知念亜衣美
Feminist Task Force XX: A Self-selective Service System Branch of Feminist Standard Bureau
Project Mission
We choose the roles we play. How do we choose our morals amongst interlaced and layered ideas of militarized violence of our society. How do we learn to be a non violent Human?
Feminism Fights Patriarchal Power is a performative installation that plays on the bureaucratic system of patriarchy. This collaborative installation hopes to engender deeper thoughts on how we all participate in a patriarchal society. Exhibition space will function as an educational and developmental recruitment system for matriarchal bureaucracy. Patriarchy has no gender. Many women and men alike consciously or unconsciously participate in patriarchal system that benefits them personally. Even when patriarchy is not beneficial, most think that the system of structure are unchangeable lacking imaginative power to perceive a just and fair distribution of power. Culture of patriarchy is made, so it can be unmade and reconstructed. Nothing is ever concrete because even concrete crumbles. We can build a better system because in the unwritten history we were not taught, it did and does exist, a system of shared power.
Participants are encouraged to take action through an application process to create thoughts on what it means to live by feminist morals in opposition to military morals, the poster boy of patriarchy, which seem to intertwine as more women gain “equal” rights in a militaristic patriarchal society. (Note: it is possible to have a demilitarized military. If this is confusing don’t be lazy and read more. International Relations Feminism is a good start. ) Patriarchy sustains its dominance by bureaucratic violence and militarized force implemented through hierarchical structure of command. FFPP plays on this structures of power through Matriarchal forms that will be officialized by the Feminist Standard Bureau. Final stage of the exhibition entails filling out the Feminist Service for Genuine Security (FSGS) Forms to join the Feminist Task Force XX, a self-selective service system that will be archived at http://www.feministmorals.tk
General Goal
Through CAMP and PLAY utilize patriarchal and military structure filtered through Feminist lense to expose the cruel nature of patriarchal and military domination. Create inclusive environment for all people regardless of gender, sex, race, nationality with awareness to further the thoughts on feminism as a human issue that needs to be accepted and shared by males as well as females in a violently dominated patriarchal mindset. Security shouldn’t come from violence and oppression of others. It should be through love and communal sharing and it's possible through culture of peace.
Major themes that will be explored by the Feminist Task Force XX:
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What is Feminist Moral in disparity with Military Morals?
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Dissect the interlaced nature of military morals in the systematized patriarchal society.
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Investigate ways patriarchy is passed down to indoctrinate young minds molding the current patriarchal system through dominance in support of a military mindset.
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How military predilection and the subliminal ways such ideologies are passed onto younger generations of humankind.
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Understand the ways military ideas penetrate civilian lives
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Power relation created to conquer another
Our goal is to exhibit the artistic feminists interpretation of the military mindset as a collaborative project utilizing each participating artists’ talents and skills as part of a sharing system.
Partnership
Curator in Residence is part of The Feminist Art Project - Baltimore.
The Feminist Art Project - Baltimore (TFAPB) is a grassroots, nomadic, non-profit arts incubator that supports and promotes self-identified women in the arts. Locally, we have been operating since the Fall of 2013, providing free opportunities to Baltimore artists and communities. TFAPB is an active arm of an international organization --The Feminist Art Project* -- and a Fusion Partnerships Inc. partner. We frequently collaborate with individuals, local non-profits and community organizations that parallel our mission, interest and passion, in order to enrich our public exhibitions and community programs.
Hyperobjects of War with Lynn Cazabon
This presentation will focus on the environmental legacy of war set within the theoretical framework of Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects,” entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. The discussion will include several key examples of the lasting environmental impacts of warfare in different parts of the world, revealing how these forces have shaped the planet and continue to permeate all species on earth. Cazabon’s research in this area began with her current project Baltic Portraits, started while she was in Latvia under a Fulbright Fellowship. Within the context of Feminism Fights Military Morals, the presentation draws attention to the ubiquity of war in human culture.
Lynn Cazabon is a visual artist who creates work using a diversity of media including photography, audio, and animation, taking form as public displays, installations, websites, mobile applications, and community collaborations. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for the past 20 years as public art, and in solo and group exhibitions. Cazabon is an Associate Professor of Art at UMBC.
(WWII Gas Identification Poster, U.S. Army, c. 1941-45)
“You Know You’re a Support Junkie”: Care-Packaging and the Militarization of Gratitude
with Rebecca A. Adelman
“Say thank you to the troops.” Gratitude has become the default affective response to the service and sacrifice of American military personnel. Schoolchildren write thank-you notes; airlines offer priority seating; the funerary speech for those killed in action is delivered “on behalf of a grateful nation.” There exists a broad cultural consensus that military service is priceless. Yet military personnel labor under the continual threat of cuts to their pay and benefits, while military families tend to incur much more debt and own far fewer assets than their civilian counterparts. Militarized gratitude is thus fraught with tensions and contradictions.
To explore them, I focus on the practice of care-packaging for deployed military personnel. The acts of purchasing, boxing, and shipping consumer goods to service members stationed abroad seems a tangible way to support and reward them, but this circulation of inexpensive consumer products also raises complicated questions about value, exchange, and reciprocity. Care-packaging is also an expressly gendered process; it is largely, but not exclusively, the purview of women, and often reinscribes gender norms for the recipients. As part of my ongoing inquiry into the militarization of gratitude, I map the economies (of goods, of feelings, of ideologies) that underpin this sort of charity, and its manifestation of the larger imperative to thank the troops for their service.
Rebecca A. Adelman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research focuses on the intersections of visual culture and militarized violence, with particular interest in questions of ethics, affect, and imagination. Her first book, Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), maps the visual circuits linking the terrorized American nation-state, its citizens, and its enemies by exploring the practices of image creation, circulation, and consumption that animate these relationships.
The Semiotic Square Workshop with Christopher Kojzar
Labels are a part of language that often lie in contradiction and contrariety to one another. Nowadays we’ve come to break down binary systems like “hot or cold”, “black or white”, and “female or male” by using “both/and” ways of describing the in between. But how can we break down the semantics of language and explore the beautiful shades of grey that exist in between words that seemingly have no relation? In this workshop, participants will explore the characteristics of language by using the best known theoretical model that has emerged from the Paris school of semiotics : The Semiotic Square. Championed by A.J. Greimas, this simplistic ‘gadget’ opens up a myriad of terms that adjust our ways of thinking. Maybe two terms are related more closely together than one has imagined! Let’s take a deep look at the phrase “Make Cake, Not War” in a workshop where we draw visual diagrams from a non-binary systems of words. Let’s not argue semantics. It’ll be fun!
Christopher Kojzar received his B.A. in International Affairs and Economics from George Washington University and studies Intermedia and Digital Art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County . His interdisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, video installation, publication, functional design, and group performance collaboration. His visual work is highly representational with raw, sublime, and expressive qualities. He has performed and exhibited in Honolulu, San Francisco, Washington DC, Baltimore, Marseille, France & Buenos Aires, Argentina while his visual art is found nationally and internationally.
“Rather than clarifying for women the power we exert in the maintenance of systems of domination and setting forth strategies for resistance and change, most current discussions of feminism and militarism further mystify woman's role. In keeping with sexist thinking, women are described as objects rather than subjects. We are depicted not as laborers and activists who, like men, make political choices, but as passive observers who have taken no responsibility for actively maintaining and perpetuating the current value system of our society
which privileges violence and domination as the most effective tool of coercive control in human interaction, a society whose value systems advocate and promote war.”
bell hooks in Feminism and Militarism
