No play—Feminist Training Camp

Wassan Ali, Bini Adamczak & Konstanze Schmitt, Vela Arbutina, Anna Bromley, Cinenova Feminist Film and Video Distributor / Karolin Meunier, COOL FOR YOU, Kajsa Dahlberg, Athena Farrokhzad, Feministische Gesundheitsrecherchegruppe Berlin / Julia Bonn & Alice Münch & Inga Zimprich, Feminist Repair Café / Elisa Garrote Gasch, Annie Goh, Minna Henriksson, International Women’s Space, Karolina Kucia, Las Hipókritas, Lowkick Tag Team, Iris Rajanayagam, Noha Ramadan, reboot.fm / Diana McCarty, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Sabrina Saase & Lanca, Nora Sternfeld, Dominika Trapp & Virág Bogyó, MC Xuparina, Andrea Zarza, and others
 

There is an urgent need to revive old and develop new feminist and anti-fascist strategies of resistance, survival, and collective action. No play proposes a structure, a temporal, spatial and social architecture that turns the exhibition space of nGbK into a resource, a site of activity and exchange in the shape of a Feminist Training Camp.

The training units are prepared by international actors from the fields of art, literature, performance, activism, martial arts, health and film, and include formats dealing with language as a weapon in political resistance and employing artistic strategies, but also practice-oriented workshops such as self-defense courses and a feminist repair café. An important focus of the training camp is on different working methods and forms of organizing. Where knowledge results from lived experiences and room is provided for disagreement and negotiations, a local public grasping itself as political can emerge. A radio broadcasting system is set up that will allow the recapitulation of the conversations going on in the training camp as well as disseminate them through the air and the internet.

The training camp is based on a queer understanding of feminism, whose issues go far beyond women’s equality. Woman* is part of the category of “gender”—just one of many categories, such as race, class, ability and sexuality. Their interrelations must be regarded in context so as to understand and act against forms of systemic discrimination on which dominant power structures are based. To this end, it is important to employ a diverse range of radical and emancipatory strategies and practices.

In the exhibition space, the training camp seeks to spatially and thematically integrate the space of art with a space for action. It is structured in zones in which different means of production including documentary and archival sound and video recordings, a work table, sports mats and artistic installations are provided. All works and materials made available in the exhibition space during the course of the training camp form an infrastructure for planning and training.

At the end of the year the publication No play will be released, a poetic-political manual compiling the strategies, discussions and experiences of the project. The idea is to create a document that plays with the main characteristics of the manual as genre—didacticism, direct communication, instrumentality, “objectivity,” illustrations—to also subvert them, questioning what could be a feminist take on a manual of methods, that wants to be useful for a wide range of feminisms, but also understands the problems of generalization and its patriarchal nature. Therefore its materials are imagined as a promiscuous ensemble of poetry, essays, manifestos, conversations, visual material, all edited together to form a collection of instructions intra-acting with each other.
Publisher: nGbK, ISBN: 978-3-938515-63-1