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.

Alta Ego

In this episode Tessa Mars, a Haitian visual artist living and working in Port-au-Prince, talks about her practice as a performance that is not limited to the living body. The ancestors she is specifically referring to are those heroes of the Haitian Revolution, enslaved peoples who famously rose up against and defeated French colonial rule and the system of slavery there.