Digital Feminisms between Archives and Networks

Since the emergence of the web 1.0 in the ’90s, several feminist theorists and practitioners have reflected on the possibility of repurposing technologies to build virtual interconnected communities. How did we visualize care at the rise of IT and how might we do so in the future through Internet, data, and artificial intelligence? How do we build a feminist citational politics, and how can we create material queer and anti-racist feminist networks in designing new imaginaries and infrastructures? 

Artists in conversation: Mindy Seu (Designer and Researcher); Alice Yuan Zhang + Sara Suárez (Co-founders of Virtual Care Lab); Caroline Sinders (Designer, Researcher & Artist). Moderators: Dr. Nicki Washington (Professor of the Practice of Computer Science, Duke University) and 

Dr. Victoria Szabo (Research Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University). In the exhibition, we showcased also work by Kelsey Brod; Brittaney Green; and Kate Alexandrite. 

The panel and the exhibition were curated by Tania Rispoli. 

Fieldnotes to Survival

The global COVID-19 pandemic has upended our lives in ways many of us could never have imagined. The “new-normal” of quarantine, mask-wearing, physical distancing, and being away from family and friends has left us feeling fatigued, isolated, and in despair. What can we learn from the people around us who have already been living a life of isolation? What does it mean to renegotiate one’s relationship to productivity in a capitalist society? And what might care look like beyond the moment of crisis? “Fieldnotes to Survival” will look to artists who utilize their lived experiences with the precarious conditions of survival, mortality, illness, and disease under capitalism to consider how a shared language of care and vulnerability can be an answer to despair.  

Artists in conversation: Charmaine Bee (multi-disciplinary artist using mediums such as video, movement, sculpture, plant medicine, writing, sound and textile); Kym McDaniel (experimental filmmaker, media collaborator, choreographer, and performer).

The event and the exhibition are curated by Felicity Palma and Lauren Henschel. 

Queering Communities of Care

Revaluing Care in the Global Economy, Visualizing Care Series presents artists Devynn Emory and Gabriel Garcia Roman in conversation with Pedro Lasch (Artist & Research Professor of Art, Duke University) and Peter Sigal (Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University. How do we visualize care? In particular: How do we make care more visible, and how can we defamiliarize the naturalized and often common-sensical representations of care? And how can we develop a new vocabulary of care – visual, auditory, lexical, etc., – to help us to represent care in new ways?”Queering Communities of Care” launches a series of conversations and accompanying exhibits in which we invite artists, activists, and academics to help us explore these questions. Devynn Emory and Gabriel Garcia Roman will consider how we envision care beyond cis/heteronormative norms and how artistic practices help to trouble the problems of queering care and creating new networks and kinships.

Artists in Exhibition: Anna Brody, Devynn Emory, Eleni Tomadaki, Ayan Felix, Ayling Zulema Dominguez, Luca Asta, Gabriel Garcia Roman

Curated by Lauren Henschel and Tania Rispoli

Women and Work

Revaluing Care in the Global Economy, Visualizing Care Series presents artists Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Juniper Fleming and Nydia Blas in conversation with Jennifer Nash (Jean Fox O’Barr Professor Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Duke University) and Anna Storti (Assistant Professor Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Duke University).

The exhibit “Women and Work” moves beyond the dichotomy of the wage system and gender binarism.  It starts from the recognition that domestic, unwaged labor constitutes the prototypical form of various racialized and gendered modes of care work, which demand embodied affects and a surplus of performance as well as often an investment of time, expertise, and often-unseen labor. The 1970s International Wages for Housework Campaign emphasized that domestic labor is both invisible and undervalued while Arlie Russel Hochschild pointed to housework as a “second shift” performed mainly by women next to their formal job at the workplace. Focusing on the relationship among housework, Black motherhood, and sex work, we examine the performative aspects of care they require, and the gender and racial violence frequently involved. Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Juniper Fleming and Nydia Blas will help us to consider how mixed media contemporary art represents the exploitation of “women’s” labor and how it constitutes a way of liberating new social forces and political imaginaries.

Curated by Lauren Henschel and Tania Rispoli

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