Documents 14. Ways of Doing Through the Feminist Fanzine

The Heretics, by Joan Braderman

Monday, 2 December 2019 - 7pm
Place
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Inside the Framework of:

Objectors. Feminisms in the Museo

Programme:

Documents

Force line:

Action and radical imagination

Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía

This session inside the Documents programme is the second part to Documents 14. Ways of Doing Through the Feminist Fanzine, which explores the modes of production of the feminist fanzine after a first instalment comprising a practical workshop with artist Azucena Vieites. The present activity focuses on the history of the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics by way of the screening of the documentary The Heretics (2009), by film-maker and writer Joan Braderman.

Heresies was a North American journal published from 1977 to 1993 by The Heretics collective, made up of artists, art critics and feminist theorists from the so-called second wave, such as Ida Applebroog, Su Friedrich, Joyce Kozloff, Lucy Lippard, Miriam Schapiro, Pat Steir, Michelle Stuart and Susana Torre, among numerous others. This group of women was set up through this platform to call out, collectively but without relinquishing the creative distinctiveness of each one, a series of pivotal issues formerly ignored by art’s ecosystem: sexuality, gender-based violence, care, racism and the environment; issues which are still highly topical today.  

The journal is a pertinent example of feminist ways of doing. More specifically, it meant women and collectives came together from different social and racial backgrounds to form a compound voice from difference. The publication was also a springboard for questioning formalist readings around art, and published pioneering issues on performance, photography, film, video and new media. Braderman’s documentary, screened for the first time in Madrid, seeks to recover this experience, which still lacks the recognition it deserves.

Participants

Susana Torre is an Argentine-born American architect and a past member, with Lucy Lippard, Joyze Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, Pat Steir and numerous others, of the feminist collective The Heretics. As co-founder of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1993), she actively contributed to its different issues on architecture. Her architecture projects explore the links between feminism and architecture and the relationships between building, territory and nature. She has also written about the notions of monument and memory in Argentina after the dictatorship.


Programme

Joan Braderman.
The Heretics
USA, 2009, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 95’
Presentation and talk by Susana Torre