Visitors to Sanja Ivekovic’s public art project Monument to Revolution in central Athens encounter a collective oral document in which women from diverse contexts and backgrounds respond to the imagining of an international Anti-fascist Feminist Front. Envisioned as a prefigurative political positioning, this gathering of voices foregrounds the need for a broad, coalitional feminism against the current fascist offensive witnessed in many parts of the world. The contributors speak in different languages –their mother tongues or the languages in which their thinking and acting is shaped– and yet they speak in common. Women involved in cultural or political critique, women involved in activism, women making art and writing poetry, women –above all– that experience feminism as a revolutionary political horizon incompatible with the misery and oppression of contemporary capitalism, and the political monsters it is generating, assemble in spirit taking their cue from the dynamism of strategic feminist militancy.
Sanja Iveković’s work, hosted by documenta 14, re-imagines Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Monument to the November Revolution) built in Berlin in 1926 and destroyed by the Nazis in the 1930s, representing a second death of the two revolutionaries who were murdered in 1919 by the proto-Nazi Freikorps. The audio intervention takes place at the site where the temporary re-materialisation of the base of this historic monument stands as a challenge to the normalised excision both of female revolutionary leaders and the memory of insurrections from urban space. The audio document is inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s definition of transformative political praxis in terms of an ‘art of the possible’: “our practical struggle become[s] what it must be: the realisation of our basic principles in the process of social life and the embodiment of our general principles in practical every day action. And only under these conditions do we fight in the sole permissible way for what is at any time ‘possible’.” Following in her steps, the women’s responses to Monument to Revolution and the possibility of an international antifascist feminist front indicate a framework for action within our historically specific conditions of urgency without forgetting the vigilant solidarity underpinning the feminist struggle as such.
Art of the Possible
Contributors include: Mujeres Públicas (activist art collective, Argentina), Elke Krasny (art theorist, Austria), Jaleh Mansoor (art historian, Canada), Cecilia Vicuña (artist, poet, Chile), Vesna Kesić (activist and writer, Croatia), Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen (CAMP founders, Denmark), Mare Tralla (artist and activist, Estonia/UK), Arahmaiani (artist and activist, Indonesia), Giovanna Zapperi (art historian, Italy/France), Isabell Lorey (political theorist, Germany), Athena Athanasiou (social theorist, Greece), Phoebe Giannisi (poet, Greece), To Mov/The Purple (feminist collective, Greece), The Organization of United African Women (Migrant Women Association, Greece), Larissa Vergou (actress and elected councilor of Athens Municipality, Greece), Universal Jenny (poet, Greece), Dilar Dirik (writer and activist, Kurdish Women’s Movement), Sylvia Marcos (writer and activist, Mexico), Syreny.tv, Ewa Majewska & Aleka Polis (feminist network, Poland), Ana Teixeira Pinto with Alex Martinis Roe (writer and artist, Portugal/Australia/Germany), Gülsün Karamustafa (artist, Turkey), Esther Leslie (political and cultural theorist, UK), International Women’s Strike (USA), The National Women’s Liberation (USA), Kristine Stiles (art historian, USA), Martha Wilson (artist, USA), Bojana Pejić (art historian, Serbia), Shubigi Rao (artist and writer, Singapore), Nuria Enguita Mayo (art historian, Spain), Le Zbor (Feminist Choir, Zagreb), Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
The sound file was compiled by the feminist electronic musician and performer AGF (Germany/Finland).
The audio intervention is an initiative of art theorists and writers Angela Dimitrakaki and Antonia Majaca in collaboration with Sanja Iveković.
