In Angola, which has been in a constant state of civil war for more than 25 years, women have been organizing themselves in the fight against poverty, exploitation and patriarchal structures. Radically, because they have nothing to lose. O.M.A. has become a mass movement.

Isabel Machado from Portugal and Christine Reeh from Germany have made a film about women in Angola and the O.M.A. congress near Luanda under the Asterisk label (Lisbon). They were inspired by a solidarity project run by Portuguese women. »First Story...,« an exhibition curated by Ute Meta Bauer for Porto as the European Capital of Culture 2001, is about many such cross-references and exchanges. This installation by Asterisk was on display in the new exhibition hall and library »Galeria do Palcio/Biblioteca Municipal Almeida Garrett.« The many pictures taken in Angola were spread out on a table, as a sort of jigsaw puzzle that the visitors were meant to use to put together their own stories in pictures. It was accompanied by an audio track on which the filmmakers talk about their work and their own connotations and relationship to the concept of feminism: a personal approach by the post-feminist generation. From these biographical and cultural stories inside and outside Europe, the different experiences of the First and the Third World founded on centuries of a colonial background, a broad spectrum of definitions regarding feminism and women is produced. The discussion between the two filmmakers is enough on its own to refute Chandra Monhanty's homogenizing concept of feminism, according to which women are an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, independent of class-specific, ethnic or racist positions and contradictions.¹ Machado's definition of feminism refers to a female way of thinking that should be defended, while Christine Reeh sees feminisms as manifest, sometimes contradictory elements of a society that change the relationship of all people involved to one another and also appeal to the potential of men's ability to learn.

In »First Story...« it is not only this discussion that disclaims the assumption of universal categories of gender, and suggests that it makes more sense to ask »how and whether women's ability to act and their desire was discriminated against at a certain time and in a certain place, and how and whether these questions can be empirically resolved.« ² The success of O.M.A., an organization that has no counterpart in Europe that can compare to it in size and popularity, can be explained according to this theory. »First Story - Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century« is an exhibition about the situations women are in; an interdisciplinary project carried out by many female artists, cultural producers, architects, musicians, sociologists, anthropologists, town planners and economists.

The exhibition provokes an unusual sort of receptive behavior, namely absolutely equal attention to the works shown. This concept also consistently runs through the accompanying formats: the exhibition reader »Case 1,« the Web page, the insert for MIL FOLHAS by Regina Möller, and the work by Maria Eichhorn - a list of selected bibliographies of the participants, connected with a purchase of these books and magazines by the first lending library in the north of Portugal - as well as the catalog, »Case 2.« The displays by the South African architect Nina Cohen create orientating emphases. Despite the wealth of pictures, text is concentrated and spatially structured, thus becoming an important level in the exhibition. It is not the abundance of text, but the complicated informational quality and the well-considered use of formats, the precise facticities, that give this impression.

The »New Narratives« cited in the title of the exhibition are, on the one hand, the result of consistent work by Ute Meta Bauer in the area of feminism and culture with women artists and scientists - she has been working with some of them for years already - while on the other they arise in the projects carried out by many young artists and producers. All the works are based on communication, exchange and distribution. Many of them draw from early experiences of collaborations of women or women's groups, which are framed in different fields like education, work, history, society and culture. The subject of the body and sexuality are dealt with using the abortion debate in Portugal as a concrete example: »Women on Waves,« a Dutch group of women activists that operates an abortion clinic on the high seas, has started an initiative aimed at obtaining the right to choose safe and legal abortion in Portugal. The center of their activities is a mobile gynecological station in a container designed by the Atelier van Lieshout studio. The container is at present on board a ship outside Portuguese sovereign territory, but could be loaded onto a truck at any time for use in regions with a weak infrastructure.

The »New Narratives of the 21st Century,« unfortunately, still remain partly the old ones, the ones that have not yet been resolved, like illegalized abortion - in Portugal and Ireland, for example - and naturally the economic disparities world-wide. But there are also areas in which new horizons and spaces have been playfully and powerfully opened up, like that of electronic music, of fanzines and comics, of lesbian culture. There, feminist content is celebrated with self-confident relish.

The atmosphere of »First Story...« is primarily produced by the architecture, which could be considered a successful standard model, displaying as it does the flexibility necessary for complex usages. The theory and practice of architecture is itself an important theme of the exhibition. Representing the design concept is Itsuko Hasegawa, one of the internationally most important woman architects of the present day, whose most recent projects include the »Niigata City Performing Arts Center and the Aera Development,« and the »Museum of Fruit« in Yamanashi. Hasegawa opened her own studio in 1979, the first woman in Japan to do so. Communication is the fundamental basis of her architectural concepts - and she sees »the public« as clients: »An exhibition,« says Hasegawa »is also a study of how communication can produce spaces or how spaces and communication interact.« For her designs she draws on elementary forms, like that of a water drop or simple biomorphic shapes. In Hasegawa's buildings, this method of design, which in a superficial reading calls to mind the essentialism of the seventies - where fluidity and nature had female connotations -, is condensed into architectural machines, full of tension and seeming poetry. Her design for the exhibition »First Story...« draws on traditions of Japanese culture, and builds its tension on two elements - the chashitu and the harappa: »The tea-room chashitu, a cultural, rigidly standardized room, demands appropriate behavior from people.« It is fairly intimate, and its ground plan consists of a module of two tatami mats (1.8 m x 0.9 m). Harappa is a Japanese word for an open, freely developing field. On a harappa, various communities put on their markets and celebrations, completely free of ritualized manners. Hasegawa has adapted the harappas for »First Story...«. Basic elements made of sheet steel in the shape of an ellipse structure the space and provide neutral islands for the »narratives.«

On the end wall of the exhibition room, a dominant, red-colored pattern can be seen, like a logo. It is a palimpsest made up of overlying ground plans of buildings for women (»Women Buildings«) - from (reconstructed) temples to present-day constructions, researched by Yvonne Doderer in collaboration with Ruth Becker. What does women-specific town planning mean today? Ruth Becker also deals with this question in her essay in »Case 2.« In her opinion, the »concept of obligatory heterosexuality« ³ as a theoretical basis could open up new horizons for the feminist planning discourse. Spaces should not only be examined as »sexualized,« but, in a further step, be analyzed under the »concept of compulsory heterosexuality.«

The Spanish women's group »Women and City Forum« has been working for five years on a politicized planning concept and for a reclamation of public space influenced to some extent by the everyday experiences of women. They have the idea of setting up communal facilities as reserve spaces for unorthodox use as a measure against the aggressive politics of privatization. A theoretical elucidation of the »Women Space« will be published in the Spanish art magazine »Zehar« ⁴, which has devoted two issues to urbanistic politics.

»Feminist public action was most effective in the cases where it made the ideological barriers between the private and the public sphere, society and family, more permeable; where it on the one hand made public things that had been kept quiet, hidden in domestic intimacy, and on the other exposed the supposedly objective and purposive actions of social institutions as a myth.« ⁵ The work contributed to »First Story...« by anthropologist and cultural producer Nicole Wolf exemplifies and elucidates this analysis. Wolf shows feminist public action in a program containing films and videos by Indian women filmmakers. Their works contrast Indian tradition - the traditional image of families and women that is marked by the Hindu concepts of virtue on which female identity is based - with subjective stories, personal memories, religious obedience and tales of the varied past.

Feminist public action takes place in many forms, under differing circumstances and with various intentions. The »Manifesto of the Riot Grrrls,« written in New York in 1992, has motivated many girls and young women in the USA - and far beyond its borders - »to be prepared to fight to be themselves« ⁶, and to work on a new organizational structure that is anti-hierarchical, based on communication and understanding and (even though this is very hard to realize) does not produce any mechanisms of exclusion. Born of the confrontation of ideals belonging to punk and activist collections, fuelled by the boom in girl bands and girlzines, Riotgirl is out to redefine girls' culture. The area of music and fanzines were suitable vehicles for rage, for the desire to make fruitful a revolution of everyday life, to look for alternatives that were opposed to structural sexism and discrimination. Taking this historical context as a basis, Christiane Erharter has put together an audio project for »First Story...« about women musicians, producers, DJs, lyric writers and all those women who work in the gigantic field of electronic music, under the title »XXO1.« »XXO1« is a sound collage consisting of selected pieces and excerpts from interviews with the musicians Hanin Elias and Gudrun Gut. The cultural producer Elke Zobl presents fanzine production as a feminist strategy that is available to many women and girls for producing their own images and discourses far from the mainstream, and putting them into circulation. At »First Story...« Zobl shows a large selection from a collection of fanzines: a potential of enraged, subjective utterances that change the world? The presentation was well set up. Visitors were not only able to view the covers in the display cases, but could also take out the magazines to leaf through them.

An extension of the feminist space into the Net that »womenspacework« has created in »First Story...,« with links to sites and political, social and cultural topics relevant for women, shows once more that feminism, as a field of concepts and conflict, comes in a variety of forms, as feminisms whose various movements allow no hasty, hard-and-fast categorizations of gender or identity. A cartography like the one drawn by »First Story...,« not just in its capacity as an exhibition, but above all in the networks included in a cooperational structure, seems more suitable for opening up a variety of action potential and points of connection for feminist politics.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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