Feminist Spatial Practices: the global network always open to submissions

Commissioned in 2023 by the Jencks Foundation and e-flux journal, FSP – Feminist Spatial Practices – has since evolved into a global network of creative works engaging with intersectional gender equity in the built environment.

What happens to our ideas – clever, sharp, groundbreaking – when there’s no audience willing to hear them out? Do they go wasted? Do we stop believing in them?

A glance through any Western art history textbook can reveal the loud absence of women artists, guilty of asking unwanted questions and demanding difficult answers that nobody wanted to give. With their stories systematically erased from the official narratives – not because they were defined as uninteresting, weak, easy, or problematic, but because they were never defined at all – women artists had to fight to see their visions survive and come down to us.

Fully aware of the dangers this kind of cultural erasure can cause, Bryony Roberts – designer, artist, writer, and educator – and Abriannah Aiken – designer and activist, currently working at DLR Group in New York – created a new digital space to protect and promote the stories of female, Black, and queer voices: Feminist Spatial Practices is accessible and free for all.

HOW THE PROJECT STARTED

Founded in 2023 and commissioned by the Jencks Foundation and e-flux, FSP is “a participatory space to highlight, promote, and share feminist practices in art, design, architecture, and activism”. Through the construction of a safe virtual space – the online web platform has been active since the fall of 2024 – FSP’s mission is to expand the cultural debate, engage with artistic realities worldwide, and, most importantly, recognize the inequalities that have contributed to shaping our society due to hierarchies of power and male white privilege. “The project nurtures the diverse ways that creators work towards intersectional gender equity in the built environment, acknowledging and celebrating the different feminisms that have existed across geographies and time.”

ARCHIVES AS RESISTANCE DEVICES

The creation of a vast, continuously growing archive thus becomes an act of disobedience and a powerful resistance device: “I think it is particularly important to turn to the archive when studying women artists as so frequently their agency is diminished through limiting biographical accounts or in the construction of a male-dominated art history” states Cora Chalaby – PhD candidate in History of Art at University College London.

Organized around six themes – Alternative Materialities, Collaborative Practices, Embodied Theories, Expanding Histories, Experimental Pedagogies, Spaces for Non-Conforming Bodies – a global map with new collectives, exhibitions, publications, websites and much more is always open to submissions, inviting people to participate and join the community.

FEMINIST AND ANTICOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

The collective specifies that “‘feminist’ here indicates practices that actively engage with themes of gender, sexuality, and social equity, including practitioners of any background or gender identification.” The note comes as no surprise, since the term “feminism” – more than political movement itself – often triggers people that mistake definitions for restrictions, as if being a feminist, which actually represents the possibility to choose, negates the possibility of being anything else.

FSP also pays a tribute to “indigenous communities globally around the world,” acknowledging that “much of the work from our global archive and the work of our community members takes place on indigenous land.”