Session II: Affidamento/Entrustment
Affidamento, or entrustment, is one of the most important, and difficult, practices enacted by the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, founded in 1975. Rejecting a narrative of equality and sisterhood, the Milan group sees difference, or disparity, as one of the most generative qualities of the personal and political relationships between women. Looking to historical examples of relationships of affidamento, and discussing how entrustment operates in our own lives, this session explores how practices of writing and narration give form to these exchanges and open up new spaces for feminist politics in the everyday.
To participate in this workshop, please RSVP to Leila Timmins at leila@gallery44.org. Childcare available - please contact for more information. Gallery 44 is an accessible space.
text: Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, excerpt from Chapter Four (Teresa de Lauretis, trans.) (1990), p. 108-131 (please read in advance and bring a copy to the session)
conversation: excerpts from the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective
writing activity: “An exercise in the practice of affidamento” devised by Alex Martinis Roe, invites participants to consider entrustment as a practice of "knowing through doing" that combines narration and an individual writing activity.
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EMILIA-AMALIA is an exploratory working group that employs practices of citation, annotation, and autobiography as modes of activating feminist art, writing and research practices.
Through readings, screenings, discussions, and writing activities, the group will investigate historical and intergenerational feminisms, as well as relationships of mentorship, collaboration, and indebtedness between artists, writers, thinkers, curators, and practitioners. In tracing these lines, the group aims to elucidate the histories of feminism that have been obscured and overlooked in the narratives of 1970s, or “second-wave” feminism that we have inherited. EMILIA-AMALIA will critically examine how we fit in with those past iterations, and also, how we might update and extend them so that they can respond to contemporary questions.
Motivated by a desire to think through these questions collaboratively, each monthly meeting will be structured around a text, a conversation, and a writing activity.
EMILIA-AMALIA is an open group that invites all levels of engagement. We are all experts. No one is an expert. Expertise is not expected.
EMILIA-AMALIA is initiated by Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Leila Timmins, and cheyanne turions and is hosted by Gallery 44.
