fermenting feminism
Book launch at Broken Dimanche Press, Berlin - August 5th, 2017
 

For the Berlin launch of fermenting feminism, Canadian curator Lauren Fournier and Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (Dea Antonsen & Ida Bencke) presented video screenings and listening sessions with the following artists featured in the publication:

WhiteFeather Hunter (Canada) / Rubina Martini (USA), Zoë Schneiderder (Canada) / Nicki Green (USA) / The Unstitute (Spain) / Leila Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint (USA) / Regina De Miguel and Lucrecia Dalt (Spain/Colombia & Berlin)

fermenting feminism brings together artists whose work responds to what it means to bring fermentation and feminism into the same critical space. These are works that approach fermentation through intersectional and trans-inclusive feminist frameworks, and works that approach feminisms through the metaphor and material practice of fermentation. As both a metaphor and a physical process, fermentation embodies bioavailability and accessibility, preservation and transformation, inter-species symbiosis and coevolution, biodiversity and futurity, harm reduction and care.

Fermentation as a process of transformation becomes both a metaphor and a material practice through which to explore important issues for feminist artists and researchers, from the politics of labour, affect, survival, and care to colonialism, food, indigeneity, and the land. Is “feminism,” with its etymological roots in the feminine, something worth preserving? In what ways might it be preserved? In what ways might it be transformed? Is feminism a relic of the past, something that has soured? Or is feminism still a vital imperative? fermenting feminism positions fermentation as a potentially vital and viable space to re-conceive of feminism’s past, present, and futures.

Spanning the speculative and the literal, the embodied and the ephemeral, the agents in fermenting feminism reinvigorate questions of health, materiality, canonicity, community, consumption, ritual, and tradition. The works in this publication obscure the line between illness and well-being, between science and witchcraft, between human and non-human, and between sentient and non-sentient to flesh out pressing political, theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical questions in the present.

Working across the disciplines of art and science, fermenting feminism makes space for multi-disciplinary experimentation, including engagements with new materialisms, food studies, critical disability and mad studies, sexual diversity studies, and trans-inclusive intersectional feminist theory and practice. In addition to this publication fermenting feminism comprises a constellation of exhibitions, screenings, and programming taking place internationally. Given the site-specificity and importance of material and cultural context to fermentation practices, we are interested in having the exhibition and screenings of fermenting feminism evolve over the course of its tour, engaging with local artists and communities through performances, workshops, screenings, and experimental programming.

fermenting feminism (2017) is a limited edition artist’s book curated and edited by Lauren Fournier and published by the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, with design by Zille Bostinius (zillebo.com).

The digital, open-access version of Fermenting Feminism is archived through Artexte/e-artexte in Montreal,
and can be downloaded here.