Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

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In this episode Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Isabel Lewis, Lynne Kouassi and Sadie Plant.

Isabel Lewis is a Berlin-based artist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, her work encompasses myriad forms, from lecture performances to workshops, music sessions, parties, hosted occasions, and large-scale artistic/programmatic works like the Institute for Embodied Creative Practices.

Lynne Kouassi is a Basel-based artist whose works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Her practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration.

Sadie Plant is a British philosopher, cultural theorist, and author based in Biel/Bienne. In her research and writings, she offers an alternative, feminist account of the history and nature of digital technology, and the influence of psychoactive substances on Western culture.