On 16th January 2018, Darlene Clover, Nancy Taber and Kathy Sanford conducted a feminist museum hack visiting the collection of photographs in the participatory museum of photography near Milan, with a group of high school and university students, teachers, curators and researchers. After presenting the methodology, the participants went to the exhibition:
The series on display, realized over a span of time from the 1960s to the early years of the new millennium, are very different in terms of theme, genre, visual language, technique, format and support. The exhibition features works organized by major themes. The first floor gallery hosts series about the body – from social reportage to Body Art – along with other series closer to abstraction and various forms of experimentation. The upstairs gallery presents landscape-related projects, understood both in the narrow sense of territory and the broader sense of social environment, which also represent a symbolic space of visual enquiry and linguistic hybridization. (HTTPS://WWW.MUFOCO.ORG/EN/P ERMAN ENT-EXHIBITION-SERIES/)
Each person made comments on a post-it and sticked it on the wall near the artwork. The guiding research questions had to do with whose gaze, who exhibited this way, who is invisible, how would you tell this story. The participants are invited to walk and read all comments and reconvene at the end for a collective conversation about power, feminism, and museums.
Photos with post-it comments
:
Hai notato che la prima sala è composta solo da fotografi maschi? Did you notice that the first room shows pictures of only male photographers?
Come ti sentiresti se la donna in questa foto fosse la tua mamma o tua sorella? How would you feel if this in the photo was your mother or sister?