Participant Presentations
Looking back to think forward: Storytelling critique, possibility and a new imaginary
Darlene Clover, Canada
Worldwide feminists working in and with museums are (re)educating the public by (re)storying histories, deeds, perspectives and experiences long denied a public audience and intellectual credibility. Drawing on examples I will position this work within framings of critical and arts-based adult education: the imagination, the language of critique and the language of possibility.
The imagination is positioned as a powerful too. If you can imagine something new (and have the time, support and space to image, something often denied to women) you can make it real. Languages of critique uncover and render visible practices of gender inequity such as epistemic injustice, which has excluded women and the gender diverse as knowers and producers of knowledge and limited their ability to make sense of their own experiences despite it being strongly in their interests to render intelligible. Languages of possibility create a sense of agency and make a different world thinkable and actionable by making it imaginable. I will speak to how feminist strategies of animation, herstorying, repositioning, rescripting, reclaiming and so forth not only shatter entrenched masculine narratives but shift women and the gender diverse from the margins to the centre, transforming their experiences of oppression into critical insights and actions.
Embodied Earth: Resurgence of Indigenous sovereignty through land-based dramaturgy: Performance- Sturgeon Woman Rising
Lindsay Delaronde, Canada
Indigenous forms of storytelling are an essential methodology in the resurgence of women’s Indigenous epistemologies. Indigenous narratives counteract dominant bio and geopolitical settler-colonial norms by centring Indigenous women’s testimonies as sites of reclaiming power. I will present at this conference Sturgeon Woman Rising, a land-based performance I have created to teach the language of remembering, giving gratitude and offerings to the natural world. Swirling in the river activates mother nature’s natural pathways to revive our devotion to water, rivers, non-human beings and the invisibility of the spirit. This performance incorporates Indigenous artistic aesthetics, contemporary dance, and spiritual symbolism. Merging body and fish create an imaginative and playful pathway for deeper understandings of the language of the planet beyond our human limitations. Sharing across cultures strengthens interconnectivity between diverse nations- globally. My artistic practices engage themes, topics and initiates dialogue of transformation and healing.
Her Brother’s House: addressing gender and class at Jane Austen’s House
Lizzie Dunford, England
In 1809, Jane Austen, her mother, sister Cassandra and sister-in-law Martha Lloyd, moved into what is now known as Jane Austen’s House, a substantial cottage that was part of her wealthy brother Edward’s vast estates.
Until relatively recently, on a visit to the museum, you would have been able to read as many, if not more, words of text dedicated to the lives and careers of Austen’s brothers than to the work of the author herself. Despite Austen’s international fame and influence, her legacy, both in general, and in particular as represented at her home, was shaped by wealthier, male relatives and their descendants.
In this presentation, I, Director of JAH, will explore the ways in which the interpretation of the House and the author herself have been shaped by patriarchal forces, and the work of the current curatorial team to re-centre the house as the both the workshop of Austen’s imagination and as a consciously chosen all-female household. This work includes investigating and accurately presenting Austen’s position in society, alongside the female labour carried out by both Austen’s gentry family and the now-anonymous working-class women who supported and enabled the household of Chawton Cottage.
Threads that break the silence: Storytelling, participation, empowerment
Gaby Franger, Germany
An essential approach of our educational work in the Museum Frauenkultur Regional — International is to support, disseminate and transform women’s demands and resistance against violence and oppression. Sewing, embroidery, and weaving have always been a means of expression for women to tell their individual and collective stories, and what they cannot express in any other way. The language of these images is universal – we thus understand trauma and its overcoming. As history shows, women with their testimonial textile art have the power to move societies (e.g. Chile, Colombia, and Mexico). I will present the creative process of using textile storytelling as a means of empowering women from different communities, initiating intercultural and cross-cultural dialogues between women with no common language such as migrant and local women.
Fostering solidarity, social Justice, and sisterhood in museum spaces
Sadia Habib, England
Over the past five years, I have led the Our Shared Culture Heritage (OSCH) programme at Manchester Museum, focusing on transforming heritage spaces into safe spaces where young people, particularly from South Asian backgrounds, engage critically, creatively, and collaboratively. This initiative aims to reframe traditional museum narratives and practices to better embrace and represent ethnically diverse communities, especially those historically marginalised in such settings.
In this presentation, I will discuss the transformative impacts of the OSCH programme in facilitating engagement with cultural heritage and in empowering young people to lead initiatives within the museum context. A particular emphasis will be placed on the experiences of young women in the Museum Collective, who have been encouraged to boldly engage in truth-telling and storytelling as powerful acts of social justice and solidarity.
Drawing on the critical framework of bell hooks (1989), I will explore how these young women have used their narratives to ‘talk back’, and to challenge and disrupt conventional museum practices, thereby advocating for a more inclusive and equitable cultural space. This presentation aims to highlight the potential of museums as platforms for activism and education, where young people can contribute to reshaping cultural discourses and practices.
Feminist imaginary in archival work: Reflections
Maissan Hassan, Netherlands/Egypt
I arrived at the archival field following years of D.I.Y. archival and curatorial practices with feminist groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region where my work was informed by feminist conceptualisations of ‘situated knowledges’. Conversely, since joining the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Social History (IISG/IISH) in summer 2022, I have been coming across institutional (archival) practices that exemplify what archivist Michelle Caswell labels as “the view from nowhere”. This view could be defined as an internalized approach that claims neutrality and obscures socially positioned knowledge. As such, this approach ends up propagating the dominant hegemonic knowledge. I will reflect on the ways in which the feminist imaginary can bring about changes to this hegemonic knowledge. From my current position as a collection developer/curator of the “International Collections” in the IISG, I will discuss how the feminist imaginary could be applied and operationalised, as referred to by Darlene Clover and Kathy Sanford, ‘as a tool of knowledge, representation, and change’. I will share a case study of an archive by an international membership-based organization of workers, especially women, in informal economy.
Autoethnographic method in museum storytelling: Example of the “Birth Culture” exhibition
Tijana Jakovljevic Sevic, Serbia
Narrative researchers have long ago noticed the power of a personal story in capturing the reader’s attention and their own emotional connection with the subject, using that attention and connection to convey certain messages. The story itself can further communicate social, cultural or political contexts. Therefore, autoethnography claims that when we talk publicly about our experiences, they transcend the private and personal and take on social and political significance.
Can this method be converted and applied as museum storytelling and narrative mechanism of interpretation in a museum exhibition? In working with the audience at the exhibition “Birth Culture. From giving Birth and being Born”, which problematizes various biological and social aspects that pervade the topic of pregnancy and childbirth, I used exactly this method in the interpretation of the exhibited subjects and the presented topics. “Personal stories” referred to my personal experiences, knowledge collected within my family, but also through my areas of interest within social anthropology. Consequently, the visitors reacted to this way of storytelling by telling their own personal stories, which served me well for further research on the topic of birth culture.
Women’s museums and decolonial feminism
Elke Krasny, Austria and Lara Perry, England
Women’s Museums as a new category of museums were first initiated in the 1980s, at a moment in time when Third World Feminism was an important framework for feminist activism. Yet in hindsight, the extent to which these specific bodies of knowledge and their insights were excluded from a new feminist museum practice and a new women-centered museum pedagogy needs to be acknowledged and written into the history of such early women’s museums. This contribution develops an analysis from the perspective of decolonial feminism (Françoise Vergès) and in particular Vergès’s category of ‘civilizational feminism’ with its deep entanglements in the production and reproduction of coloniality under the regime of patriarchy. The aim is to explore what the world’s older women’s museums can learn from new women’s museums which have been founded in different nation states in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and are introducing and developing new feminist pedagogies in conjunction with feminist movements in these geographies.
Afro-Caribbean decolonial stories of memory and resistance
Claudia Mandel-Katz, Costa Rica
The works of award-winning photographers which we showcase in our women’s museum emphasise the importance of storytelling as an instrument to create an anti-racist and
decolonial consciousness that renders visible the logic of power relations in the matrix of gender, race and class oppression. Together, they raise questions about how Black women cope with experiences of alienation and anguish? In my presentation I will show how they use landscape, architecture, and images to tell the stories of power and the complex ways takes up and shapes identity and memory.
Lá na mBan/The day of women’: Telling Irish women’s stories
Sinead McCoole, Ireland
Ireland and the Irish are known worldwide as a nation of story tellers. Our oral traditions survived in our native language, Irish. Stories from Ireland – how women’s stories have been told – from ancient times to the present day in literature, art and language – against the backdrop of colonial suppression. Contemporary versions of the same stories – who is remembered and who is forgotten. Exploring the ongoing and evolving role of archives, museums, and art galleries I will focus on the collection of the National Library if Ireland. My illustrated talk will explore the women from ancient times to the present from surviving sources and stories of legend and folklore. Specifically, I will look at how the revolutionary movement shaped the narrative, and looking at the part education, religion in the preserving and promotion of an Irish identity, in Ireland and abroad in pre- and post-independence eras.
Not a day without herstory
Tihana Puc, Croatia
Not a Day Without Herstory is a long-term “program in progress” aimed at fostering social change by promoting gender equity and justice through a platform for creative engagement, education, and exchange centred around the Collection of Croatian Women Painters born in the 19th Century at the Zagreb City Museum. The Collection of more than a thousand artworks is a valuable source of (her)stories that provide a look into experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion, but also into experiences of agency, and struggle for rights and equality. Through various collection-related educational, art-based, and exhibition activities, the program attempts to make artists’ stories relevant to contemporary gender issues and audiences and use the collection’s storytelling potential to activate a more gender-just and compassionate society. Drawing on the stories of women artists from the Collection, historically excluded from museums, the project links them to present-day exclusions aiming to challenge them and create a more inclusive museum environment.
Ah, I have been doing exhibition storytelling all along
Carol Tullock, England
My curatorial practice, over some 24 years, has been driven by the potential of the archival narrative to the exhibition-making process and the final landscape of the exhibition space to discuss difference, race, activism, teenage lives, and domestic crafts. Exhibition narrative is the term I usually framed this practice in. But to reflect on this practice from the position of me, the curator, Carol Tulloch a Black British working-class woman of Jamaican parents, then the drive to curate shows in major gallery spaces, a women’s prison, a shop or a women’s library, allows the curator’s voice to be heard (not usually), that may or may not chime with the institution, is storytelling as agency, an individualised telling informed by the complex legacies of my biographical profile. Through the frame of exhibition storytelling, what has emerged for me is a particular curatorial ‘voice’ about women’s lives, their representative objects or practices. Together, what do these exhibitions say about the curatorial storytelling of this Black British curator?
Trick or Tweet: ArtActivist Barbie (AAB) as feminist trickster and storyteller
Sarah Williamson, England
I will present how I created ‘ArtActivistBarbie’, a modern day ‘trickster’ who draws upon the Trickster archetype and traditions found in stories from folklore and myth the world over. I will showcase the provocative staging of Barbie dolls in national art museums and galleries as ‘ArtActivistBarbie’, a fearless feminist activist, and speak to the impact she has on visitors and staff but also, on museums which are inviting her in to help them change how they think about and showcase women. I will also lead an ArtActivistBarbie’ in public, engaging all the participants in her mischievous and highly public actions to subvert the dominant patriarchal narratives in the public sphere.
Animating herstories: AI and digital storytelling
Samba Yonga, Zambia
In my presentation, I will talk about researching and creating Leading Ladies, a 2D animated podcast of the Women’s History Museum, Zambia. The primary objective of the podcast is to shed light on the obscured and hidden stories of Zambian women who held significant leadership roles throughout history in Africa. The website has a digital interactive space to enable engagement. I will also discuss the importance of ‘herstorians’, the women who had kept the stories alive by passing them down through the generations and make it public living knowledge.