Feminism Art Maintenance group explores different perspectives on womxn’s organising, maintenance and radical care, from mothering to cultural production to industrial action.

F.A.M. is a research group bringing together artists, poets, filmmakers, academics, curators and other cultural workers committed to collective forms of organising. We work at various scales within the context of ongoing political struggles, with community or wxmen's organisations, as part of film collectives, embedded in feminist libraries, or in the making of new (feminist) institutions. We attend to the ongoing, recurring, repetitive, and cyclic, heard in the different currents we are moving within.

We see an urgency to build solidarity across different local struggles and artistic endeavours; experimenting with ways to gather, to hold space, to listen, and build alliances. Our first gathering was initiated by Petra Bauer and began with Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles and its lingering questions about reproductive work. Over these initial days we shared practices, exhibitions, films and perspectives on ‘housework’, shifting the focus away from domestic contexts – from the video activism of “Les Insoumuses” (Defiant Muses) in 1970s France to “all about my mother” and the mixing of familial and institutional practices/metaphors at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.

In our semi-public and closed meet-ups we have discussed in-process artwork/research/practices and tested tools for gathering: Who is hosting? Who is cooking? Around the kitchen table, we share something of our lives and the possibility to embed care as a value and meaningful practice into other organisational and institutional contexts. This website, developed with Maeve Redmond and Jamie Sterling, is intended as a library-of-sorts where you can find articles, films, images and other materials related to this research and upcoming public activity.

F.A.M. is Petra Bauer, Binna Choi, Marius Dybwad Brandrud, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Frances Stacey, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha, Marina Vishmidt. Contributors to date include: Marwa Arsanios, Yin Aiwen, Akwugo Emejulu, Léuli Eshrāghi, iLiana Fokianaki, Mijke van der Drift, Caroline Gausden, Malin Huber, Petra Hultman, Annette Krauss, Rosanna Mercado-Rojas, Olivia Plender, Jenny Richards, Elena Sorokina. Project partners include: Bureau of Care, Cove Park, The Institut Français/Lara Szabo Greisma and Marie Proffit, Kvinnocenter i Tensta-Hjulsta.

F.A.M. is funded by Vetenskapsrådet / The Swedish Research Council and hosted by the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

Binna Choi

I run the art organisation often called Casco in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Last year we changed the name from Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory to Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. This was a result of the artistic research program ‘Composing the Commons’ (2013-2016), which was taken as the next step after the project ‘Grand Domestic Revolution’. Throughout this path, the commons from a feminist perspective, reproductive labour, life, community/diverse economics have been recurrent issues for myself and the institution.

Fabiana Ex-Souza

I am an Afro-Brazilian artist and researcher based in Paris. I am developing research on Latin American decolonial aesthetics, studying for a doctorate in Visual Arts and Photography at the University of Paris VIII. I have a master’s in arts from the same university, with a focus on Brazilian contemporary art.

A graduate of Fine Arts at the Guignard School in Brazil, I deploy my practice in different media, including video, photography, installation, and plant materials. My work has been evolving in France since 2012 as an artistic practice that dialogues with my 'body politic', questioning the dominant narratives of History from my ontological-existential condition as a diasporic Black woman. In 2020 I was one of the recipients of the AWARE/CNAP French prize "La vie bonne".

Frances Stacey

I am a producer, curator and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne working in artist-led and contemporary art institutions, grassroots organisations, and educational contexts. I co-founded the artist-run space Rhubaba in 2009 and worked with visual art organisation Collective from 2013 to 2020, supporting the production of exhibitions, films, events, audio walks, summer schools and off-site programmes. I worked closely with Petra to develop the film and expanded exhibition Workers! with sex worker-led collective SCOT-PEP (2014 – 2018); going on to co-edited Workers! A Production Dossier and the article Workers! A Conversation in a PARSE journal special issue on Art & Work (2019). I continue to be involved in rights-based organising with SCOT-PEP and the sex worker rights movement in Scotland.

Kirsten Lloyd

I am Lecturer in Curatorial Theory and Practice at The University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on late 20th and 21st art and mediation, including lens-based practice, participatory work and realism. Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘Art, Life and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Curating Social Practice’ in the Journal of Curatorial Studies (2021), If You Lived Here… : A Case Study on Social Reproduction in Feminist Art History,” in Feminism and Art History Now (I.B. Tauris, 2017), and the first journal special issue on Social Reproduction and Art, co-edited with Angela Dimitrakaki for Third Text (2017). I am the Academic Lead for the University’s Contemporary Art Research Collection and currently working on the collaborative exhibition project Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism which will be presented with Glasgow Women’s Library in 2021 and a book called Contemporary Art and Capitalist Life.

Marina Vishmidt

I am a writer, editor, organiser and academic. I teach at Goldsmiths, University of London. My work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as in a number of edited volumes. I am the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). I am one of the organisers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). I've worked for many years with Cinenova, the UK-based feminist film distributor, and am currently involved in union and community solidarity organising at Goldsmiths through the GUCU and other formations.

Marius Dybwad Brandrud

I am a filmmaker based in Sweden and a doctoral candidate in film and media at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Nat Raha

I am a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. My current research focuses on transfeminism, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism and decolonisation, across politics, poetry, art and hi(r)story.

My recent writing addresses politics, print cultures and poetics of LGBTQ, anti-colonial, feminist and Mad liberation movements in North America and Europe from the early 1970s onwards. I am the author of three collections of poetry,of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and Octet (Veer Books, 2010). My recent creative and critical writing includes 'Queer and Trans Social Reproduction', in Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021); 'The place of the transfagbidyke is in the revolution', co-authored with Grietje Baars, in Third Text('Imagining Queer Europe', 2021); 'Embodying autonomous trans healthcare in zines', in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly ('The Europa Issue', 2021); 'blubber, guts, southern leith', in MAP Magazine; and 'solidarity & house.', commissioned for the Love & Solidarity, Solidarity & Love exhibitions by Jamie Crewe (Grand Union and Humber Street galleries, 2020). With Fiona Anderson and Glyn Davis, I co-edited 'Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now', a special issue of Third Text Journal (January 2021).

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

I am a curator, writer, and editor, who lives in Paris, and whose research interests spans situated curatorial practices, empathy, transnational feminism, slow institutions, degrowth, and performative practices in the former Eastern Europe. I am the cultural programmes manager for the Cite des Arts, Paris. I recently curated the Contour Biennale 9 entitled "Coltan as Cotton", which looks at the intersections between practices of degrowth and decolonial thinking. Together with Giovanna Zapperi, I am the curator of the exhibition "Les Muses insoumises. Delphine Seyrig between Cinema and Feminist Video" (LaM, Lille and Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid).

Petra Bauer

I am an artist and filmmaker based in Sweden. I work at the Royal Institute of Art as a research leader and Head of Department for artistic research and further education in architecture and fine art in Stockholm. In my artistic practice and research I am interested in how we can approach film as a space for social and political negotiations. My work explores politically and aesthetically how women have organised and resisted historically and in a contemporary global world. I have formed long-term collaborations with several different feminist organisations including Southall Black Sisters in London, the sex worker led organisation SCOT-PEP in Edinburgh, and The Women’s Centre in Tensta-Hjulsta in Stockholm. I am one of the initiators of the feminist platform k.ö.k (Women Desire Collectivity). My recent research project revisits feminist figures in art works of the 70s and explores how they can be rethought from a contemporary global and decolonial perspective.