subRosa's 'Cell Track: Mapping the Appropriation of Life Materials

subRosa (www.cyberfeminism.net), a US-based collective of (cyber)feminist artists/activists will be visiting Zagreb, Croatia from May 30-June 8, 2008 for a collaborative artist residency and performance entitled: A Week With(out) Women. subRosa will collaborate with women artists, activists, professionals, educators, and students in Zagreb, to make visible the often invisible ways in which women produce, reproduce, maintain, cultivate and care for life in both intimate and public spheres.

  subRosa will explore many fields of new creativity and activity of women today--personal, cultural, artistic, social, scientific, economic, political, and spiritual.  subRosa is interested in focusing on three main topics, but is open to all topics of interest to our collaborators:
 

      1.Cultural work: Women’s art, education, pleasure, networking. In what ways can we counter women’s visibility as sexualized images used to sell commodities and satisfy others’ desires in advertising, magazines, films, pornography? How do we create our own images of women’s desire, pleasure, power, and work?

      2.Care and maintenance work: How/Why do women still bear the chief responsibility for maintaining and producing life: childbearing/childcare, homemaking, professional care work such as medical, nursing, eldercare, food preparation, etc.?

      3.The work of peace-making and social healing: subRosa is interested in learning about the ways in which people everywhere are building non-violent communities, and teaching each other to make peace. This work is most often performed by women, youth, and students with little public support or recognition.

Residency in Nova Gallery:

      Building on subRosa’s history of projects of hosting and welcoming,  residency will be a performance of hosting, critical conviviality, and mutual knowledge creation. As resident guests and hosts in whw Nova gallery, we invite you to become part of  project there. We will be there every afternoon and evening from June 2-June 5. We invite you to participate with us and formulate your own questions.

    * Manifestations. With collaborators, subRosa will identify a series of places/spaces in Zagreb where we can hold manifestations of various kinds each day. For example: A silent vigil near a war monument to call attention to people’s anti-war actions and women’s on-going peace work.  subRosa will document similar performances in their home cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago and exhibit these images alongside the manifestations in Zagreb.
    * Salons: subRosa will host a series of invitational evening salons in the WHW space for the purpose of presenting and sharing creative and activist work. In this way they also wish to explore local uses and meanings of concepts of feminism (which comes from Western Enlightenment discourse and may be situated quite differently in non-Western contexts). They hope to meet with artists, activists, and youth organizers who work specifically with women’s issues.

 

Invitation to a Festive Gathering: From 7-9 PM, Friday evening, June 6, subRosa hosts a festive collaborative performance: Look! Listen! Performing Visibility. This is a ceremonial occasion of speaking and listening, staged in TD, a public theatre, with and for all participants. You are invited to join a multi-generational group of participants and collaborators who have been gathered during the salons of the preceding week to bring their questions “to the table” and manifest their work and urgency. Come share your questions, desires, and concerns; discuss the politics of friendship between women, and how “acts of political love” could become new possibilities in our lives, in the community, in the world. subRosa will contribute questions and testimony about current feminist movement and anti-war activism in the US. We hope this gathering will generate a collaborative document, such as slide-show, video, traveling exhibition exchange, and/or website, that would have a further life and distribution elsewhere in the world. 


Invitation: Welcome. subRosa hails you and invites you to come and sit at our table in friendship. This gathering reflects feminist traditions of hosting, hospitality, feasting, mutual nourishment and consciousness-raising as sites for critical conviviality. Singing, dancing, reciting poetry, impromptu performances are all encouraged. Please dress in a festive and comfortable manner. Please feel free to invite others to the feast—we will seat as many as possible and all will be welcome. 

Please RSVP by June 4, 2008

Contacts in Zagreb:

• Irena Curik  < Ova email adresa je zaštićena od spam robota, nije vidljiva ako ste isključili Javascript >,
• Marin Blazevic < Ova email adresa je zaštićena od spam robota, nije vidljiva ako ste isključili Javascript >
• Lovro Rumiha Ova email adresa je zaštićena od spam robota, nije vidljiva ako ste isključili Javascript
• Sabina Sabolovic  < Ova email adresa je zaštićena od spam robota, nije vidljiva ako ste isključili Javascript >

subRosa contact:

• Faith Wilding, Ova email adresa je zaštićena od spam robota, nije vidljiva ako ste isključili Javascript  

www.cyberfeminism.net


Sponsors:

• Marin Blazevic (professor at Academy of dramatic arts, artistic director of Theater &TD) Theatre &TD, Culture of Change, Student Centre (Savska 25, 10 000 Zagreb)
• What, How and for Whom Curatorial Group