MIS(S)PLACED WOMEN? METHODOLOGIES OF EMPOWERING FEMINIST ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Tanja Ostojić
Listen to voiceover
Mis(s)placed Women? (2009-2022) is a complex long-term art project that includes solo and group contributions by over 180 individuals from six continents, embodying and enacting some of everyday-life’s activities. These thematise displacement experienced by migrants, refugees, and itinerant artists traveling the world to earn their living. Contributions/contributors originate from places including, among others, Aberdeen, Aix-en-Provence, Calgary, Gaborone, Montevideo, New York, Wuhan. While some of the performances and workshops deal with migration issues, others engage with feminism, queerness, gentrification, inclusion, accessibility, power relations, and vulnerability, particularly as they relate to women and non-binary people, an aspect that figured prominently in the past three decades of my artistic practice. Mis(s)placed Women? investigates privilege by distinguishing between working mobility, forced or desired migration, and how arbitrary laws apply to migrants. The project also explores diverse public spaces and the invisibility of certain groups within them.
Mis(s)placed Women? workshops apply the principles of Art as Social Practice and explore a variety of public spaces and the possibilities for temporary interventions in them. They empower participants via a kind of master-class block seminar—a laboratory outside of official educational institutions, so to say—while developing new collective and individual works, performances and performance scores, and in some cases as well activist actions and performances. I have conducted numerous workshops across the world in which the participants are selected by open call.
Local and international Mis(s)placed Women? gatherings are organised around the idea of community building, as well as sharing struggles and strategies via creative exchange and performative actions between different ecologies. To do so, for example, long term contributors from Canada, across Europe and Bangladesh gathered in Belgrade (2021) and in Istanbul (2022).
In this text, I share some of the methodologies of empowering feminist artistic practice that I developed over the period of 13 years in the framework of my Mis(s)placed Women? project. Through its collaborative and multifaceted aspects, this project seeks to raise awareness and visibility for marginalised and discriminated minorities on the local and international scale, while the artistic process brings together research, theories, praxis and artistic production. I want to share some of the ethics that were crucial to the processes of the project’s development, and will give as well insights about steps of the workshops’ creation and delivery.
I realised that there is a 30-year-long mutual learning process between the methodologies I use in my teaching formats and in my artistic practice, and that the ethical aspects of working with people play an essential role in it. For instance in the framework of my other, in part parallel, long-term-project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić (2011-18) that developed further the strategies of conscious ethical politics in artistic production, the creation of a community with shared authorship and ownership (with an intergenerational group of 33 name sisters of different social and ethnic backgrounds), and the emancipatory potentials of collective autobiographical methodologies as the basis for art-making; this included the creation of an Ethical Codex that in most aspects applied to the Mis(s)placed Women? project.
Ethical Codex1
— Participants have the right to step out of the project at any time.
— Nothing will be published without their knowledge or consent.
— Participants have the right to take back certain information or censor parts that they do not wish to be accessible to the public.
— Participants can/will get all material produced in the project’s frame for their own use.
— In the case of public events, participants could additionally decide whether they were willing to take part in it or not; which questions they might be ready to answer and which not; what facts can be disclosed about them and which should stay secret; if they want to be filmed, photographed, or not, etc.
What are the Specifics and Methods of the Mis(s)placed Women? Project?
1. It is a long term project, that means that we engage over an extended period of time. The performance workshops are not one-off workshops, so some of the participants who connect with each other in those workshops, happen to socialise and to collaborate with each other after as well, and/or continue to contribute to the project itself, over 5 or 10 years.
2. Personal and performance relationships with each of the project’s participants are built.
3. Community building; (Art)friendships, performance friendships.
4. Pear learning; Pear shaping of the program
5. Support each other
6. We practise women’s circle
7. Learn about the issues and embark in the creative process together (We embark all together into creative processes, so this is not happening on a theoretical level or on a paper, we are entering creative processes and are producing individual and group performances, in some cases with shared or delegated authorship).
8. Involving people outside of institutional/academic context/outside of the art-world or people from the margin.
9. Practice of embracing, hugging, sometimes even healing, certainly empowering one another.
What is the Structure of the Workshops?
1. Get together in a welcoming round and the inclusive circle in our social base. Present ourselves to each other, who we are and what is our motivation to join the workshop, and what are the expectations.
2. Gathering of topics (via various physical and verbal exercises).
3. Looking at the city map, then going to derive walks, exploring, experimenting, and performing ad hoc. Or, discuss and pre-decide which neighbourhoods, spaces or locations would host certain ideas the best, which audiences or spaces we would like to address and why.
4. Joint meals, coffee circles, possible creation of smaller affiliation working groups.
5. Inspiring each other; supporting each other in the implementation of each other’s ideas, (coperform, take care of things and objects, engage with documentation; overtake a certain technique or a part of production/creation process that one feels confident with, for the other person who struggles with a particular aspect).
6. Daily get together to give each other feedback, discuss how the process has been developing. What are the feelings, plans for the day, next steps…
7. Self-reflection and writing task (free format, in the form of a poem, manifesto, few sentences, a review, or a longer academic text).
8. Public discussion, presentation of the workshop’s results that includes important internal processes of feedback to each other between the participants, from the workshop leader, taking place towards the end of the workshop.
9. Editing and publishing (including post production of written contributions and workshop reviews).
10. Editing, choosing and distribution of the workshop documentation (photos, videos, maps, audio recordings if any. Usually taking place in part already before the public presentation).
11. Remaining in contact.
12. Occasional annual meetings, community gatherings, project exhibitions and similar.
Feminist Ethics of Care: With its Artistic, Activist and Pedagogical Aspects
As facilitator, I practise affectionate leadership, and encourage participants to support each other within their peer groups, so that nobody is left behind, and people are opening up and contributing in their own capacities. I need to be open-hearted and humble for all kinds of proposals and ideas coming from the participants. Sometimes I am talking about some of my own work that could somehow demonstrate that I have capacity, so to say, to work with sensitive topics and with people who are for different reasons marginalised. Furthermore, we create an inclusive space in our project base and are discussing and practising how to extend and hold this further in the public spaces where we work. We discuss beforehand risks of certain locations and strategies of how to handle them, for instance, as our intention is to make the action or performance happen and not to get arrested or forced away, we utilise the strategy of talking out security. Sometimes I advise some of the participants not to perform at certain locations and we search together alternative solutions.
A sixty-eight minute documentary entitled Mis(s)placed Women? Performance Art Workshop by Tanja Ostojić, Istanbul Itinerary, engages with this type of practice of care, while following the process of becoming, of collective and individual performances and reflections of the workshop participants over three days in three different neighbourhoods of Istanbul, and showcases the final presentation and discussion we had at the Beykoz Kundura Cinema (September 2021). Participants were delightfully supportive of each other and highly motivated, while the response from the public was tremendous and appreciative, in spite of the police presence and oppression that made working in the public spaces of Istanbul particularly demanding. Contrary to the 2021 workshop, where we operated with the support of organisational and documentation teams and a permissions to work in the public space, in 2022 we used guerrilla actions, one of which took place on a rainy day, on underground line M2, between stations Şişhane-Haciosman-Şişhane, where we experimented with several of scores from the “Mis(s)placed Women?” project archive and with new ones as well.
Work with Performance Scores
Performance scores are instructions on how to perform a piece, described in simple steps. They can be understood as an overall frame, a starting point, or as an inspiration. Some of them are written before and some after the initial performances. One score can result in numerous and diverse performances depending on the interpretation.
In my artistic practice I build, use and share an archive of performance scores as an artistic, pedagogical and activist tool. In the framework of the “Mis(s)placed Women?” Project workshops (as well as at other workshops, or while teaching seminars at universities) we are engaging with this archive of scores (some examples in the conclusion below), performing archive, usually in the form of embodied performances. We are combining scores and developing them further. Proposing and writing new scores that we share. The power of working in a group gets amplified via tools, such as exercises and scores, that are like vocabulary for us to be examined and tested on how they work in different contexts.
Example of JIN* JÎYAN AZADÎ /
WOMEN LIFE FREEDOM Action2
JIN* JÎYAN AZADÎ / WOMEN LIFE FREEDOM was a collective action of the Mis(s)placed Women? Community in remembrance of Jina Mahsa Amini, and in solidarity with the activists, especially all women, silenced and murdered in Iran. The action started at Galata Square in Istanbul on the 22nd September 2022 at 11am, combining three performance scores from the Mis(s)placed Women? Performance Workshop held one year earlier, (September 2021, Istanbul), including walking backwards and waving of colourful scarves (Protest Scarves Against Turkey’s Retreat from the Istanbul Convention) that our community performed at Istiklal Street, and Opening of The Voice, action of collective screaming while walking busy streets in Kadiköy. So, when the Mis(s)placed Women? community from Istanbul joined forces with the Mis(s)placed Women? community from Berlin and London in 2022, after one day of indoor performances at Depo, on the second day of our workshop, we decided to combine the above mentioned three performance elements/three scores so to say, creating a powerful action in solidarity with women, silenced and murdered in Iran. We walked backwards carrying above our heads our colourful scarfs connected with nods to each other, along the Büyük-Hendek-Street until the square at the junction with Meşrutiyet-Street and Şişhane Metro, continuously screaming. We raised great interest, and people were standing up from their chairs in cafes across the way, taking pictures of the action.
Example of Score #7, The Safe Circle
In September 2019, Luciana Damiani came from Montevideo to Berlin with a travel grant from the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture in order to meet with me and to collaborate on the Mis(s)placed Women? Project, as she wrote, it was “necessary for me to try to get an opportunity to share my experiences and generate bonds with other people who have experienced similar situations” regarding misplacement. So, I organised a workshop for her in the Park am Nordbahnhof Berlin, where she had chosen a place, drown a circle with yellow chalk, and performed the Score #1: Unpacking a Bag of Your Own, which I wrote in 2009. Then she read her Manifesto, and afterwards performed as well the Score #2: Holding the ‘Misplaced Women?’ Sign3, in her version, the ‘Misplaced Human?’. In September 2023, I wrote a Score #7: The Safe Circle and shared it in a workshop in a public space close to the construction site for the inclusive social housing for multigenerational lesbian women. I would like to share at this point and at the end of my essay, those four short texts/instructions/scores (the manifesto below and three scores at the end) as an invitation to perform them and I would be pleased to hear back from you in case you perform them. I will start from this:
Luciana Damiani’s Manifesto 4
I am a body and I am a statement.
I am a witness and I am evidence of manipulation.
I don’t want to ask for permission to be.
I don’t have to ask for permission to be.
I don’t want to be defined by you, or anybody, or anywhere, or anything.
I don’t want to be from here or there.
If my existence threatens you, that is because you’re afraid to lose your privileges.
If your walls surround me, my words will be the weapon to make them fall.
If you hurt me, I will heal.
And I will repeat this all over again.
Because I have a pact with all of my kind.
Because that’s my duty and my only way to resist.
Conclusion and Scores Offering
It means to me a lot to get an opportunity to hold the space, to invite to share and discuss anti-discriminatory knowledges, endorsing, and transformative artistic practices, in the first line with others who identify as women, many of whom did not had an access to the arts, art production, access to art education, similar to mine, got marginalised due to the processes of canonisation, or on the basis of lack of opportunity and compatibility with art market/carrier dynamics due to maternity engagement, or peripheral geographies… So, the methodologies of empowering feminist artistic practices and alternative pedagogical formats I wrote about above, have been developed over decades of working from a marginal position myself, and have been embedded in my own artistic practice. In this way there has been a mutual learning process between the two, as well as, between the participants and myself, and others as hosts or facilitators. Those mutual learning processes and empowerments have been interlaced with appreciation and long lasting women friendships, sisterhoods, resulting from community building processes. Reunions, and international community gatherings have been incredibly rewarding and productive, as women would meet and reunite, often in a new life cycle, different life stage and circumstances. With time, the trust and openness to the group dynamics and the process grows.
Between the major challenges I have been facing over the years, in many of the project workshops and exhibitions, what emerged was precarity (lack of funds, limited time, space and organisational facilities), post production that, especially at the earlier stage of the project’s development, was not understood as part of the process; there was too the complexity of organising work, travel, communication, documentation, archiving and crediting with numerous and such diverse participants. It is worth investing the extraordinary effort needed to assure that in participatory artistic practices ethical guidelines are respected and all contributors are credited, even in the case of, for instance, the 27-metre-long Mis(s)placed Women? project’s timeline installation covering a period of 13 years, between 2009–2022, that has been on display at Depo-Istanbul, consisting of photos, videos, signs, banners, accompanied by over 200 names of participants, partner institutions, documentarists, locations, dates, etc. It is worth the effort of crediting, and thanking everyone.
Score offerings
Alongside the manifesto above, below I am including in this contribution three existing performance scores, that I offer to the reader of the performingborders e-journal: “Score #1: Unpacking a Bag of Your Own”, (2009); “Score #2: Holding the ‘Misplaced Women?’ Sign”(2012); and “Score #7: The Safe Circle”, (2023).
Score#1:
Unpacking a Bag of Your Own5
More or less than an hour,
with or without preparation,
one or more performers,
migration-specific locations
Listen
About:
Misplaced Women? is an art project that welcomes contributions by people from diverse backgrounds that embody and enact everyday-life activities that touch upon forms of displacement. Participants are invited to perform and reflect upon different notions of travelling, identity, illegality, homelessness, security, private/public space, and to share their experiences on the project blog.
Instructions:
1. Select a migration-specific place that resonates with you (such as public transportation, central bus station, airport, border, different areas affected by gentrification).
2. Get there and unpack a bag of your own (such as your own purse or backpack, or a bag with empty plastic bags, or packaging from consumer articles).
3. Take every single item out and turn it inside out. Take everything out of your pockets. Turn your pockets inside out. Take your shoes off. Once you have unpacked everything, search to see if you have discovered something else.
4. For those more advanced and highly motivated: You can repeat the same action in various places and times, and see how it is perceived by those around you. If you choose this option, draw a map of places where you performed each of the unpacking performances.
Note:
Reflect upon how it felt to do this in public. Did you feel exposed? How did it resonate with your life experience, and did it bring you closer to the people on the move, people on the street, etc? Be open to talk to the passers-by about what you’re actually doing and why. Let this performance last for at least half an hour. If you have unpacked your things in a hectic way, after a break, try to pack items back with appreciation and care (or the other way around).
Attention:
Places that are generally understood as public spaces might appear not to be such. That means that with your performance you might challenge the notion of public space, and see where it is (not) possible to do your action. A security guy might push you one metre away from the entrance (in a shopping mall, or what many train stations have become nowadays, right)? A policeman might ask you, “What are you doing?”. I can only advise you to bring one person with you to try to talk to any security personnel you encounter, so that you can finish your performance. You may also say that you are searching for an item of your own that you really need but you are not sure if you took it with you (Whatever that might be, right?). This is to avoid being kicked out or arrested, given that performing and filming is usually not allowed in some “public” places.
Score #2:
Holding the “Misplaced Women?” Sign6
Less than an hour,
with or without preparation,
one performer
Listen
Instructions:
1. Select a migration-specific place that resonates with you.
2. Make your own “MIS(S)PLACED WOMEN?” / “MISPLACED MAN?” / “MISPLACED HUMAN” sign or banner (on a cardboard, on a piece of paper, on some cloth. It can be a drawing or an embroidery or even a collage).
3. Stand there and hold it for at least half an hour.
4. Ask someone to take a photo of you standing there.
5. You can repeat the same action in various places and times, and see how it is being perceived by those around you. If you choose this option, draw on the map the places where you performed each action.
Note:
Reflect upon how it felt to hold the sign, how it resonated with you, with your life experience, how the location you chose affected you. Be open to talk to the people that are passing by about the sign you are holding and related issues, and hear what they have to say about it.
Crediting and Publishing:
It is important to credit everyone properly. With the Mis(s)placed Women? project we pay special attention to that. Please be sure to fully credit your action as: (your name) Mis(s)placed Women? delegated performance by Tanja Ostojić, whenever you publish it. We will do the same with your contribution. Send a photo or a drawing of yourself performing, a description about how it went (include your name, date, time, duration, location(s) name(s) of everyone involved, photographer and notes). Please let us know if you would like your contribution to be published on the project’s blog. We would greatly appreciate your permission to do so.
Score #7:
The Safe Circle7
Around 30 minutes or longer,
without preparations,
one or more participants
Location: A public, semi-public, or private space where one can feel protected
Listen
About:
This score derived from Luciana Damiani’s, performance entitled The Safe Circle, based on my Mis(s)placed Women? Score#1 and Score#2, realised in the framework of Mis(s)placed Women? Workshop, Park am Nordbahnhof, Berlin (2019), as well as out of my own performances Personal Space (1996) and On Rape Attempts (2021). All those performances had an empowering effect on authors, as they had on a few others who re-performed and witnessed them, so I created this score as an invitation to others who would like to reflect and to share their personal experiences in a safe circle. It is important to try out this score, to visualise and possibly even share stories, feelings and thoughts, if you feel that it will be an empowering experience for yourself and others around you, and a part of your healing process. You need to be in control of whether to share and how to share your experiences. You can choose in what circumstances and at what level of detail you feel comfortable talking about it. Ultimately, what matters most is what has value and meaning for you.
Instructions:
1. Let your friends from the group give you a healing hug when you finish, if you like.
2. Select a location in a public space where you can feel safe and protected (by architecture, greenery, and by a crowd that would gather to support you).
3. Choose a colour and a size of the circle, or some other shape that speaks to you and draw it yourself with chalk on the ground.
4. Position yourself in a safe circle that you have drawn on the ground.
5. Think about situations in which you felt safe/unsafe. You may start with memories from your childhood, or by situations that affected you the most in your life.
6. You can take time to write down or draw your thoughts, and feelings for a while.
7. When you are ready you can invite your people to come around the circle or to step inside. Share with your trust group your findings (such as: reading some of your notes, explaining a drawing…).
8. You may instruct one of your friends to co-perform, and try to translate your words or drawings into improvised bodily movements or another artistic medium.
9. You can choose to shake out the stress from your body.
Notes:
Reflect upon: What does safety mean to you? What do you feel you need in order to feel safe? With whom do you feel safe? Where do you feel safe? Do you feel safe here (in this neighbourhood)? What colour and what size is your safe circle? What considerations/reservations do you have? What other feelings do you associate with safety? We can discuss together as well, what is the difference between safety and security.
End Notes
1. First published: “Transformative Encounters, from the Author’s Perspective” in Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, in Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, ed. T. Ostojić, Live Arts Development Agency, London, UK and MMSU, Rijeka, Croatia, 2018. (p.17)
2. JIN* JÎYAN AZADÎ / WOMEN LIFE FREEDOM action, with the participation of: Gaby Bila-Gunther aka Lady Gaby, Selma Hekim, Kathryn Fischer aka Mad Kate, Susan Merrick, Tanja Ostojić, Vanessa Ponte, Hieu Hanh Hoang Tran aka Hany Tea, Adrienne Teicher, Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz, Arzu Yayıntaş, Gülhatun Yıldırım. Organised in the frame of: Tanja Ostojić: MIS(S)PLACED WOMEN? 2009–2022, A Collaborative Art Project, Exhibition at Depo Istanbul (2022), Mis(s)placed Women? Community Gathering and Live Events, curated by: Arzu Yayıntaş and Tanja Ostojić
3. Tanja Ostojić, “Score #2: Holding the ‘Misplaced Women?’ Sign”, 2012.
4. Luciana Damiani’s Manifesto, first published by T. Ostojić at the Misplaced Women? Blog, 2019.
5. Tanja Ostojić, “Score #1: Unpacking a Bag of Your Own”, 2009.
6. Tanja Ostojić, “Score #2: Holding the ‘Misplaced Women?’ Sign”, 2012.
7. Tanja Ostojić, “Score #7: The Safe Circle”, 2023
References
Mis(s)placed Women? Project blog: http://misplacedwomen.wordpress.com
Mis(s)placed Women? Video Channel: https://vimeo.com/channels/1482708/videos
Tanja Ostojić’s Research at Academia.edu: https://tanjaostojic.academia.edu/research
Tanja Ostojić’s Homepage: https://tanjaostojic.com/
Tanja Ostojić: Mis(s)placed Women?, 2009-2022, A Collaborative Art Project, exhibition catalogue (ed: T. Ostojić, Depo and Anadolukultur, Istanbul, Turkey, 2022. (English and Turkish edition)
“About” (pp. 6-7), “Unpacking a Bag of your Own” (pp.12-13, 18-19, 22-23, 25-31), “Holding the Misplaced Women? Sign (pp. 36-41), “Misplaced Women? And the Tourist Suitcase” (pp.50-55), “Performance Workshops” (pp. 56-57, 78-79), “Live Events” (pp.88-91) in Tanja Ostojić: Mis(s)placed Women?, exhibition catalogue (eds: T. Ostojić, D. Vasić), Cultural Center of Belgrade, Serbia, 2021.
“Misplaced Women? Performance Art Workshop on Migration, in the Public Spaces in Belgrade, Serbia”, in Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art, Sholette, Gregory and Bass, Chloë, eds., Queens Museum New York, 2018.
“Transformative Encounters, from the Author’s Perspective” in Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, in Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, ed. T. Ostojić, Live Arts Development Agency, London, UK and MMSU, Rijeka, Croatia, 2018.