RADICAL SELF-QUARANTINE
A COLLECTIVE FEMINIST ART INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAM
A COLLECTIVE FEMINIST ART INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAM
RADICAL SELF-QUARANTINE is a collectively-authored modular public "syllabus" for groups of people (artists, students, and anyone else who wants to participate!) to share a series of weekly creative moving image project prompts, screening, and reading ideas during periods of isolation, social distancing, and quarantine. It is also an experiment in creative companionship, exchange, and building new networks and creative communities.
You can get together with people you already know to do this project together, or you can form a project group with strangers. You can use a camera, a phone, or a webcam / screen capture, or any other tools available to you to make the projects. The projects are designed to be low tech, quick to make, possible to make without leaving your house, and easy to share with others. You are encouraged to make one project each week and to "meet" virtually each week with the other members of your project group to discuss what you've been making, reading, and watching in your self-quarantine independent study. You can do some of the projects, or you can do the whole independent study. Group size can vary, but 5-10 people is recommended.
Please join the Radical Self-Quarantine email group or Facebook group to get updates as this project evolves!
RADICAL SELF-QUARANTINE is a challenge to respond to quickly-changing new social and political contexts by making work that explicitly uses the tools and conditions of social distancing as materials to think through and with in generative new ways:
How can we create forms that can reflect directly on ideas of isolation, distance, loneliness, intimacy, gathering, public / private space, and political organizing during times of physical separation?
How can we think about the impossible political binary of social movement vs. social distancing?
Or the binary of disruption vs. maintenance and care?
What can we learn from this moment of intensely regulated bodies?
Or from the radical sharing networks that have flourished at the same time?
What is the utopian potential of stopping work together and what is the cost?
How is our labor instrumentalized in new ways when it is virtual, unboundaried, or when it takes place at home?
How is time different when we have nowhere to be?
How do we look after each other in times of crisis? How are we sharing space? Can care be enacted across physical distance?
What can we learn from disability communities that have been making alternate structures for meeting and making things for many years?
What can we learn from this moment about our capacity to change our behavior in radical collective ways?
How can we imagine the future together at a moment when the future is canceled?
Why feminist? Feminists have been talking forever about things like care, care labor, intimate labor, maintenance work, housework, maternal / parental labor, disability, collaborative structures, and numerous other related topics that are suddenly being foregrounded in national conversations, as more people globally are being asked to shelter in place. Learning from feminist art practices and histories is a great idea right now (and always)!