Lesson 3, Part 2

Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea (2015, Bucharest, Bologna)
Manifesto for the Gynecene – Sketch of a New Geological Era

This manifesto was widely distributed on several websites as soon as it was written and is available in several languages. It is now available in the 50 Feminist Art Manifestos ebook.

https://www.digitalmanifesto.net/manifestos/205/

http://istitutosvizzero.taylormacklin.com/alexandrapirici.html

It was reproduced in German in Helen Hester and Armen Avanessian (eds) dea ex machina  (Merve Verlag Gmbh, 2015) alongside contributions by Rosi Braidotti, Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, Laboria Cuboniks, Lisa Nakamura, Alexandra Pirici, Nina Power, Paul B. Preciado.

It is reproduced in Romanian: https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/arte-vizuale-manifest-pentru-ginecen-schita-a-unei-noi-ere-geologice/

It is translated into Finnish here: https://balticcircle.fi/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BC2016_58_64_gyneseeni_nettiin.pdf

LevArt/ LevArText translated the manifesto into Norwegian in 2016. The Manifesto poster-publication is available at Kunsthall Trondheim and by contact at LevArt: levart.no

Versions are also available in Hungarian and Spanish and in Swedish ‘Manifest för Gynecen – skiss tll en ny geologisk era. [Manifesto for Gynecene: sketch for a new geological era.]’ Paletten Vol. 300, Iss. 2,  (0, 2015): 4-11 (interview with Maja Hammaren.

In this video from Kunsthall Trondheim, the two authors discuss at length their rationale for producing and writing the manifesto.

Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea discuss “Manifesto for the Gynecene” from Kunsthall Trondheim on Vimeo.(2017)

In this presentation, the authors inform us that the manifesto was written as a collaboration and arose from a dialogue between the two women on a closed facebook page. In the video presentation, the projected images show an archive of these conversations, and slides of different connections to items online which provoked or informed their thinking.

They discuss with the presenter, the excitement of many people towards this manifesto and how its critical bite is often expressed as an “antidote” to contemporary times.

The authors describe their ambition as part of imagining a new political programme or a new political system, which both starts from a re-evaluation of the feminine as another value system and develops a critique of both patriarchy and the status quo.

They describe how they want to emphasise some of the positive values in femininity (not its traditional conventions or connotations) and extract this positivity from any conception of identity politics, focused on women alone. This is why the gynecene is declared a “new geological era”, not a condition of women alone, but an alternative space for a different transformation of the future.

The two authors claim the “invention” of word in their format – “gyno” (feminine) as opposed to “Andropo” (Man), attached to “cene”, an abbreviation of scene. This substitution is in line with many feminist critiques of Humanity, as they point out how our understanding of Humanity retains the dominance of patriarchy and is geared towards masculine value systems. Human is often only men and does not always include women. This is also known as “man-made” language/”man-made” world or the feminist critique of male bias in language, thought and culture. (In the 1980s, the same term was used to describe a set of feminist literary critics as “gyno-critics”, because of their focus on women artists and writers as a means to rethink what a future canon of art or literature might be). Like the gyno-critics, Pirici and Voinea argue for an expanded gendered, spatial set of perspectives, which would become inclusive for all human beings but it is still the case that we have to acknowledge the history of our culture as gendered and divided as well as structured into male/female or masculine/feminine binaries.

In the writing of the ‘Manifesto for the Gynecene’, they encourage us to think about how to create scalable networked solutions to change the ecology of the planet and give much greater consideration to how the local can affect and transform global dynamics. The manifesto presents an argument about how to engage differently with Anthropocene. Its aspiration is to find a different way to imagine survival in good terms: beyond a choice of working as automata or using only robots (this combines a Marxist critique of human labour and that of a solely technological future where robots take over). This different utopian ethic is based on transforming labour/work, especially the extensive manual labour of women invested in maintenance, reproduction and care of the human species.

The manifesto is critical of the strong negative connotations of the link between women and nature in Anthropocene debates, and is instead concerned with how the continuation of the species can be transformed into another kind of future.
They offer a critique of the Anthropocene that it is all-encompassing, in ideas of thinking about Gaia or the Cosmos as monolithic ideas for planetary survival, and point instead to how it is only some people, some institutions and some practices which are polluting the planet and damaging the environment (and producing high levels of violence against women) in unsustainable ways. Any idea of political or social change must be directed towards these sources of pollution, harm and destruction.

The manifesto is their response to the current situation but it sets out, in a highly reduced form, a future set of propositions for change including a freedom of the imagination.

There are many neologisms in this debate: capitalcene, Chthulacene, trans-humanism, post-humanism…

Their idea of working through different identities to reach common ground does find a parallel in Hardt and Negri’s book, Commonwealth but it is also a refusal to adopt any form of singular identity (where one characteristic takes priority over all others), for example, gender over nation, race or ethnicity. The proposal that there is a definite need for a common ground, as an alliance, is also linked to moving beyond the constant harassment and violence against women and to find a way to refuse withdrawing from tackling this aggression in society by lack of action.

The manifesto presents a strong intersectional basis for feminism in its ideas, because it recognises the limits of identity politics. It also demonstrates their interest in post-human concepts proposed by feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, whereby identity is seen as fluid in three dimensions – becoming animal, becoming earth and becoming machine.

However, the local urgencies and political/social crises of Romania and Italy are very present in manifesto and places of Bucharest/Bologna are always given in the joint signature. In the video, they discuss the problem of alliance with a critical left, all men, traditional Marxists in Romania, who do not wish to engage with feminist ideas. So, how to imagine a future alliance between feminists and a broader left grouping is also a key question in this manifesto, when, by contrast, the political Right appear to have no problem with making strategic alliances with any who mirror or share their political beliefs. Reproducing or over-emphasising the differences of minor ethnic groups or different segments of the population against a strong “white identity politics” (not just of the Right, but also in the Left), they argue, does not help. Their awareness of local politics lies behind their critique of universalism: in both colonialism and in Enlightenment thinking about progress/change towards a technological future.  In the video, they argue against saying simply “all lives matter”, as well as the need to move against those who argue that “some lives matter more”.

The Gynecene, they believe, offers a radical place of the feminine, and not a confined one, over-determined by patriarchy. It speaks to a certain history of care which has been combined with exploitation. It remains a technofeminist aspiration in these terms to recover some of the positive aspirations of the Enlightenment in terms of liberation from exploitation and be comfortable with technical progress, including body modification. This is not a celebration of static vision of nature but it is a reassertion of a gendered dynamic where care and kindness matter alongside a desire to solve problems by negotiation and accommodation rather than conflictual dynamics or war and destruction.

In the video, they argue that the role of artists must be to “reappropriate institutions” before we change them and that we need to save them: there needs to be a place for art and culture in any future vision of society. They see their claim for a universalism of the Gynecene in this light without the desire for Uber (over-arching) institutions in which equilibrium is always through growth, never through stability.

In their comments, they are well aware, the manifesto offers a reductionist viewpoint, but as a manifesto, this is its quality. It was a starting point for a bold expression of their ideas as a means to make connections and meet other people, to form “solidarities” or networks, (as in conference in Helsinki in 2016). Many of the reactions to the actual manifesto, they remark, felt like “thin air”. However, it did inspire the Xenofeminists….

What does the text innoculate us against?

Why is it important that in the first principle: “The female body has to cease functioning as a battlefield”?

How is the gynecene a response to the Anthropocene?

Are the propositions an effective modification or a cancellation of the Anthropocene’s violent and destructive future for the planet?

Would you place your faith in a future feminine principle of care and kindness? Is care and kindness an exclusively feminine principle?

Is the Gynecene a sufficient term for a female-gendering of the Anthropocene?

For Pirici and Voinea: the gynecene is:

the feminine as equivalent not to a gender but to a condition, not a “natural” condition but a cultural one. The feminine is the first stage towards a transgressive humanism and the Gynecene is the first global and simultaneous transfer of the feminine imprint onto the physical and political strata (deeply connected as they are today) of the Earth.

Does the concept of the gynecene risk reinforcing a universalising notion of the feminine which is equivalent to a totalizing notion also criticised in Anthropocene rhetoric, by T.J. Demos because:

the Anthropocene thesis can be roundly criticized for its assorted failings—terminological, philosophical, ecological, political. Nonetheless, the term remains significant for one reason: it registers the geological impact of colonial and industrial activities on Earth’s natural systems. As such, it offers an important wedge—one that unites climate science and environmental studies with the environmental arts and humanities—against climate change denial, funded generously by the destructive, profiteering fossil fuel industry.

Demos, T. J. (2017) Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press

or is the notion of a gendered “cene” more complex, as Donna Haraway suggests:-

‘The Anthropocene has had a conflicted etymological history. A number of experts think of anthropos as “the one who looks up from the earth,” the one who is earth-bound, of the earth, but looking up, fleeing the elemental and abyssal forces, “astralized.” “Human” is a better figure for our species, if we want a species word, because of its tie to humus, compost. Unlike anthropos, humus is not about looking up; it’s about being hot. [Laughter] Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have this little bumper sticker “compost is so hot,” for one of their feminist ecosexual slogans. It’s not post-human, but com-post.’

‘Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney’ in Davis, H. and Turpin, E., eds. (2015) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.

Other Sources to consult:-

https://www.tba21.org/journals/article/keynote_by_tj_demos_

Demos, T. J. (2016) Decolonising Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Mirzoeff, N. (2014) ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture 26(2 (73)): 213-232.

Demos, T. J. (2017) Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

jan Jagodzinski (ed) Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question (Springer, 2018)

Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016). Haraway has proposed the Chtulucene as an alternative to Anthropocene because this emphasises “a sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making”, which the latter implies in which humans dictate / control relations with other species.

More Questions about the Text

Let’s try analysing the text in terms of how each of the principles are examples of ideas that the authors are “for” and “against”.

Principle 1: the female condition is seen as “physically vulnerable”, but the authors do not support seizing “hard power” as a solution. They are for “empowerment” but as a change of paradigm where this physical weakness is understood and respected as a basis for change. They are for “the possibility of infinitely expanding and shifting bodily configurations and consciousness, they are against the limits of imposed “norms”. They embrace “difference” as a choice, not an obligation: and see feminism as a fight for real freedom of choice. They are for transhumanism as the challenge of being part of the human race.

2. The authors juxtapose and foreground the struggle of a radical left in opposing the threat posed by the right. They advocate an equality of race and gender, poor and disenfranchised to stand against the expansive and interconnected politics of exclusion promoted by capitalism, religion, racisms, sexism, and anthropocentrism.

3. They name 3 kinds of violence: the arms race as central to the economy, domestic violence across classes, and animal cruelty and hunting as a sport. They advocate and support an expanded conception of rights and social justice, away from militarization and brtual control or policing of populations in the name of peace and security.

4. They juxtapose the quote from Shulamith Firestone with their critique of neoliberalism. Capitalism remains a conservative politics, neoliberalism promotes sexism and racism in its vision of economic freedom. How do we work towards a better present and future without it?

5. They support the universalism of basic human rights and the idea of a tolerant and pluralistic society – but this is an expanded vision from the usual, embracing inter-species, inter-object relations and “a true respect for difference” in planetary terms, where there are “no second-class citizens”. This is a rejection of man’s control over nature, and a more humble vision of the earth as a shared and intimate space, “a living room”. Our ideas of freedom need to change and be re-orientated to achieve this vision.

6. Equality is linked to provision of natural resources in ecological terms – access to them is presented as a right. This paragraph re-iterates what can be found in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights but it adds self-government at local level in the interests of communities to provide these rights and questions the overwhelming faith in technological progress/advancement as the only goal. It is a call to adhere to the Declaration.

7. They support a version of pluralism maintained by a universal secular framework, a secular education, and a freedom to practice religion that is compatible with this system and does not seek to undermine or put in place “presecriptive set of rules, interdictions, and punishments’ against those outside it (non-believers, women, queers). The sentiments here reinforce the idea of “religion as an opium to the masses”: “Providing easy and simple answers for the complexity of human existence might fake the offering of a “meaning” and help some survive, but it will never help us evolve”.

8. They support “emancipatory use of sustainable technology” for future ecology as well as changing our position towards the exploitation of the natural world and its resources. They are against “private interests or profit” in this and for seeing technologies as cultural assets to be made public, open and free.

The final paragraph switches to the question of “beauty”: “the beauty of kindness”. Alternative visions of a technological “machinic future” or a “conservative retreat to the past” are refused. The Gynecene is embraced as a “pluralistic and expanded humanism” in a collective, fragile and subjective time. Unity, collective existence, emancipatory moments and recognition of incompatible histories in the Gynecene are contrasted with an Anthropocene which is man-made.

About Raluca Voinea

Raluca Voinea is curator and art critic, based in Bucharest. Since 2012 she is co-director of tranzit.ro Association. From 2012 to 2019 she managed tranzit.ro space in Bucharest.

http://ro.tranzit.org/en/people/founding+members/raluca-voinea

She is co-editor with Popovici, Iulia, Metaforă. Protest. Concept – Performance art din România şi Moldova. Metaphor. Protest. Concept – Performance art from Romania and Moldova (IDEA Design & Print Editură, Cluj, 2018). Romanian/English text.

Bogdan Ghiu & Raluca Voinea ‘The University Square’
http://idea.ro/revista/en/article/XI8Y2hAAACYA4B8_/the-university-square describes their ideas of possibilities of political interventions in a public square between 1989-2012.

N.B.  University Square was the setting for an important installation, Memorial of Cloth, in 1991 by Romanian artist, Ana Lupas, but this is not mentioned in their article. This was a restaging (albeit in dramatically altered form with black cloths not white) of an earlier installation Humid (1970).
You can read about this intervention by the artist in an essay by Ramona Novicov. pp.47-48  https://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue20_Ramona-Novicov_43-50.pdf

https://docplayer.net/18288374-Ana-lupas-early-works.html

If you want some background into Art during the period after the post-Communist Revolution from 1990-2012, this document may interest you, for the role of Lia Perjovschi and H.Arta in Romania:

http://www.policiesforculture.org/dld/Detective_Draft_part5.pdf

About Alexandra Pirici

Alexandra Pirici is an artist from Bologna, Italy who creates performance events (for galleries), using choreographed movements.

Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus represented Romania at the 55^th Venice Biennial (2013) with a work involving the continuous performance of a group of performers in the Pavilion. The Venice Biennial lasts 6 months and the performance took place every day over that period. They won a Golden Lion for this pavilion. This pavilion was curated with Raluca Voinea.

https://www.radiopapesse.org/en/archive/interviews/an-immaterial-retrospective-of-the-venice-biennale

See Mihnea Mirchan’s comments in http://venicebiennale2013.ideologicalguide.com/pavilion/romania/

Another major piece of Pirici’s work is Aggregate, which was staged for Art Basel, an art fair:

https://www.artbasel.com/news/messeplatz-alexandra-pirici-glossary

Aggregate forms the framework for more than 80 performers, who together with the visitors define the exhibition space in a swarm movement. Based on embodied memories that negotiate fragments of the common world heritage, the work referrs to mankind’s attempt to preserve essential aspects of its existence in time capsules, such as NASA’s “Voyager Golden Records”, comprising selected information on life on Earth in order to make it available for other, alien species.

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) press release, where Aggregate was performed in August 2017.

A 22 second video clip of the performance, Aggregate, can be found here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BX5HmAEjf4i/?hl=en

Another work Re-Collection is part of the Collection Collective project, based in Romania.
http://www.collectioncollective.art/member/alexandra-pirici

Pirici said about her practice that it was distinct from the writing of the manifesto, but it does operate as principles / directions of thought in her work.

‘I see the Manifesto for the Gynecene as being quite a distinct project from my art practice, even though, of course, I stand by the same principles in my practice as well or I try to, as much as I can. And I don’t think I can provide a model for a better future – as I also can’t provide a mode of operation for my artistic practice as well, but rather principles or directions of thought, all included in the manifesto and some manifesting in my artistic practice as well (hopefully).’

Interview with the artist about her practice in 2017: https://revistaarta.ro/en/i-see-practice/

Continue this lesson

Part 1…… Part 3

Summary

Watch Nathan Sacket’s interesting commentary on
Manifesto for the Gynecene, and
XenoFeminist Manifesto.