I would like to thank everyone who made it to our first meeting entitled ‘Building Feminist Resilience’.

Here are publicly available MEETING NOTES

Building Feminist Resilience is a network of local female or non binary artists and arts organisers. The group’s organisational model is based on an equal stakes principle with basic facilitation provided by Aga Paulina Młyńczak, Natsumi Sakamoto, Isabella Shields and Nell Cardozo. It aims to examine the arts sector in a productive and critical way, bolstering practitioners through discussing the discourses, infrastructures, and frameworks experienced by our peers in the international arts community. All participants are invited to host meetings, invite guest speakers, introduce new topics of discussion as well as propose objectives.

During the pilot meeting, all participants were invited to share and discuss their takes on resilience within the art sector.

‘When untangling my thoughts for the first meeting, the thread kept knotting around certain words: Generosity, Resilience, Resistance, Care and Labour. In the end, it was a good place to begin.‘

Continue reading a short take by Nell Cardozo

Wide breadth of the invoked topics:

1. Conversation as research, sharing as empowerment
2. Capital is messy – where does it come from in the non-profit sector. Care?
3. The complexity of generosity: doing more with less
4. Competition and collective action
5. The balance of care and respect – boundaries as a source of resilience
6. Creating a network of support that could bolster everyone
7. Protection and advocacy with space for maintaining differences
8. Glasgow vs. Tokyo
9. How do people manage to juggle life and care work
10. The pace of the art practice race and how it impacts the invisibility of various groups
11. The hard to find artist-curator development arc
12. Women and non-binary artists – professional development and success divided into stages
13. What does the road to a sustainable not for profit arts organisation look like?
14. Gathering different ‘good practice’ resources
15. Because we have no idea of what success looks like we’re not writing a canon

Goals:

1. Regular Local Meetings
2. Special International Guest Sessions
3. Collaboratively created online public resource including notes on ‘good practice’, the record of takes and conversations as well as suggestions for further reading.
4. End-of-Year Seminar supported by Goethe Institute

JOIN
Subject of your email: Feminist Resilience Network – Expression of Interest
Please remember to include your full name and a couple of sentences describing your preliminary thoughts and/or areas of interest.

See you next time,

– Aga