At the start of May, a group of twenty-seven women will meet for three days of programmed activities at Gutshof Sauen, a large guesthouse in the Brandenburg countryside that surrounds Berlin. Within the framework of the meeting, and extending on the formats and content of the Our Future Network workshop series that Alex Martinis Roe has been hosting over the past eighteen months, all of the people attending have prepared contributions in various formats—be they discussions, group tasks etc.—which Martinis Roe has more specifically termed ‘propositions for feminist collective practice’.
These propositions have been developed in collaboration with the artist in the lead up to the meeting, and build on the experience of experimenting practically with the historical practices explored in the other films within her To Become Two series (2014–2016), as well as its relation and/or contribution to each contributor’s own personal research or activities. The contributors to this Our Future Network meeting are: Alejandra Avilés, Cécile Bally, Vasso Belia, Elena Betros, Federica Bueti, Åsa Elzén, Svenja Engels, Lucia Farinati, Julia Gorostidi, Janneke Koers, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Deborah Ligorio, Sara Paiola, Helena Pérez, Helena Reckitt, Juliette Sanchez-Lambert, Valerie Terwei, Veronica Valentini, Evelyn Wan, Lindsay Grace Weber, and Lea von Witzingerode.
The meeting will also provide the action for the development of the last film in the To Become Two series, which across its six film-installations will map the relations between and within a number of collectives and currents who have produced and distributed feminist theory in Europe and Australia. The project explores the entanglement of theory and practice through compiling a history of the practices that brought about these theories, and, in turn, the practices that emerged from them. Within this series the Our Future Network film will explore what these histories can mean for a current generation of feminists.
The film crew for Our Future Network is producer Susan Gibb, director of photography, Smina Bluth; second camera, Nadja Krüger; sound, Birte Gerstenkorn; and production assistance Ying Que.
Our Future Network is co-commissioned by ar/ge Kunst, Bolzano; Casco – Office for Art, Theory and Design, Utrecht; If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam; and The Showroom, London.