Intersectionality and Transnational Feminism in Françoise Dasques' Documentary La Conférence des femmes—Nairobi (1985)
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
Within the recent history of post-1968 feminisms in France, the feminist video documentation and archiving institution Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, founded in 1982 by the feminist activist and actress Delphine Seyrig and authors of activist documentary videos Carole Roussoupoulos and Ioana Wieder, and the film La Conférence des femmes—Nairobi (1985) commissioned by the Centre, hold an important position. This exceptional one-hour documentary conceived by Françoise Dasques depicts the proceedings of Nairobi’s seminal 1985 NGO Forum of women’s groups from all over the world. The intense polemical speeches at the event addressed topics such as the Palestinian struggle, female genital mutilation, transnational alliances of LGBTQI communities, practices of self-defense, and the various significations of veiling women’s bodies in post-revolutionary Iran. These topics were all debated exclusively by women—across races, classes, and sexual orientations. The historical moment in Nairobi and this documentary exemplify intersectionality at work, a few years before Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s theorization revealed the term's full scope.
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent curator and writer. Among the projects and exhibitions, she curated are Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power (with Wim Waelput, KIOSK, Gent), Resilience. Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia at Moderna galerija/Museum of Contemporary Art (Ljubljana), transmediale.08 at HKW (Berlin), Our House is a House that Moves at Living Art Museum (Reykjavik), Let's Talk about the Weather at the Sursock Museum (with Nora Razian and Ashkan Sepahvand, Beirut), and in France: The Promises of the Past at the Centre Pompidou (with Christine Macel and Joanna Mytkowska). Between 2010 and 2012, she was co-director of Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers and co-founder of the network of art institutions Cluster. She is co-organizer of the seminar "Something You Should Know" at EHESS, Paris (with Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières), and a member of the research group Travelling Féministe, at Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. Between 2014 and 2017 she was the chief editor of the online platform L'Internationale Online, and was the chief editor of the Manifesta Journal between 2012 and 2014. Curator of the Contour Biennale 9 (2018–19), and together with Giovanna Zapperi works on the first exhibition around the videos by the French feminist and actress Delphine Seyrig (LAM, Lille and Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2019–20).
THE BLACK WOMAN'S WOMB. CARE, CAPITAL, RACE, FEMINISM
Françoise Vergès
Françoise Vergès will discuss two terrains affected by Capital, Race, State and patriarchy– reproductive rights and the cleaning/caring industry–to trace how a racialized nexus–birth control/migrations/environment–has affected Black women. She will look at the ways in which reproduction was racialized for feeding primitive accumulation during the slave trade–the African womb was capitalized–then she will move to post World War II when the West constructed a discourse and imposed practices that connected birth control in the Global South, control of migrations and concern for the environment. She will show that these politics are part and parcel of a reconfiguration of the feminine exploited workforce in cleaning/caring.
Françoise Vergès, Chair of Global South(s) at the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris, part of the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme. She was a feminist and antiracist journalist and editor in the 1980s, before doing her BA and PhD in the United States (PhD in Political Theory at University of California/Berkeley). Her areas of research are: postcolonial studies, South-South exchanges, coloniality and independence policies, feminism, etc. She regularly works with artists, produces exhibitions, is the author of documentary films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire. She was project advisor for Documenta 11 in 2002 and the Triennale de Paris in 2011. Her publications include: Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme, Albin Michel, Paris, 2017; Exposer l'esclavage: méthodologies et pratiques (Exposing slavery: methodologies and practices), Africultures, Paris, 2013; L'Homme prédateur. Ce que nous enseigne l'esclavage sur notre temps (Predatory humans. What slavery tells us about our era), Albin Michel, Paris, 2011; Ruptures postcoloniales (Post-colonial rupture), with Nicolas Bancel, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubakeur and Achille Mbembe, La Découverte, Paris, 2010.
Screening
Ashley Hans Scheirl
Dandy Dust, AT/UK 1998, 94 min., English OV with German subtitles
Followed by a conversation between Ashley Hans Scheirl and Claudia Slanar
Welcome and introduction
Stella Rollig (General Director of the Belvedere and Belvedere 21)
Andrea B. Braidt (Vice-Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
Movements in Feminism / Feminisms in Movement: Urgencies, Emergencies, Promises
Luisa Ziaja, Elke Krasny, Lara Perry and Dorothee Richter
Lecture
Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, Lucretia Revisited. On Rape
Moderated by Luisa Ziaja
Performance Lecture
Night School - Neda Hosseinyar, Marissa Lôbo, Stephanie Misa, Catrin Seefranz, Unruly Thinking: A Performance Lecture
Moderated by Elke Krasny
Lectures
Magda Lipska, NIEPODLEGŁE: Women, Independence and National Discourse. Or how Women Are Depicted in National Narratives?
Elke Krasny, Feminist Transnationalism: The Activist as Curator
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Intersectionality and Transnational Feminism in Françoise Dasques' Do- cumentary La Conférence des femmes—Nairobi (1985)
Moderated by Lara Perry
Lecture
Françoise Vergès, The Black Woman’s Womb. Care, Capital, Race, Feminism
Moderated by Elke Krasny