Dear all, 

We would be delighted to receive any female contributions for our project, W21. 

W21, Women 21st Century (https://www.women21stcentury.com), is an on-going online research project focusing on post-feminist and intersectional practice in Art, Science, and Technology founded by curator Valeria Facchin together with Indrani Saha and Delanie Joy Linden, PhD students, MIT. 

The aim of the project is to create an auto-generative archive, and a new feminist manifesto. 
For any info, please write to [log in to unmask] 

Based on W21’s ever-evolving and collaborative structure, every year a new set of questions will be circulated. The chosen theme for 2020 is Dis/Embodiment. The collected interviews trace the general trend of our present time and become the primary materials for artists’ commissions, essays, and panel discussions.
Taking inspiration from Frigyes Karinthy’s model of 'Six Degrees of Separation', Karen Barad’s feminist technoscience theory, and Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg' (1984) and 'Companion Species' manifesto (2003), W21 aims to challenge the never-evolving nature of the archive, and its fixed discriminating taxonomy.
Six Degrees of Separation asserts that we all are six steps away from each other, while feminist technoscience assumes that science is entwined with the common interests of society. Ecofeminism, on the other hand, advances ‘female’ values, strengthening the bonds between women and nature by critiquing their parallel oppressions and encouraging an ethic of caring and a politics of solidarity.
 
W21 questions the patriarchal system of knowledge. 
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The task of W21 falls in line with Griselda Pollock’s suggested correction of a total restructuring of the historical canon as presented in Alfred H. Barr's 'Cubism and Abstract Art' diagram: “Analysing the activities of women [...] cannot merely involve mapping women on to existing schemata”. While a prominent reinterpretation of Barr’s diagram exists as part of Leah Dickerman's 'Inventing Abstraction' (MoMA, New York, 2012), we are not in the long, retrospective position to delve back into an archive to draw out forgotten names and relations. We find ourselves in the place of Alfred H. Barr. W21 is compelled to rethink structural mappings of female practitioners of our immediate past and present, and immuned to archival fever.
We consider extra-disciplinary and noncanonical actors not as relegated to red-inked boundaries or external to the chart, but as deeply imbricated in the more three-dimensional network we are hoping to construct. Moreover, an additional deviation can be found in the aspirations of such project. It is our hope that this diagramming becomes generative, autopoietic, and not dictated by the hand of a single maker. Interviews are guided by the suggestion of a previous interviewee. Collaborations are organically born out of these exchanges, as a tentacular thinking. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres, but as connections. 
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W21 Questionnaire
Send your contribution to: [log in to unmask] indicating your practice [ex. artist, scientist, scholar, etc]
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1. We live in a fluid, post-digital world, in which Aristotelian categories are constantly under redefinition. Is it possible, and if so how, to define what it means to be a woman in the 21st Century? [max 200 words]
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2. In 1850, the artist, writer, and mother Madame Marie-Elisabeth Cavé penned her art manual Drawing without a Master: The Cavé Method for Learning to Draw from Memory. The method achieved wide success throughout French schools and was quickly translated into English. While the drawing technique was designed for all genders, her manual, written in the form of an epistolary novel, advocated for the unique capabilities of women artists; for example, she argued that women were inherently talented in the realms of ornament, a field that “belonged” solely to women. She provocatively states, “Women the rival of man – what a burlesque!” (“Une femme rivaliser avec un homme, quelle chose burlesque!”). In the patriarchal conditions of Paris in which Cavé negotiated, she strategically carved out a space in the industrial revolution for women while also fulfilling the socio-normative expectations of her male colleagues. There are parallels with Cavé’s world and our own 21st-century world. How have you strategically manoeuvered within the patriarchal socio-system today? How have you capitalized on being a woman? [max 200 words]
 
3. In the 2015 bestseller, Between the World and Me, author Ta-Nehisi Coates presents the vulnerability of the particularised body with the provocative line: “Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.” Speaking on the racialized body in its material and metaphysical manifestations, Coates identifies the threat of disembodiment that contemporary theoreticians, historians, and practitioners of art are actively attempting to undo within the collaborative spaces offered up by critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and disability studies amongst other interdisciplinary efforts. Can the threat of disembodiment and its terroristic potential be countered and reimagined as productive? How do you imagine the very tools that rely on disembodiment be reconfigured to speak to subjectivity and agency? [max 200 words]
 
4. W21mvb (Message in a Virtual Bottle): What would you say to future female generations?

5. W21next: Name the next inspiring woman you want to be linked with [provide their email address] 

Many thanks for all your contributions, 

Valeria from W21 


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