Aftershocks and (un)belongings: Reflecting on Home Strike

Abstract

In this dialogic chapter, we reflect on our collaborative curation of an exhibition that explored domesticity from feminist dissident perspectives. Featuring work protesting the changes to policy concerning domestic violence in Poland (Malgorzata Markiewicz), subverting, through craft, women’s maintenance of the home as both dwelling and ideal (Su Richardson), unpicking maternal subjectivities while staging a confrontation between feminist and modernist approaches to art history (CANAN), and unsettlingly recasting the home as a site of violence and resistance (Paula Chambers), Home Strike (l’etrangere, 2018) is revisited as both an unfinished inter-generational and transnational project critiquing and defamiliarising the home, and an opportunity for reflection and exchange on the curators’ own lived experiences of migration and patriarchal regimes of space. Personal meditations on (un)belonging, temporary habitats and object attachments are interspersed with critical observations on migration, xenophobia and the neoliberal demand for mobility, particularly in the case of cultural workers. As well as (a) correspondence and dialogic reflection on shared preoccupations, what follows is an exchange of letters working through the aftershocks of our co-curation of an exhibition and opening up new strands of thinking and research into projects yet unrealised. The epistolary form was adopted as a practical and equitable record-keeping of our exchange, but also for its rich tradition in feminist politics and thought: as Margaretta Jolly (2008) eloquently demonstrates, in the Women’s Liberation Movement correspondence both charted the emergence of a new consciousness and sisterly alliances, and became a lab for the development of alternative ways of thinking and engaging with one another. Following recent feminist experimentation, we aspire to occupy the space between ‘letter-writing as a formal convention’ (Meskimmon, 2014, 31) and a dialogical critical feminist methodology of ‘engaged essay-making’ (ibid, 29).