The Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) focuses on under-represented feminist texts, movements and struggles from outside the Anglo-American canon. The group has developed a practice of reading out loud, together, one paragraph at a time, with the aim of creating a sense of connection and intimacy during meetings.
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As part of Frances Scott’s research residency at TACO! an online screening event for short film, Valentina (2020) was followed by an in conversation event with writer Beth Bramich.
Continue reading “Frances Scott: Valentina”![A black and white photograph of a white woman behind the bars of a gate. She is reaching up to attach a hand-painted banner that reads: Les Ouvrieres Occupent L'usine [translation: workers occupy the factory].](https://bethbramich.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/cathy-bernheim-ned-burgess-catherine-d-eudon-suzanne-fenn-and-annette-levy-willard-grecc80ve-des-femmes-acc80-troyes-womens-strike-in-the-city-of-troyes-1971.jpg)
To mark the publication of issue 48 of Afterall journal, Beth Bramich invited The Camera: Nous, an intermittent film club led by Lauren Houlton, to lead a collective reading of Stéphanie Jeanjean’s essay Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives accompanied by a screening of Grève des femmes à Troyes (1971). The screening and reading group took place at Arts Catalyst, London.
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Guts Up Chuck is a publication produced through a collaboration between writer Beth Bramich and design studio Design Print Bind. Pairing 24 short, queasy texts on subjects including acid reflux, nausea and anxiety with experimental, gestural monoprints, the publication gazes down at an unruly body and tries to make sense of it through moments of detachment and drift, sudden awareness, vulnerability, limitation and possibility; to find empathy for what is partially known, understood, felt.
A hundred years or so before my mother’s mother prepared to move her family from Myanmar to Calcutta, India, and then some years later on to Birmingham, my father’s ancestors travelled on convict ships to Australia. I write this to position myself in relation to Australia: Myanmar and Australia hold a special place in my imagination as countries where people somewhat like me lead radically different lives.
I arrived in Melbourne on 25 January, the day before Australia Day, a public holiday commemorating the 1788 arrival of the first fleet of British ships. This is a controversial celebration, which, despite being tied to centuries-old colonialisation, has only been a national public holiday for 30 years. Speaking to people born in Australia and to immigrants, I came to understand that a vocal community thinks that the holiday should instead mark a different moment in the country’s history, for example the day that indigenous Australians gained rights through the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975.
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Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis write manifestos. They write in marker pen on walls and on sugar paper sheets, all caps: statements, questions, quotes. They also write rules, for each other and other people, provocations and terms of engagement. There are schedules too, and to-do lists and in-jokes and scores. It’s a part of externalising their process — a necessary one when working together as a pair or in larger groups — and it significantly shapes what is to come. These texts and diagrams are preparatory materials, scores for activity, but sometimes after the fact, they are one of just a small physical trace of actions that involve a handful to a hundred or more people.
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A New Career In A New Town (2019) is a creative writing manual, a diary and a selection of experimental texts that respond to the context of a new town being built on the banks of the Thames in North Kent.
hmn is a quarterly sound-based test centre organised by artist Anne Tallentire and writer Chris Fite-Wassilak. This roaming event series, running since February 2015, is an intimate and unique platform for artists, thinkers and workers from a range of backgrounds to present new work. Conceived as an alternative space for testing ‘what sound is and can be’, each edition takes up residence for an evening in venues such as libraries and community centres across London. In a recent conversation with Beth Bramich, Tallentire and Fite-Wassilak discuss the project’s intentions and outcomes, and its ongoing development.
Join The Bad Vibes Club (Beth Bramich & Kathryn Siegel) at the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery for a reading group and discussion about transgenerational approaches to feminist politics, based on a reading excerpts from Alex Martinis Roe‘s book To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice. This event touches on themes Martinis Roe explores of intergenerational rifts and estrangements, the affective aspects of collective practices and the possibilities of solidarity in difference.
Beth Bramich 