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.

Screamers

This episode is based on a panel discussion with Chus Martínez, Quinn Latimer, Sonia Fernández Pan, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, and Barabara Casavecchia.

Sonia Fernández Pan is a (in)dependent curator who researches and writes through art and, since 2011, is the author of esnorquel, a personal project in the form of an online archive with podcasts, texts, and written conversations. She currently hosts the podcast series Feminism Under Corona and Corona Under the Ocean produced by the Art Institute and TBA21–Academy.

Martina-Sofie Wildberger is a performance artist working on the power of language, alternative ways of communicating, and the relationship between scribality and orality. Central to her practice is sound, the articulation of words, and the meanings constituted in the act of speaking as well as the poetic quality of language.

Barbara Casavecchia is a writer, curator, and educator based in Milan, and currently mentor of the Ocean Fellowship at Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy.