There are multiple sources for the ‘Light House’ instruction and the tale of Ono discussing it with Lennon over lunch in 1967 (see, for example, the explanatory narrative for IMAGINE PEACE TOWER taken from an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘The Architecture Interview, Van Alen Institute, New York, June 2008’, in Obrist, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, 17, op. cit., pp. 39–62, p. 42). The 1970 edition of Grapefruit included Ono’s Sales List from 1965, which was reprinted and made available at the Indica show of 1966 at which she met Lennon. It reads:‘LIGHT HOUSE – a house constructed of light from prisms, which exists in accordance with the changes of the day’. Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions by Yoko Ono, Introduction by John Lennon, London: Peter Owen, 1970, no pages. The longer description is reprinted in Yoko Ono with Jon Hendricks and Thomas Kellein, Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2008, p. 192 (misattributed to Grapefruit, 1970, in which it does not appear): Build a house with walls which come into existence only with the particular prism effect created by sunset If necessary, some walls or parts of the walls can be made of material other than light 1965 SPRING

14 Integral to IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is a website (http://imaginepeacetower.com/) that offers livestreaming of the beam and information about the project, a book and CD rom (IMAGINE PEACE TOWER Videy Island Reykjavik Iceland, Reykjavik: Iceland Post in collaboration with Yoko Ono, 2008), and a commemorative stamp that marked the first anniversary of the work. The projects comprising IMAGINE PEACE are even more various and transmedial, but again, Ono’s website (http://imaginepeace.com/) is important as a pivot for the project. 15 It is not surprising to find that transversal politics and peacebuilding have been intimately connected with ‘translating practices’ for these very same reasons. See, for example, Cynthia Cockburn and Lynette Hunter, ‘Transversal Politics and Translating Practices’, Soundings, 12, 1999, pp. 88–93. 16 In a reprinted article on the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER website (http://imaginepeacetower.com/yoko-onos-wish-trees/), Ono refers to the date of the wish trees coming

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17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29 30

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about:‘It’s after 1981, after John, my husband’s, passing’. However, the generally accepted date for the first installation of a Wish Tree is 1996 and thus I note both dates, but will adhere to 1996 as the first instance of the work’s materialization. Soundings 12, 1999 (back page). Tina Sideris,‘Problems of Identity, Solidarity and Reconciliation’, in The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, edited by Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay and Meredith Turshen, London and New York: Zed Books, 2001, pp. 46–62, p. 56. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, op. cit., p. ix. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, op. cit., pp. x, 2–3, 16, 25, 33, 181. Ono’s excitement about using the internet within her practice is palpable in two interviews she had with Hans Ulrich Obrist, see: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, 17, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009; Interview I, pp. 7–32, p. 19 and Interview III, pp. 39–62, p. 54. Obrist, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, Interview I, pp. 7–32, op. cit., p. 21. It is not coincidental that Mignon Nixon’s astute exploration of the interconnections between feminism, sexual politics and the campaigns to end the undeclared war in Vietnam opens with Yoko and John’s honeymoon Bed In in Amsterdam, 1969. See: Mignon Nixon, ‘What’s Love Got to Do, Got to Do with It: Feminist Politics and America’s War in Vietnam’, in Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975, edited by Melissa Ho, Thomas Crow, Martha Rosler, Mignin Nixon, Erica Levin, Katherine Markoski, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, pp. 325–48. From Yoko Ono interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Mix a Building and The Wind, New York, November 2001’, in Obrist, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, 17, op. cit., p. 28; and reprinted in IMAGINE PEACE TOWER Videy Island Reykjavik Iceland, op. cit., p. 59. It is interesting that Ono speaks of having begun work on the Iceland project as early as this interview from 2001. Ono was no stranger to living across borders, having been domiciled in both Japan and the United States during her childhood and as a college student. As a young adult, her professional practice saw her moving between Tokyo, New York and London frequently and she had twice married, once to a Japanese citizen and once to a US citizen. With Lennon, she faced additional visa issues during the early 1970s and the two were only able to settle permanently in New York City a few years before his death. The impossibility of using a fixed national framework to describe Ono’s practice has been mentioned in many publications, not least: Kristine Stiles, ‘Being Undyed: The Meeting of Mind and Matter in Yoko Ono’s Events’, in YES Yoko Ono, ex.cat., New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000, pp. 145–9, p. 147; Alexandra Munroe,‘Why War? Yoko by Yoko at the Serpentine’, in Yoko Ono: To the Light, op. cit., pp. 8–13, p. 10; Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombing during the Second World War, was rebuilt as a covenant to peace and reconciliation. In this charged space, the ‘union’ of East and West hearkened back to the Second World War even as it nodded to the then-current conflict in Viet Nam. The boxes, note and many of the replies they received are archived on the IMAGINE PEACE website: http://imaginepeace.com/archives/6633. References to the space being John Lennon’s garden are found in more than one source; see, for example, IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, op. cit., p. 77 and ‘The Architecture Interview, Van Alen Institute, New York, June 2008’, in Obrist, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, 17, op. cit., pp. 39–62, p. 45. Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Peace Index 2018: Measuring Peace in a Complex World, Sydney, June 2018. Available at: http://visionofhumanity.org/app/ uploads/2018/06/Global-Peace-Index-2018-2.pdf (accessed September 2018). World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2017. Available at: www3.weforum. org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf (accessed September 2018).

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31 Janie L. Leatherman, Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict, Cambridge: Polity, 2011, pp. 3–4. 32 Cynthia Cockburn and Cynthia Enloe, ‘Militarism, Patriarchy and Peace Movements’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14:4, 2012, pp. 550–7, pp. 551–2. 33 There is almost too much UN data on this, but see especially UN Resolution 1325 (2000) and Resolution 2242 (2015) that set out the centrality of gender equality and international peace and security, as well as the key role of men and boys in supporting women and girls in equal partnerships. 34 This argument is made elsewhere in this volume, see especially, Chapter 4. In addition, it is noteworthy that in 2015, Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, announced the establishment of a fund to end the gender gap by 2020 with these words:‘Men cannot sit idly by when issues such as gender-based violence and the gender pay gap are being discussed. These are not only women‘s issues. These are issues of general human rights’. UN Women: www.unwomen.org/en/get-involved/step-it-up/commitments/iceland. This further plays out through the important HeForShe campaign: www. unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2017/12/press-release-heforshe-international-humansolidarity-day. 35 The significance of the Ono Lennons as a symbol was not lost on the couple; as Lennon said: ‘One kid up in Yorkshire wrote this heartfelt letter about being both Oriental and English and identifying with John & Yoko; the odd kid in the class. There are a lot of those kids who identify with us. . . . They identify with us as a couple, a biracial couple, who stand for love, peace, feminism, and the positive things of the world. You know, give peace a chance, not shoot people for peace’, cited in Yoko Ono Lennon, Imagine John Yoko, London: Thames and Hudson, 2018, p. 23. 36 Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley: Crossing Press, (1984) 2007, pp. 110–13. In addition, Chrissie Iles makes the case that Ono’s feminism was always coalitional, included men and was focused on dismantling power relationships at all levels; in Yoko Ono: Have you seen the horizon lately? Essay by Chrissie Iles, Texts by Yoko Ono, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1998, p. 136. 37 Cynthia Cockburn,‘War and Security, Women and Gender: An Overview of the Issues’, Gender and Development, 21:3, 2013, pp. 433–52, p. 433. And note that Ono’s work has long linked multiple forms of sexual violence to normative gender roles, as per her reprise of Three Mounds in Bielefeld (Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head, 2008): ‘Three Mounds, women subjected to domestic violence, women forced into madhouse, women victims of elder abuse y.o.08’. 38 This is consistent in interviews by the couple (for a particularly moving account, see Imagine John Yoko, op. cit., p. 128), in the critical literature on Ono and persisting in more recent reviews, such as the one by Tim Hilton of Ono’s show at Oxford MOMA in the Independent, 7 December 1997. 39 Alan Smith, ‘The Anthem of the World’ (1971 interview with John and Yoko Ono Lennon for the NME), reprinted The Best of NME, 1970–1974, vol. 4, TI Media Ltd., pp. 37–41, p. 38. 40 The famous statement by Lennon is reprinted in Imagine John Yoko, p. 41:‘Imagine should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song because a lot of it – the lyric and the concept – came from Yoko. But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book. There’s a whole pile of pieces about ‘Imagine this’ and ‘Imagine that’. And give her credit now, long overdue’ (1980). 41 IMAGINE PEACE website, archives: http://imaginepeace.com/archives/6633. 42 I am obviously borrowing this phrase from Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, New York: Crown Publishers, 2006. The more recent story (and fabulous images that went viral) of Parker Curry, the little girl mesmerized by Michelle Obama’s portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, will suffice to remind us of the power of role models, and of the visual arts, in establishing greater representation and diversity in politics and social life.

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43 In a recent interview, Obama was asked about the polarization of politics in the United States and referenced this notion of being ‘soft’ directly: ‘“There are well-meaning folks passionate about social justice, who think things have gotten so bad, the lines have been so starkly drawn, that we have to fight fire with fire . . . I don’t agree with that. It’s not because I’m soft,” he added’. Peter Baker,‘Obama Lashes Trump in Debut 2018 Speech’, The New York Times, 7 September 2018. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/ us/politics/obama-2018-campaign-trump.html (accessed October 2018). Significantly, refusing to fight fire with fire is central to Ono’s frequent invocation of the phrase attributed to Mohandas Gandhi:‘An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind’ and also the Ono Lennon’s establishment of ‘Nutopia’ with a white flag, so to surrender to, not fight for, peace. See: Obrist, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, 17, op. cit., p. 22. 44 Obama famously cried in public on seven occasions during his presidency: see www. bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38582921/seven-times-barack-obama-cried-during-anemotional-eight-years. 45 Statistically, gun crime is a male crime; 90% of shootings are committed by men who own more than 2/3 of all the guns in the US. While women and children are at risk from men with guns, the more shocking figures concern men’s homicide and suicide rates from guns. Just a snapshot of the telling statistics will suffice here: Alia Dastagir, ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, Men and Boys Kill People, Experts Say’, USA Today, February 15, 2018. Available at: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/10/men-specialrisk-guns-they-love/734961001/; for general statistics on gun crime worldwide from the BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41488081. 46 See Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of these ideas. 47 Significantly, neither Ono nor Lennon cast the process of personal change in gendered norms as easy or natural, but rather as a matter of learning to think and act differently:‘YO: John and I stood for peace and love but standing for peace doesn’t make either of us holier than thou . . . . JL: But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster’. Imagine John Yoko, op. cit., p. 128. 48 See IMAGINE PEACE website for information on the Spirit Foundation: http://imaginepeace.com/?s=spirit+foundation; https://whyhunger.org/. 49 It is now common knowledge that Lennon had been under surveillance by the CIA during the 1970s and that his US visa issues were politically motivated; opinion-makers and symbolism matter. 50 Munroe,‘Why War?’, op. cit., p. 13. 51 One of the most closely argued texts to explore the aesthetic strategies of the works as a means of translating imaginative potential into concrete (political) action is Stiles,‘Being Undyed’, op. cit. 52 ‘A Conversation with Yoko Ono: Thu, Apr 12, 2007,Yoko Ono discusses her “Wish Tree for Washington D.C.” installation at the Hirshhorn with Chief Curator Kerry Brougher’, https://hirshhorn.si.edu/explore/a-conversation-with-yoko-ono/ Minute 16.20 on the difference between wishing and imagining. 53 Jude Rogers, ‘Not the Only One: How Yoko Ono Helped Create John Lennon’s Imagine’ in www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/oct/06/how-yoko-ono-helped-createjohn-lennon-imagine:‘But what does the word “imagine” mean to Ono now? Her answer is simple but powerful: “To think of something to hope for.”’ 54 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 184. 55 Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1976 (2000, 2nd Edition), pp. 207. 56 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 77, 73. 57 Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, op. cit., p. 123. 58 Alexandra Munroe,‘Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono’, in YES Yoko Ono, op. cit. pp. 11–37, p. 13. Politics and conceptual practice have been uneasy bedfellows in the

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60 61

62 63

64 65

66

67 68

69

art historical literature for a number of other reasons, many of which mediated against Ono in early accounts; for this wider account, see Nizan Shaked’s excellent book The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Obrist,‘Mix a Building and a Wind’, Yoko Ono, The Conversation Series, 17, op. cit. p. 19. The difference between Ono’s affirmative stance and other avant-garde art and popular politics of the period was also noted by John Lennon in an interview with Jann S. Wenner, reprinted in ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, Imagine John Yoko, op. cit., pp. 58–61, p. 58:‘It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say no or fuck you; it says YES’. P. 58. All White Chess Set (1966), later reprised under the title Play It By Trust (1987ff). Information about the variations of this piece can be found in YES Yoko Ono, op. cit., pp. 136–9. I used the term ‘affirmative criticality’ as the title of the final chapter of Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, to invoke a stance that critically builds toward the future, rather than simply destroying the present or the past; the position has many resonances with Ono’s ‘yes’, though that was not its focus when written. Stiles,‘Being Undyed’, op. cit., p. 147. Lorde,‘The Master’s Tools’, op. cit. It is worth remembering that the intellectual circles in which Ono moved were not unaware of the anarchist counters to notions of ‘natural’ or ‘structural violence’ as the underpinning of all human behavior, as in the work of Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, New York: McClure Phillips and Co., 1902, and that the work of contemporaries, such as Murray Bookchin and Herbert Marcuse, also emphasized affirmation, generosity and imagination. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938; reprinted online at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu. au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/chapter3.html; the citation can be found on the final page of ch.3. Cockburn and Enloe,‘Militarism, Patriarchy and Peace Movements’, op. cit., p. 557; Ono, ‘Surrender to Peace’ full page Ad in The New York Times, Monday 24 January 1983, B10. Note that Ono’s open letter locates the argument for new methods (i.e. not fighting, but surrendering, for peace) directly within the context of US gun control debates, the murder of Lennon in 1980 and of a friend’s husband as the letter is being composed. This is a personal appeal, but it is not politically naïve or lacking context. And this ‘real-world’ (not naïve) contextualization has continued to the present where in the current exhibition in Liverpool of the life and work of the couple, Double Fantasy (2018–19), a wall text reads: “Over 1,400,000 people have been killed by guns since John Lennon was shot and killed on Dec 8, 1980.” Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 22, 24. It is important to note the significance of vibration in materialist feminist approaches to art, matter, attention and subjectivity, as these insights (especially in the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Erin Manning), precede and colour my reading of Eidsheim. See Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005; Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia, 2008; and Erin Manning, Individuation’s Dance: Always More Than One, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Cynthia Cockburn,‘When Is Peace? Women’s Post-Accord Experiences in Three Countries’, Soundings, 12, 1999, pp. 143–59, p. 157. In a telling passage, Ono described answering the question ‘Shouldn’t we do more than just imagining peace?’, by explaining that ‘imagine peace’, is a ‘contemporary mantra’, a means by which we can set up sonic resonances within ourselves and between ourselves and others, see Obrist, Interview III, op. cit., p. 54. From the early text piece of 1967, Water Talk (quoted here), to the many Water Event installations (the first in 1971), water connects us, even as our containers/limits, demonstrate the human propensity to differentiate between selves and others:

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Water Talk you are water/I’m water/we’re all water in different containers/that’s why it’s so easy to meet/someday we’ll evaporate together but even after the water’s gone/we’ll probably point out to the containers/and say, ‘that’s me there, that one.’/we’re container minders For Half-A-Wind Show, Lisson Gallery, London 1967. (Grapefruit, 1970, no pages) 70 Ono refers to our ‘heading towards the light’ as a powerful image of earth-wide solidarity in Peyton-Jones and Obrist,‘Interview with Yoko Ono’, op. cit., pp. 34–40. The sky plays a similar role to light for Ono, as a locus of open futurity provoked by imagining. 71 Reprinted in YES Yoko Ono, p. 297. 72 Dec 14th 1980 10-minute silent vigil observed at 2PM EST; statement: ‘BLESS YOU FOR YOUR TEARS AND PRAYERS./I SAW JOHN SMILING IN THE SKY./ I SAW SORROW CHANGING INTO CLARITY./ I SAW ALL OF US BECOMING ONE MIND./ THANK YOU.’ Reproduced in YES Yoko Ono, op. cit., p. 322; Obrist,‘Interview II Questions for Water Event Oslo, February 2005’, op. cit., pp. 33–8, p. 38. 73 Ono cited in Chrissie Iles, notes to Film No. 5 (Smile), in YES Yoko Ono, op. cit., p. 214. Dan Richter (Ono’s personal assistant in the 1970s), made a similar point about the resonance of smiling when describing the filming of Imagine:‘And then, finally, as it wraps up, she’s [Ono] sitting beside him [Lennon]; the little smile, that little recognition. It’s not a big smile. It’s a little, gentle smile of understanding. What a gift to the world’. in Imagine John Yoko, op. cit., p. 52. 74 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009. 75 In her excellent new book, Katve-Kaisa Konturri, makes a compelling case for the material potential of art, and of engaging with art, to change our ‘thinking-feeling’. See: Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration, London: Open Humanities Press, 2018, p. 194. 76 Peyton-Jones and Obrist,‘Interview with Yoko Ono’, op. cit., p. 40. 77 These are not dissimilar ideas to the arguments made by Teresa Brennan that bodies transmit affects and, in so doing, produce collective changes in the tenor of the group: The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Even more recently, Oxford University’s Kindlab has begun to collect data on the ‘transmission’ of kindness as a public health initiative, and its initial findings seem to suggest that it is possible that kindness and generosity are ‘infectious’, passing between bodies: https:// kindness.org/research/. 78 For my beautiful mother, Irene. My love for you is forever.

CONCLUDING . . . Contingent thoughts

Conventional wisdom suggests that we must reach a conclusion at the end of a book, but this volume starts a larger conversation in the form of a Trilogy and any conclusions reached here are, by defnition, provisional. More to the point, knowledge is contingent, and conclusions reached are at best staging posts en route to further (coyote) conversations, themselves already unfolding as we collect our thoughts, the better to ‘conclude’. But, as we have seen in the dialogues between transnational feminisms, transversal politics, intersections, entanglements and art that have unfolded across the pages of this volume, contingency is creative. If we embrace transversal dialogues in difference, we welcome with them the transformative power of imagination to forge dynamic solidarities that can sustain knowing, imagining and inhabiting, earth-wide and otherwise, as an ongoing feminist praxis that never reaches a fnal conclusion. Engaging in the dialogues that open between transnational feminisms and the arts is both generous and generative. Epistemic communities do not emerge through the mastery of meta-discourse, but in many small acts of attention – close reading, vulnerable listening, careful looking. Attending takes time and builds relationships; it is a radically connective practice that seeks affective affnities, and establishes productive synergies, between subjects and objects, spaces and scales, materials and ideas, where these might not, at frst sight, have appeared to exist. But this does not mean that the arguments at the centre of this volume abnegate responsibility for the bigger picture; exploring transnational feminisms and the arts teaches us how to build transversal networks that compel greater social and ecological responsibility through aesthetic and epistemic response-ability. Forging solidarities through epistemic and affective connections counters the divisive logic that promotes fear and violence. The conversations between transnational feminisms, transversal politics and the arts that this volume enacts over fve chapters make critical connections between the local (the ‘intimate’) and the global, the personal and the political, the realm of

Concluding . . .

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ethics and the feld of politics. These arguments connect knowledge with imagination, seeing them as critically entangled in liberatory politics. This book undoes ‘centre-periphery’ dynamics in favour of mutual and multidirectional exchanges to demonstrate how multidimensional, minoritarian thinking and making in action can effect sustainable change. More strongly, I am arguing that, without changing the ways in which subjects know, imagine and inhabit the world, there can be little hope of dismantling the structures that so effectively uphold present social, economic and ecological injustices globally. At a time when the inequities of globalization, war, poverty, renewed nationalisms, forced migrations, sexual and gender-based violence, and ecological destruction are increasing rapidly, new ways of thinking, making, knowing, imagining and inhabiting the world, respectful of difference, proactive in building peaceful coalitions and communities, and creative in their approaches to inclusive participation and collective responsibility, could hardly be more vital. Knowing, imagining and inhabiting, earth-wide and otherwise, requires new tools. This volume made a start by assembling its fellow travellers and beginning to chart its course through a series of provisional coordinates. Some of these coordinates will reappear in the next volumes – questions of scale, attentive listening, ecological thinking, denizen cartographies, vital matter, decolonizing feminist methodologies, radical pedagogy – to be joined by new and extended fgurations for thinking with transnational feminisms and the arts, such as horizontal histories, genealogies, resonance, gardens and the trans-canon. In particular, questions concerning institutions, labour, legacies and practices come to the fore in the next volume. It has, since the inception of the Trilogy, been intended that some works of art will play a role in more than one volume. Like characters in novels, using the works in this way enables tales to unfold from different perspectives, through differences of time, place, focus and, importantly, connections with other characters/works. The geographies explored in the present book will extend and expand as they are met with works from other times and places, and the conceptual architecture that holds each volume together will provide spaces of interconnection across and between the three. The writing in each of the chapters of this volume shifted in tone and timbre as I sought to listen to, and write with, its diverse material. The next two volumes pose new and different challenges for the practice of writing with art and their shape remains, as yet, a Gedankenexperiment. As I conclude this opening conversation, I return to the notion of position, of taking a place, with others, to make and re-make the world. Situating myself as a feminist is an act of positioning, and for me, it has always come with and through the creative work of other feminists. Many of these scholars, artists, writers and activists have been situated very differently from me, yet their ability to articulate with exceptional beauty and power from somewhere, spoke to me, elsewhere. The knowledge, forged corporeally before it was intelligible intellectually, that feminist thought, activism and art can effect change across vast and myriad differences, is my positional talisman. To end, I offer a tale.

154 Concluding . . .

When I was 13, I travelled with my parents by train to Washington DC. A white, suburban girl from Pennsylvania, I was an avid student of ballet, an even more avid reader and a visceral cosmopolitan, though I could not have used those words. When the train stopped in Philadelphia, my parents and I made a beeline for a bookstore. It was 1979, and I found Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf on a small stand in the store. Riveted, delighted, moved (women, dance, poetry!), I took it on the train and read it in one breath. It described experiences I both shared and did not (indeed, in some ways, could not); sameness and difference in equal measure, beautiful, eloquent, emotive, empowering ideas expressed through the bodies of women. As I read and looked and listened with care and attention to the creative, liberatory politics of Black women materialized through the affective and imaginative force of art, the world I inhabited was transformed from inside out, and so was I. The book was an invitation to forge feminist solidarities across differences – to declare our interdependence, and bear in mind that our selves are always already spoken and danced through the voices and gestures of others with whom we make and share the world. I offer this volume to continue that most generous gesture.

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INDEX

(‘n’ indicates reference to a note, e.g. ‘43n45’ refers to note 45 on page 43. Page numbers in italics refer exclusively to figures.) ACORN PEACE (Ono and Lennon) 133, 136 Ahmed, Sara 139–40, 141 AIDS 85, 97n51 Alaimo, Stacy 84–5 All Our Mothers (Williamson) 22–3, 27 anarchism 7, 8, 13n29, 82, 150n63 Anishinabe 58, 60, 61 Anniversary – An Act of Memory (Ross) 53–6, 57, 62, 68n28 anti-nuclear campaigning 82 Arnold, Marion 21, 41n16 Art Gallery of New South Wales 80 Art Laboratory Berlin 88, 91 ArtThrob 23 Australia: ecofeminism 73–82, 93 Australian feminist philosophy 82, 95n34 Australians, Indigenous 79–80, 81–2, 93, 94n21 Baca, Judith 63 Barthes, Roland 45–7, 48 beads, glass: Indian Act 56, 58–9 Beale, Howard 79 Belmonte, Plaza, Quito 111–17 Belmore, Rebecca 118n20 belonging, intersectional 49–51, 52, 56, 60–1, 62, 66 Benhabib, Seyla 104 Biddy Mason: Time and Place (de Bretteville and The Power of Place) 62, 63, 64–6

Biddy Mason Project 62, 63, 65, 70n50 Biko, Stephen 24, 25 Black feminism 8, 14n37, 28 Blue Danube (large bomb) (Scarce) 80–1 Bologna: transversal politics 6, 7, 13n26 bookstores, feminist 106 border crossing:Yoko Ono and John Lennon 132–3, 147n25 Bosnian War: rape 120n49 Bouabdellah, Zoulika 47–8, 67n9 Braidotti, Rosi 50–1, 83–4, 96n43 Brassil, Joan 73–7, 78–9, 81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 92–3, 94nn13–18, 21, 95n31 Bread and Roses Cultural Project 101, 102, 105, 117n6 Calabi-Yau manifolds 89, 98n66 call-and-response 28 Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging? (Brassil) 76–7, 88, 91, 94n17 Canada: Indian Act (1876) 56–7, 59, 69n38 Cartas de Mujeres 112, 113, 116, 121nn54, 55 Casey, Edward 140 centre-periphery models 3–4, 5–6, 153 Chang-Jin Lee 109 Cho, Sumi 7–8 citizenship: Biddy Mason 65; intersectional belonging 49–51, 52, 56, 60–1, 62, 66; myth of national 45–7, 48–9, 56; see also Dansons (Let’s Dance); world 52–3, 55, 56 Cockburn, Cynthia 123–4, 135, 136

168 Index

Code, Lorraine 19, 71, 73, 112–13, 115 Collective Imaginings (Gatens and Lloyd) 52, 140 Collins, Patricia Hill 26, 28 colonialism, French 45–8 Comfort Women Wanted (Chiang-Jin) 109 Common Land/Greenham (Harrison) 82–3 communities, epistemic 1, 4, 7, 8, 11, 31, 40, 152; Australian feminist philosophy 82; Chris J. Cuomo 90; Donna Haraway 21; Heresies collective 105, 106; IMAGINE PEACE 126; Nilima Sheikh 35; Nira Yuval-Davis 18, 19, 90; Sheila Levrant de Bretteville 64; Suzanne Lacy 113; Vandana Shiva 98n62 Consider the Fungi at the Interface (Brassil) 92–3 contingency 5, 18, 19, 20, 22, 31, 40, 73; citizenship 49, 52; creativity of 152; hope 140; Joan Brassil 90, 93; Joanna Hoffmann 90; peacemaking coalitions 124; Terrain 35, 37;Yoko Ono 127, 142 conversation 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 29, 40, 152–3; see also dialogue; De tu Puño y Letra 115; Donna Haraway 20, 21, 41n13; ecofeminism 71, 77–8, 90; Terrain 32, 37; There’s something I must tell you 27; Thinking of You 106–7; Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming 77–8 co-production 74, 77, 87, 88, 98n62 cosmopolitanism 51–2, 68n23 Couacaud, Sally 87 Coventry Cathedral 133, 147n26 coyote 21, 32, 37, 40, 89, 98n71, 152 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 7–8 Crystal Quilt (Lacy) 121n64 Cultural Politics of Emotion, The (Ahmed) 139–40 Cuomo, Chris J. 1, 90–1, 94n21 cyborg 90 Dalit movement 37, 39, 44n55, 120n45 Dansons (Let’s Dance) (Bouabdellah) 47–8, 62, 67n9 Death Zephyr (Scarce) 80 de Bretteville, Sheila Levrant 62, 63, 64 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 7, 13n26 Demos, T. J. 94n11 Denes, Agnes 98n65 denizenship 50–1, 53, 59, 62, 66, 67n17, 69n34 De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand) (Lacy) 111–17, 121n54, 122n70 dialogue 1, 3, 6–7, 9–10, 28–9, 30, 41n13, 88; see also conversation; Anniversary 55,

56; Chris J. Cuomo 90; denizenship 51, 52, 59; De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand) 112, 113, 115, 116, 117; ecofeminism 83; epistemic 18, 19, 20–1, 152; Felix Gonzalez-Torres 85; Heresies collective 105; Indian Act 59; Joan Brassil 74, 88, 89; Joanna Hoffmann 89; methodology 9–10; Nira Yuval Davis 42n32, 50; peacebuilding 124, 127, 129, 130, 141, 144; Rosi Braidotti 43; Terrain 32, 33, 35, 37, 39–40; There’s something I must tell you 26, 27–8; Thinking of you 107, 108; Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming 74, 77; Truth Commissions 22; Untitled (Simpson) 102, 103, 104; Working Women, Working Artists, Working Together 102;Yoko Ono 127, 129, 130, 140–1, 144 difference: citizenship and 49–50, 55–6; critical ecofeminism 82, 83, 90; IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 127–8, 129–30, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136; queer ecologies 83, 84, 85; differences: solidarity across 100, 102, 105, 124, 126, 129–30, 141, 152; as strengths 30, 31, 35, 40 differentiated universalism 49, 55, 56 Diprose, Rosalyn 84–5, 97n49 Documenta 14 (Kassel and Athens) 31–2, 33, 43n45 Double Fantasy (album) (Lennon and Ono) 135 dresses: works concerning sexual violence 101, 102, 104, 106, 110 dualism 51, 59, 82 dust 87, 88, 89, 90, 98n65 Dyck, Sandra 58 Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (Sheikh) 31–2 eco-erotic, the 86, 87, 96n45 ecofeminism, critical 71–3, 81–3, 91, 93n8; Catriona Moore 81–2; Chris J. Cuomo 90–1; Joan Brassil 73–7, 78–9, 81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 92–3, 94nn13–18, 21, 95n31; Joanna Hoffmann 88–90; Margaret Harrison 82–3; Rosi Braidotti 83–4; Sheila Jasanoff 88; Val Plumwood 82, 93n8; Vandana Shiva 87–8;Yhonnie Scarce 80–1 ecological thinking 6, 7, 19 Eidsheim, Nina Sun 141–2, 150n66 embodiment: Anniversary 54, 55, 56; Australian feminist philosophy 82; belonging 49; denizenship 51–3, 62;

Index

forms of, imagination and 140; Indian Act 58; knowledge 2, 19, 30, 40; Terrain 33, 37–8; transnational feminism 10, 40, 50, 73; Untitled (Simpson) 104;Yoko Ono 132, 138, 142, 143–4 emplacement: Joan Brassil 74, 78–9 Energy as a Delicate Contract (Brassil) 92–3 entanglement 1–2, 7, 8–9, 19, 29, 153; Anniversary 55, 62; denizenship 51; De tu Puño y Letra 113; Donna Haraway 20, 21; ecofeminism 72, 73, 81, 82, 83, 89, 91; For Those Who Can Not Speak 60–1, 62; Indian Act 57, 58, 62; Joan Brassil 74, 77, 79, 81, 87, 93; Julietta Singh 29; Terrain 32, 40;Yoko Ono 127, 131–2, 133, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143–4 epistemic communities see communities, epistemic epistemic dialogue 18, 19, 20, 152 epistemic location 1, 2, 10, 19, 61, 82; see also situatedness Fabio, Lucio 114 fake news 22 Feminism and The Mastery of Nature (Plumwood) 82 feminism versus post-truth 17–21; see also Truth Games (Williamson) feminist art, increase in 5 Feminist Bookstores Newsletter 106 feminist philosophy, Australian 82, 95n34 feminist publications 105; see also Heresies (Journal) feminist shelf 106 Few South Africans, A (Williamson) 22–3, 27 Fight for the Forests, The (Plumwood and Routley) 82 Film no.5 (Smile) (Ono) 143 First Nations 56, 58, 60, 69nn35, 38, 70n48 Fisher, Jennifer 121n64 flourishing, ethics of 73, 90–1 for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (Shange) 154 For Those Who Can Not Speak (Myre) 56, 59, 60–1, 62 Foucault, Michel 6, 7 freedom, feminism and 61 French colonialism 45–8, 67n6 fungi 91–3, 99n79 Gaard, Greta 71, 93nn6, 8, 97n47 Gatens, Moira 52, 140 Gavey, Nicola 116 gender injustice, war and 134–5

169

generosity 4, 7, 104, 144–5, 150n63, 151n77, 154; corporeal 9, 82, 97n49; transcorporeal 77, 85, 86, 90 German Agency for International Cooperation (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)) 112, 121n55 Giraud, Eva 17–18 Godden, Vanessa 118n17 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 85–7, 97n51 Great Wall of Los Angeles, The (Baca) 63 Grosz, Elizabeth 5, 61 Guattari, Félix 6, 7, 13n26 gun crime 137, 149n45, 150n65 Hanbury Brown, Robert 78 Haraway, Donna 19–21, 25, 29, 41nn13–14, 42n32, 98n71 Harrison, Margaret 82–3 Have You Metamorphosed Lately? (Brassil) 75–6, 83, 84 Hayden, Dolores 62, 63, 65, 70n50 hearing: survivors of sexual violence 102, 103, 104, 107, 110, 112, 114; see also listening Heresies collective 100–1, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 119n27 Hill-Montgomery, Candace 102 Hoffmann, Joanna 88–90 Hogan, Kristen 106 Holzer, Jenny 120n49 Homegrown (hooks and Mesa-Bains) 63–4 hooks, bell 63–4 hope 139–40, 141 How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? (Brassil) 74–5, 78–9, 87 Iceland 133, 148n34; see also IMAGINE PEACE TOWER identity 140; essentialist notions of 8, 50, 51, 52, 61, 85, 129–30, 136; national 48; place and 45, 47, 66, 132; reification of 19, 35, 52, 61, 66, 124, 132, 140 identity politics 2, 30, 50 identity work 124 imagination 2, 4, 9, 30, 139–40, 152, 153; anarchism 150n63; Australian feminist philosophy 82; belonging and 50; entanglement 7, 8; knowledge and 18–19, 21, 26, 40, 152, 153; peacebuilding 124–45; solidarity against sexual violence 106–7, 110, 117; There’s something I must tell you 26; Thinking of You 106–7; Virginia Woolf 51–2, 141; worldmaking 52, 53, 63, 66;Yoko Ono

170 Index

124–5, 140–1; see also IMAGINE PEACE TOWER (Ono) Imagine (song) (Ono and Lennon) 135 IMAGINE PEACE TOWER (Ono) 125–32, 133–9, 141–3, 144–5, 146n14 Indian Act (Myre) 56–9, 62, 70n47 ‘Indigenous’: term 69n35 Indigenous Australians 79–80, 81–2, 93, 94n21 information, creative deployment of: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 130–1 inhabiting 2–3, 4–5, 63, 66, 91, 134, 153 intersectionality, belonging and 49–51, 52, 56, 60–1, 62, 66; concept of 7–8, 14n37; Dalit activism 39; ecofeminism 72, 73; peacebuilding 124, 126, 132, 133, 135, 136, 140 intersubjectivity 52; see also subjectivity; Biddy Mason: Time and Place 65; Indian Act 59;Yoko Ono 142, 143 intimate, the and the global 2, 72, 152–3; see also personal, the and the political; De tu Puño y Letra 112, 113–14; ecofeminism 83, 91; Joan Brassil 83, 88, 91; solidarity against sexual violence 103; Thinking of You 110; Untitled (Simpson) 103, 104; Val Plumwood 82 irenic attention: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 138, 139, 141–2, 144, 146n11 Iziko Slave Lodge (Cape Town) 27 Japanese sexual slavery: Second World War 109, 110 Jasanoff, Sheila 88 Kanngeiser, Anja 7 Keck, Margaret E. 130 King, Susan 62, 63 kinship, matter of 90 knowing: listening and 29; as practice 1–2, 3, 9, 18–19 knowledge, imagination and see imagination, knowledge and knowledge as mastery 19, 29–30, 31, 38–9, 88; Terrain 32, 33, 35 knowledges, situated 8, 19–20, 21, 25, 29, 40 Kosovan War: sexual violence 106–9, 110 Kulshreshtha, Priyanka 43n43 Lacy, Suzanne 111–17, 121nn54, 58–60, 64, 122n70 landscape: ecological communication 81–2 Lennon, John 135, 138, 140–1, 143, 146n13, 148nn35, 40, 149nn47, 49;

ACORN PEACE 133, 136; IMAGINE PEACE and 126–7, 129, 131–4, 135; murder 137, 143, 150n65; War is Over campaign 125, 126 letters: De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand) 111–17 light:Yoko Ono 143, 144, 151n70 ‘Light House’ (Ono) 127, 134, 146n13 Limits of Gendered Citizenship, The 49 Lippard, Lucy 102, 119n27 listening 28–9, 31, 40; see also hearing: survivors of sexual violence; De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand) 114–16; Terrain 32, 35, 37, 39; There’s something I must tell you 26, 27–8; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa 22; vulnerable 1, 35, 37, 116, 152 Lister, Ruth 49 Lloyd, Genevieve 52, 140 location, epistemic 1, 2, 10, 19, 61, 82; see also situatedness Lomax,Yve 28–9 Lorde, Audre 9, 30, 42n38, 135, 141 Lustmond (Holzer) 120n49 Magnason, Sigtryggur 134 Maralinga 79–80, 81 Marseillaise 48 masculine-normativity 26, 48, 51, 66, 82, 116 masculinity, modes of 25, 135, 136, 137; violence 108–9, 116, 117, 122nn69, 70, 134, 137 Mason, Biddy 62–6 Massey, Doreen 78–9 mastery: knowledge as see knowledge as mastery; rejection of 32, 37–9, 40, 79 materialism, new 8, 29, 95n34 matter 77 McCall, Leslie 7–8 McClintock, Barbara 28–9 measurement 77 media testimony: Truth Games 22 men: solidarity against sexual violence 116–17, 122n70 Mesa-Bains, 63–4 metamorphosis 75–6, 77, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 96n40 metanarrative 17, 20, 25 methodologies, transnational feminist 9–11 [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo (Hoffmann) 88–90 micro-macro dialogue: Joan Brassil 74, 75, 79, 81, 88, 91;Yhonnie Scarce 81;Yoko Ono 144–5

Index

Mind the Fungi (exhibition, Art Laboratory Berlin) 91 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 30 Moore, Catriona 81–2 Munroe, Alexandra 138–9, 140 mushrooms 91–3 Myre, Nadia 56–61, 69nn37, 39, 70n47 myth 45–7 naïvety, accusations of, against Yoko Ono 138–9, 140–1 Named and The Unnamed, The (Belmore) 118n20 Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer (NSII) 74, 78, 79, 94n18 national citizenship, myth of 45–7, 48–9, 56; see also Dansons (Let’s Dance) National Gallery of Canada 60, 61, 69n43, 70n47 nature, nation and 45–7, 66n1 Nelson, Melissa K. 86 New York Health and Human Services Union, District 1199 100, 101, 105, 117nn3, 4, 6 nomadic subjectivities 83–4, 87 non-human, the 2, 8, 29, 31, 90, 97nn47, 49; For Those Who Can Not Speak 60; IMAGINE PEACE 144; Indian Act 59; Joan Brassil 74, 88, 93; queer ecologies 84, 87 Obama, Barack 136–7, 149nn43, 44 Obama, Michelle 136–7, 148n42 objective truth 17, 40, 42n32; see also universal truth objectivity 2, 17, 18, 19, 20–1, 29; scientific 72; Truth Games 25 Ono,Yoko 123, 125–45 origin, authenticity of 2 Paris Match 45–7, 48 participation: Anniversary 56; Biddy Mason: Time and Space 65; De tu Puño y Letra 111, 112, 113, 114, 116; Felix GonzalezTorres 85; IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 127, 129, 131, 139, 142; Indian Act 57, 59; Terrain 32; Thinking of You 109; Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming 74; Truth Games 25; Working Women, Working Artists, Working Together 102; worldmaking 50, 51, 52, 53, 62 patriarchies: Terrain 33, 35, 37, 39 peace movements 123–5 pedagogy, feminist 63, 64, 70n53, 99n79

171

performativity: Anniversary 54, 55–6; Donna Haraway 20; Indian Act 59 personal, the and the political 2, 3–4, 52, 152–3; see also intimate, the and the global; De tu Puño y Letra 112, 114, 115; Indian Act 58;Yoko Ono and John Lennon 131–2, 133, 135, 136 place, sense of 78–9 Plumwood, Val 82 Ponce, Gabriela 121n54 position 2–3, 4, 7–8, 9–10, 19, 25, 153; see also situatedness possibility, pure 139–40 posthuman ethics 90 post-truth 16–40; feminism versus 17–21; see also Terrain (Sheikh); Truth Games (Williamson) potatoes 74–5, 78, 79, 81, 87 Power of Place, The (Los Angeles) 62–6 Pratt, Geraldine 72 Pratt, Mary Louise 48 Pryse, Marjorie 29 queer ecologies 84–7 Quito, Ecuador 111–17 rape in war 106–10, 120n49 reading, vulnerable 29, 33, 37 reason 82 reductionism, scientific 87–8 relativism 16, 17, 18, 20, 26, 28, 40 response-ability 19, 59, 107, 138, 145, 152 response-able belonging 60–1, 66 response-able listening 26, 115 Reykjavik: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 125–32, 133–9, 141–3, 144–5, 146n14 Rights Repeated – An Act of Memory (Ross) 53 Roosevelt, Eleanor 54, 55 Rose, Deborah Bird 116 Rosner, Victoria 72 Ross, Monica 53–6, 57, 68n27 Routley, Richard 82 Rwanda: rape as war crime 109 Saar, Bettye 62, 63, 64, 65 Sakahàn (exhibition, National Gallery of Canada) 61, 69n43 Scarce,Yhonnie 80–1 science, critical ecofeminism 72, 73, 74–5, 76, 78, 87–90, 93; Mind the Fungi 91; postcolonial 17–18, 19–20 scientific reductionism 87–8 Sculpture Centre (Sydney) 74 Second World War: sexual violence 109, 110

172 Index

Sensing Sound (Eidsheim) 141–2, 150n66 sexual violence 101, 102–21 sexuality: metamorphosis 83, 84 Shange, Ntozake 154 Sheikh, Nilima 31–40, 43nn43, 46 Shilton, Siobhán 48 Shimada,Yoshiko 109 Shiva, Vandana 87–8, 98n62 Sikkink, Kathryn 130 silence: sexual violence 103, 106–8, 109, 110, 112, 114, 116 Simpson, Lorna 100–1, 102, 103, 106, 119n27 Singh, Julietta 29, 40 situatedness 1, 2, 10, 20, 21, 22, 25, 52, 153; De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand) 113–14, 115, 116; see also epistemic location; knowledges, situated; position; For Those Who Can Not Speak 61; There’s something I must tell you 27; Thinking of You 109; Truth Games 25 skirts: Thinking of You 106, 110 smile, the:Yoko Ono 143–4, 151n73 Sohni 35–7, 39 solidarity 10, 72; denizenship 51, 63, 98n71; For Those Who Can Not Speak 60; Indian Act 57; kinships 90, 98n71; peacebuilding 124; post-truth 18, 19, 20, 22, 28, 30, 31; Shadow and Stars 39; Terrain 35, 36; There’s something I must tell you 26, 27; Truth Games 22; Untitled (Simpson) 100, 102, 105;Yoko Ono 126, 129–30, 130–1, 133, 141, 142, 143, 145 solidarity across differences 1, 2, 4–5, 63, 141, 152 solidarity against sexual violence 34–5, 100–17, 120n45 sound 141–2; IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 142–3 Sounding the Event (Lomax) 28–9 Soundings 129 space: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 127, 129, 134 stars and dust 87, 88, 89, 90 Statues of Peace 109 Stengers, Isabelle 28, 29 Stiles, Kristine 141 struggle photography 25, 26 subjectivities, nomadic 83–4, 87 subjectivity, Australian feminist philosophy 82; citizenship 50; De tu Puño y Letra 112–13, 116, 117; Eurocentric models of 5; Have You Metamorphosed Lately? 83–4, 87; imagination and 30, 140; see also intersubjectivity;

responsive-responsible 19; transformation 7, 8 S.U.G.A.R. (Sydney University Giant Air Shower Recorder) 88 survivors of sexual violence: hearing 102, 103, 104, 107, 110, 112, 114 Taking Liberties (exhibition, British Library) 53 Terrain (Sheikh) 31–40, 43n45, 44n55 There’s something I must tell you (Williamson) 26–8 Thinking of You (Xhafa Mripa) 106–9, 110 Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming (Brassil) 74–7, 78–9, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 94nn15–18 Three Guineas (Woolf) 51–2 time: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 127, 129; Joan Brassil 75–6, 83, 93 tools, transformative 9, 18, 21, 30, 40, 50, 64, 153; Terrain 32, 33;Yoko Ono 125–6, 137–8, 141 transcorporeality 77, 84–5, 86, 87, 90 transculturation 48 translation: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 127, 129; peacebuilding 146n15; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 55 transnational advocacy networks 126, 130, 131, 133, 138 transnational feminisms, nature of 3–5, 6, 10, 11 transversal politics, nature of 6–7 trees: Wish Trees 128–9 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa 21–6, 41n18, 42n27 Truth Commissions 22 Truth Games (Williamson) 21–5, 27 Twiss, Richard Quentin 78 ‘Under Western Eyes’ (Mohanty) 30 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 53, 54–5 universal truth 17, 18, 23; see also objective truth universalism, differentiated 49, 55, 56 Unthinking Mastery (Singh) 29 Untitled (Simpson) 100–1, 102, 103, 106 “Untitled” works (Gonzalez-Torres) 85–7 Vemula, Rohith 37, 39, 44n55 vibrational practice 141–4, 150n66 Videy Island, Reykjavik: IMAGINE PEACE TOWER 125–32, 133–9, 141–3, 144–5, 146n14

Index

Vigil (Belmore) 118n20 violence against women see also solidarity against sexual violence: Terrain 33, 35, 37, 39; Untitled (Simpson) 100–1, 102, 103, 106 vulnerable listening 1, 35, 37, 116, 152 vulnerable reading 29, 33, 37 wampum belts 58–9, 60, 61 war: gender injustice and 134–5; peace and 123–45; sexual violence 106–10, 120n49 War is Over campaign 125, 126, 133, 135 Warren, Karen 94n21 water:Yoko Ono 142, 144, 150n69 Werbner, Pnina 50 Williamson, Sue 21–7, 28, 42n27 Wish Tree (Ono) 127–9, 131, 133, 146n16 wishing:Yoko Ono 127, 137–8, 139–40

173

Woman’s Art Journal 102 Women, Citizenship and Difference (Yuval Davis and Werbner) 50 women in South Africa: There’s something I must tell you 26–8 Woolf, Virginia 51–2, 82–3, 141 Working Women, Working Artists, Working Together (exhibition, New York) 101–2 world citizenship 52–3, 55, 56 worldmaking 53, 62; Anniversary 55–6; Biddy Mason: Time and Place 65–6; ecofeminism 73, 77–8; For Those Who Can Not Speak 60–1; Indian Act 59 Xhafa Mripa, Alketa 106–9, 110, 119n37, 120n49 yams 80, 81 Yuval-Davis, Nira 6, 7, 18, 19, 50, 90

PLATE 1  Sue Williamson, Brigalia and Busiswa Bam from There’s something I must tell you, 2013. 

Image courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 2  Nilima Sheikh, Chenab 5 from Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind, 2016-17.     Casein tempera on Sanganer paper, 213 x 89 cm. 

Image courtesy of the artist.

Nilima  Sheikh,  Shadow and Stars  from  Terrain: Carrying Across Leaving Behind,  2016–17.  Casein tempera on Sanganer paper, 213 x 89 cm. 

PLATE 3 

Image courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 4  Zoulika  Bouabdellah,  still  from  Dansons

(Let’s Dance),  single-channel     video, 

2003  ©  Zoulika  Bouabdellah  Localisation:  Paris,  Centre  Pompidou  –  Musée  national  d’art  moderne  –  Centre  de  création  industrielle.  Photo  ©  Centre  Pompidou,  MNAM-CCI,     Dist.  RMN-Grand    Palais / Service audiovisuel du  Centre Pompidou.

PLATE 5  Monica Ross, Anniversary

– an act of memory, Act 01 (07  December 2008) solo  recitation, performed as part of Ours By Right, an event celebrating the 60th anniversary  of  the  Universal  Declaration  of  Human  Rights,  presented  by  the  Equality  and  Human  Rights  Commission and The British Library as part of the exhibition Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights, British Library, London. 

Photograph, Alex  Delfanne; reproduced by kind permission of the family of Monica Ross.

PLATE 6 

Nadia Myre, Indian Act, 2000–3 

©  Nadia Myre ©DACS 2019; reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

PLATE 7  Sheila  Levrant  de  Bretteville,  with  The  Power  of  Place, Biddy

Place, 1989.  Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Mason: Time and

Joan Brassil, How Far between the Potatoes and the Planets? 1976, from the Trilogy  Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78; perspex, computer circuit board,  potatoes  –  natural  aluminium,  ceramic,  soapstone,  wax  and  bronze.  Dimensions  variable. Installation view from The Gorge,  Campbelltown Arts  Centre curated by  Jasmine  Kean, 2016. 

PLATE 8 

Photograph  courtesy  of  the  Campbelltown  Arts  Centre;  reproduced  by  kind  permission  of  the family of  Joan Brassil.

PLATE 9  Yhonnie  Scarce,  Blue Danube (large bomb),  2015.  Hand  blown  glass  bomb  and  yams. Unique works 60 x 20 x 20 cm. 

Image courtesy of the artist & THIS IS  NO FANTASY.

Joan  Brassil,  Have You Metamorphosed Lately?  1977,  from  the  Trilogy  Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming,  1976–78;  cherrywood  tree  stumps,  ironbark  posts,  stringy-bark     slabs,  earth,  bush  twigs,  ceramic  pupae,  moths  and  eggs,  copper  and  brass.  Dimensions variable. Installation view, Sydney Sculpture  Centre, 1977. 

PLATE 10 

Image courtesy of the family of  Joan Brassil.

PLATE 11  Felix  Gonzalez-Torres, 

“Untitled”  (Golden),  1995.  Strands  of  beads  with  hanging device.  Dimensions vary with installation. Installation view: Paired, Gold: Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn.  Solomon  R.  Guggenheim  Museum,  New York,  NY.  2  Oct. 2009 – 2  Jan. 2010.  Cur.  Nancy Spector. 

© Felix Gonzalez-Torres.  Courtesy of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

PLATE 12  Joan  Brassil,  Can it be that Everlasting is Everchanging?  1978,  from  the  Trilogy Three Environments of 20th Century Dreaming, 1976–78; earth, spark chambers, light  diodes,  computer  circuit  boards,  geiger  tubes,  ceramics,  perspex,  steel,  wood  and  tapa  cloth. Dimensions variable. Installation view from The Gorge,  Campbelltown Arts  Centre curated by  Jasmine Kean, 2016. 

Photograph  courtesy  of  Campbelltown  City  Council  collection;  reproduced  by  kind  permission of the family of  Joan Brassil.

Joanna  Hoffmann,  still  from  the  immersive  installation  [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo, Art Laboratory Berlin, 2015. 

PLATE 13 

Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

PLATE 14  Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Art installation Thinking

of you, 2015. 

Photograph by  Jetmir Idrizi. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

PLATE 15  Suzanne Lacy, still from the performance De

tu Puño y Letra, 2014–15. 

Photograph by  Christina Vega. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

PLATE 16  Yoko  Ono,  IMAGINE  PEACE  TOWER,  2007.  Outdoor  sculpture,  Videy 

island, Reykjavik.  Photograph  by  Sigfús  Már  Pétursson;  Collection  of  Reykjavik  Art  Museum.  © Yoko  Ono,  Courtesy Galerie Lelong &  Co.,  New York.