Documents 14. Ways of Doing Through the Feminist Fanzine
Workshop with Azucena Vieites
2 hours per session
Artists, Fine Arts students and people with visual arts training interested in the relationship between art, subcultures and sexual identity.
Museo Reina Sofía
Documentss
Action and radical imagination
![Azucena Vieites. Hey Baby! Drawing, 1993-1996. Series Juguemos a prisioneras [Let's play prisioners]](https://static3.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/styles/ficha_actividad_exposicion/public/actividades/baby1.gif?itok=hOIQPaq5 "Azucena Vieites. Hey Baby! Drawing, 1993-1996. Series Juguemos a prisioneras [Let's play prisioners]")
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. On this occasion, artist Azucena Vieites will conduct a workshop on collective practices related to the feminist and queer fanzine.
The femzine, or feminist fanzine, regarded as an example of co-existence between art and activism and the work of women setting out from an idea of the collective and the transdisciplinary, is rooted in the DIY culture with which art movements like punk, post-punk, Situationism, Dadaism, and social movements such as feminism and LGTBIQ+ liberation movements, are associated. The workshop, therefore, will explore the production methods of the feminist fanzine and the languages tied to subculture aesthetics by way of two case studies: the first is Heresies (1977–1993), an American magazine published by multiple-participant collectives — comprising, among others, critics and artists such as Ida Applebroog, Su Friedrich, Joyce Kozloff, Lucy Lippard, Miriam Schapiro, Pat Steir, Michelle Stuart, and Susana Torre — which analyses the relationships between art and feminist theory; the second is Erreakzioa-Reacción, a collective made up of Estíbaliz Sádaba and Vieites and transversally concerned with relationships between feminism and the visual arts in seminars, fanzines, drawings and videos in the 1990s.
The work of Azucena Vieites is the keystone of analysis for both publishing projects as well as other publications and artist’s videos, with the aim of setting in motion an artistic process through images and texts from feminist and queer publications and fanzines using DIY and low-fi publishing techniques. Thus, the workshop will draw on the reflections of other artists Vieites has incorporated into her own work — for instance those of Ulrike Ottinger (“finding an appropriated form”), or Jack Smith (“turning the ordinary into the extraordinary”) — and will be structured in sessions of visual artwork and interventions by other participants, culminating in the public screening of The Heretics (2009), Joan Braderman’s documentary on the experience of Heresies.
Participants
Andrea Galaxina is a femzine-maker and founder of the publisher Bombas para desayunar, which issued her book ¡Puedo decir lo que quiera! ¡Puedo hacer lo que quiera! Una genealogía incompleta del fanzine hecho por chicas (2017) the fanzines Todo mal (2017), Hay que acabar con el sistema patriarcal (2017), Haz un fanzine, empieza una revolución (2017), and the series Feminizine.
Beatriz Herráez is an art historian and currently director of Artium (Vitoria). She has curated a number of exhibitions, which include Lubricán. Julia Spínola (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, 2018), je, je…luna. María Luisa Fernández. Obras entre 1979-1997 (Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, 2015; and Museo Marco, Vigo, 2016) and co-curated Minimal Resistance. Between Late Modernism and Globalisation: Artistic Practices During the ‘80s and ‘90s (Museo Reina Sofía, 2013–2014).
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 collective Heresies, co-founding its magazine and actively contributing to its editions on architecture. Her architecture projects explore feminism and architecture and the relationship between building, territory and nature. She has also written about monument and memory in Argentina after the dictatorship.
Azucena Vieites is an artist. Her solo exhibitions notably include Tableau vivant (Museo Reina Sofía, 2013) and Fundido encadenado-Break You Nice (MUSAC, León, 2012). She has collaborated on a range of projects, for instance Dig Me Out (www.digmeout.org) and the Jornadas Feministas Estatales Granada 2009, and is an associate lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Salamanca and the Fine Arts Department at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1994, she founded, with Estíbaliz Sádaba, the collective Erreakzioa-Reacción, an initiative to develop projects spanning art and feminism.
Programme
Session 1. An Introduction to Heresies, by Beatriz Herráez
Wednesday, 6 November 2019 – 5pm
Session 2. Erreakzioa-Reacción, by Azucena Vieites
Wednesday, 13 November 2019 – 5pm
Session 3. Making Femzines Today, by Andrea Galaxina
Wednesday, 20 November 2019 – 5pm
Session 4. Work Session
Wednesday, 27 November 2019 – 5pm
Public screening
Monday, 2 December 2019 – 7pm
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Joan Braderman, The Heretics
USA, 2009, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 95’
Presentation and talk by Susana Torre
