9. SaRA RIVERA

Watching the march in Petrograd in 2012 is a gathering of texts made by revolutionary women to document the evolving urgency and material basis for resistance across time, place, and contradictions.

The work follows women’s pursuit of new freedoms as explicitly voiced by the two revolutionaries in an assembled single-chanel audio—Alexandra Kollontai, a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet who founded the Women’s Committee in 1919 and Charisse Bañez, a student leader and organizer from the Philippines. This is a gesture meant to draw parallels between the militant history of women revolutionaries in the Philippines to the Women Question at the time of the October Revolution. The weaving together of the texts can be understood as the embodiment of diverging histories and the universality of class struggle. The work was conceptualized in response to a call to create modal expressions of  the woman’s place in society and their historical task of changing this imposed upon place. 

The embroidered text in red is an utterance credited to Bolshevik tramway worker, Aleksandra Rodionova who was put in charge of coordinating the Petrograd railway during the insurrection. It is directed to lend muscle to the otherwise bodiless sound—tethering the two spoken texts together in a medium that is familiar and temporal. 

Integral to the work is the viewer, who, when prompted to feel the embroidery becomes part of the circuit that triggers the sound. This precise created ultimatum to feel and to link is in part, the work’s continuing meditation on action, motion, collectivity, and defiance.