Beyond Nuclear Family: Recipes for Happiness

✶15:00
Agnė Jokšė: Dear Friend

✶Dear Friend is a performance by the artist based on a letter-form text written in contemplation of friendship as platonic love between queer women. The work openly speaks about various forms of love, affection and care as well as the fragility of relationships and how it can be determined by physical distance and the passage of time. In a highly sensitive, yet engaged and charged manner, the performance addresses not only the intimacy of a (potential) relationship of the writer and the recipient of the letter, but also touches upon the themes of co-living, displacement, coming-of-age, hidden hierarchies of the LGBTQIA+ communities, closeness and the difference between friendship and kinship.

✶Agnė Jokšė grew up in Vilnius, Lithuania and currently lives and works between Copenhagen and Vilnius. Her main practice lies in writing, which she develops through non-linear, poetic films and videos. Several of her works address the topics of family relations, friendship and kinship, questioning the related gender-based and social stereotypes. Although her works are to a large extend text-based, she is interested in the unsaid, untellable, felt and experienced.

✶16:00 annette hollywood: [anderkawer], screening and artist talk

✶The project [anderkawer] shines light on the situation of non-heteronormative families through the prism of biographies and social-historical events of the past hundred years, bringing changing ideologies of family and motherhood into focus. The search for traces of these families who often, as result of discrimination and fears of punishment, lived covertly, leads into queer and historical archives and is being filmically enacted. annette hollywood presents her cases as time-travelling private detective, starting out with the first wave of homosexuals becoming visible in 1920s Berlin. Not an easy investigation as lesbian mothers stayed well hidden until the 1980s for fears of loosing custody after divorce. Archival documents and found footage tell a story of gradually increasing discussion, social acceptance and legal change towards more visibility of queer families. The vulnerability and social discourse come into focus, producing knowledge about the history of queer families, in particular lesbian mothers, in Germany. The author presents three chapters of her long-term research project [anderkawer], each focusing on one decade of the last century, from the 1920s to the 1940s.

✶annette hollywood is a Berlin-based artist and filmmaker. In her work, she critically and humorously examines social and political issues of our times, such as constructions of power and gender or the distribution of resources and attention. Employing her performative appropriation strategy ‘Performing Found Footage’, through which she interact with pop and mass-cultural phenomena, her works represent deconstructions of mass media formats and offer new perspectives.

✶17:00 Sophie Lewis: Abolish the Family!?

✶While being the site of the vast majority of the world's rapes and murders, the family is also where almost all of us were manufactured. Although very often violent in itself, it is the only thing protecting many of us from the violence of the state, and repairing the damage done to our bodies and souls in the market. For many of us, the family is the only place where we feel cared for. But what if we could change this organization of the world? What if care was not something we expected to receive exclusively from kin? For more than two centuries, revolutionaries (from Charles Fourier to Alexandra Kollontai) and movements (from Wages for Housework to Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation) have raised the utopian proposal of abolishing the family – defined as the privatization of care into private nuclear households – as part of a wider revolution against capitalism. What can we take from this longstanding critical-utopian, lesbian, black radical, and Marxist-feminist political tradition today?

✶Sophie Lewis is a writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses on feminism, utopian theory, and anti-work politics at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her essays - on subjects ranging from domestic labor to trans liberation to octopus eros - have been published in academic journals such as Signs and Feminist Theory as well as non-academic ones such as Boston Review, The New York Times, n+1 and The London Review of Books. Sophie studied English Literature and subsequently Environmental Policy at Oxford University, followed by Politics at the New School for Social Research and Human Geography (for her PhD) at the University of Manchester. She is now a Visiting Scholar at the Alice Paul Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and tweets at @reproutopia. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019) and her second, published in October 2022, will be Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso Books and Salvage Editions).

✶Place: Auditorium of the Display Gallery
Dittrichova 9, Praha 2

✶The program will be held in English.✶

✶Sunday 16.10.✶

✶16:00 – 19:00
Taka Taka – artist lecture

Panagiotis

Panagiotakopoulos (GR), a.k.a Taka Taka, is the godmother of the drag House of Hopelezz, sister for others, mother of the drag king House of Løstbois, proud daughter of Jennifer Hopelezz and co-founder of the non-profit Drag King Academy Amsterdam . Taka Taka identifies as a dragtivist, educator, queer theorist and independent curator who produces performances as art director for the Amsterdam‘s sex positive underground night club, Church since 2013. They were trained as a professional make-up artist, studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie followed by Master in Arts at the Dutch Art Institute. Currently researching drag mothering as an artistic educational model together with DAS support PhD programme THIRD. Taka Taka sees drag as an amplified voice, whose purpose is to communicate, problematize and propose methods according to local conditions. They have shared their knowledge and methodologies for drag mothering, gendered character based practices and its intersections with HIV through interviews, lectures, essays and workshops with various Dutch art institutions and art academies. They collaborated annually with SOA/AIDS Nederland, Global Aids Village, and more. As well with their biological mother Dimitra Panagiotakopoulou who is living in the Greek village Saravali and designing and knitting entire outfits for Taka's lectures and performances.

✶Monday 17.10.✶
10:00 – 17:00 workshop

PARTICIPATION AFTER PREVIOUS REGISTRATION AT THE ADDRESS info@sjch.cz

re-ORGAN-ice our senses.

(play all day till we feel like clay)

✶We welcome the esteemed camp drag queen, scholar and dragtivst Taka Taka to present a one-hour lecture followed by a practical workshop exploring character creation with tools that they have developed from their camp – dragtivist practice, resulting in short performances for and with our characters. The aim of this workshop is to reveal the act of dressing/undressing as an undeniable personal and social engagement by having fun while understanding one’s impact, the realities of character and their production from fingernail to toenail. For this workshop we will use tools from drag to define our performance characters and reflect on the following question: How can we relate to society in order to channel and experience the power and responsibility of getting attention through our altered public image?

(*Drag can be seen for our workshop with a wider lens as a transformation practice of reorganizing oursenses; so drag is a practice far beyond achieving a character- look by instrumenatlizing aesthetics of drag binary performers)

This workshop will consist of a 45-minute lecture and an accompanying workshop on creating drag characters by the use of interactive exercises on paper, face, body, resulting to a character presentation / rehearsal / performance in the end of the day.

✶What to bring:

Basic makeup will be provided, but please bring any make-up or costume pieces you have. As well bring heels or Dr Martens or flip flops :)) wigs, hats, masks are also make-up, and whatever material you would like to place on your character's body or surrounding ...You are especially encouraged to bring that thing in your closet you love but never manage to wear.Or any old or new artwork that can wear on your body:))

Secondly a photographic reference of a character who for some reason talks to you, could be a fantasy character from movie / video game / an animal / someone you admire / a politician you hate or just a photograph which contains some-body.

✶Place: Auditorium of the Display Gallery
Dittrichova 9, Praha 2

✶The program will be held in English.✶

Program

✶13:00
Performance by Mothers Artlovers: Dinner Party / in Czech

✶The final performance of the Mothers Artlovers collective for their installation Dinner Party
✶Mothers Artlovers is a group of visual artists, theoreticians, curators and activists – mothers. As part of the Beyond Nuclear Family exhibition, they present their long-term project reflecting various forms and experiences of love, its visibility, as well as social and institutional critique. The authors were loosely inspired by the now iconic work of Judy Chicago from the 1970s, and here, too, the triangular table serves as a site of feminist visions. As presented by Mothers Artlovers, each side of the table represents one form of love: Self-love, self-care and self-worth; Love as partnership; Love at the institutional level, institutional care. A multi-layered installation of ceramic objects, recipes, and actual food takes place on the table, changing over time. Within the closing show, the performance brings the whole installation to life and sets into motion other meanings of "recipes of happiness”.

✶14:00 Tabita Rezaire: Art of Birth + talk with Vlaďka Niederhafnerová / film with English subtitles, talk in Czech

✶Her own path as a doula inspired the artist Tabita Rezaire to gather ancestral teachings from the elders of different communities of French Guiana. Art of Birth blesses us with the transmission of four women who from their respective traditions have supported and cared for the initiation of motherhood: Mrs Yapara from the Indigenous Lokono tradition, Odette and Noria from the Maroon Saramaka tradition, and Mrs Myriam Kerrel from the Creole tradition. Through these testimonies, Tabita shares with us the art and science of birthing from her land and follows in the footsteps of her grandmother and great grandmothers who were both midwives. 
✶The screening will be followed by a talk and discussion with Vlaďka Niederhafnerová, a Czech midwife, who will address the topic natural birth and local possibilities, restrictions and experiences with birthing within and beyond the institutional system.

✶16:00 Claims, Quests & Desires. Around the Family Table / in English

✶Round-Table & Think Lab with inputs, discussions, and poster production 
hosted by alpha nova & galerie futura, Berlin with artist, activist, and curator Zofia Nierodzińska (until recently Arsenal Municipal Gallery Poznań), artist and activist Jolanta Nowaczyk (Ciocia Czesia) and social worker and activist Hong Van Tran and guests.

✶Claims, Quests & Desires is a series of round tables and think labs in which we repeatedly address different questions around feminist presences and futures and together with invited guests and the participants develop practical activist and cultural strategies for action and forge alliances. 
In Prague, we will address the topic of family from a feminist perspective and through particular lenses of people whose experiences and stakes have been commonly marginalized in the heterenormative discourse on reproduction and family. We will address the following questions, among others: What exactly does family mean to us? How do we want to live family and how do we represent it? What forms of kinship, care and support do we need to achieve transformative change and how can we shape them together? What radical potential can we aspire to if we live practices of mothering as a possible action rather than a gendered identity? How can motherhood be understood and lived as a feminist, queer, radical and collective practice? 
✶alpha nova & galerie futura is an art and exhibition space in Berlin that works from an emancipatory and feminist perspective at the intersection of art, science and political practice.

www.galeriefutura.de