FAC Research / Addressing and Undressing / asfaBBQ 2019

The Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research participates at asfaBBQ, the annual festival of performance and time-based media of the Athens School of Fine Arts,
curating the workshop/event “Addressing and Undressing” the Social Contract*

The schedule of the event is as follows.

September, 15, 2019

5:00-6:00 pm
Chosen Family Photo Booth
Family is one of the most oppressive institutions in our society connected with notions of the reproduction of the nation-state, heteronormativity, the lethal ideology racial purity, property, and capitalism. Yet, it is our primary model of togetherness. The chosen family photo-booth workshop invites you to explore other expressions of togetherness foreclosed by the normative, nuclear, reproductive family. Dress up or dress down and have your anti-family portrait taken!

6:00-7:30 p.m.
Building Togetherness in our Movements
In this performative discussion the participants will draw on tools of feminist horizontal communication, politics of care, and consent based decision making in order to constitute an ephemeral community. We feel that care, love, tenderness, and respect is often missing from our movements and we internalise neoliberal qualities of antagonism and power. The performative discussion will urge reflection on how we communicate both in interpersonal and political contexts online and “in real life”.

7:30-8:00 p.m.
Break

8:00-9:00 p.m.
Building the Feminist S(h)elf
We invite you to a hands-on workshop to help us build the library that will be open to the public at the Feminist Autonomous Centre of the Research. What belongs on the Feminist s(h)elf? Tell us about what books you are dying to read but cannot afford to buy and which stories remain to be written. Delving into questions of what counts as knowledge and who has the right to produce and receive it we will deconstruct hegemonic ideas of the library and envision community-based alternatives.

9:00-9:30
Closing reflections
What the FAC was that all about?

* Our title is inspired by Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, eds. C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon & Abbey Volcano. Oakland: AK Press, 2013.

FAC Research is a space for learning, reflection, collaboration, support, exchange, knowledge production, political interventions, and trouble-making. Working across and against nation-state and continental borders, disciplinary boundaries, and institutional barriers, we return to the feminist roots of autonomous knowledge production, challenging what counts as legitimate knowledge and who is granted the right to produce and receive it. Our feminisms are queer, trans, intersectional, antiracist, anti-authoritarian, always in plural, reflexive, and internally contested.