(take-away archives)

This exhibition presents a series of posters that incorporate graphic and textual elements from printed matter linked to feminist struggles. The newspapers, books, flyers, and zines used for this project suggest strategies to envision feminist spaces beyond mainstream narratives. What makes a home, organization, institution, or city feminist? What processes are needed in order to create feminist spaces? When asking these questions, we realized many conversations focused on either providing or correcting infrastructures to meet “women’s needs” (breastfeeding rooms, street lighting, child-friendly public restrooms, flexible working hours, equal pay for equal work) or on including women in positions of power. The first perspective is concerned with cosmetic solutions that merely touch up inherently oppressive structures, and the latter often translates into equal-opportunity domination—where all genders have the option to become oppressors. Both resonate with the neoliberal attempt to institutionalize the feminist movement in order to neutralize its subversive potential.

To think beyond these hegemonic understandings of the so-called feminist production of space, we researched two collections: Interference Archive in Brooklyn and Aeromoto Public Library in Mexico City. In these archives, we found materials interrogating power relations, social interactions, and spatial politics. Their collections contain records and traces of feminist struggles, which allowed us to revisit and re-contextualize reflections, conversations, images, memorabilia, mottos, and other collective writings that disrupt the way space is imagined, produced, experienced, and desired.

On view are newly designed posters along with the original source materials from which we drew inspiration for our collaborative process. Materials from Interference Archive include flyers and posters created by labor unions and anarchist organizers; newspapers like TAP DANCE (1981), put out by the New York Wages for Housework campaign; RAT, Subterranean News (1968-1970), a major New York underground periodical which was transformed into a feminist newspaper; and off our backs (1970-2008), an American radical feminist periodical. Materials from Aeromoto Public Library include artist books such as Cómo estar 10 horas de pie by Bárbara Foulkes, 14 Radnor Terrace: A Woman’s Place by Amy Budd and Naomi Pearce, Be careful with each other so we can be dangerous together edited by Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga and Experiments in Joy: A Workbook compiled by Gabrielle Civil. 

(take-away archives) is an exercise of archival activation and circulation. It was initially presented as part of the exhibition disorienting plans at the New School in 2022, curated by Andrea Ancira and Gaby López. The posters were designed by Maru Calva and Daniela Ramírez and printed by Secret Riso Club.

Header image: Maru Calva, detail of poster design for (take-away archives), 2022 

A sneak peak of exhibition content:

This project is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.