Call No. 5 – Refiguring the Feminist Future

Aisha Qandisha is one of the most honored and fearsome Jinn in the Arab and Islamic culture. She is known as »the opener«. When she possesses men, she does not take over the host but rather opens them to an outside; to a storm of incoming Jinn and demons, making them a traffic zone of cosmodromic data. The only way to stay sane when possessed by Aisha is to participate with her. – Image by Morehshin Allahyari: »She Who Sees The Unknown: Aisha Qandisha«, video still, courtesy of artist, 2018.

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Call release: May 23, 2018
Applications: until July 2 (midnight), 2018
Web residencies: July 9 – August 6, 2018
Residents:  Luiza Prado (Berlin, Germany), Rasheedah Phillips (Philadelphia/USA), Tesia Kosmalski (Minneapolis, MN/USA), Umber Majeed (Brooklyn, NY, USA)
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»I believe we must have feminist figures of humanity. They cannot be man or woman. Feminist figures cannot have a name; they cannot be native. Feminist humanity must, somehow, both resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes.« – Donna Haraway

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We have a dream and it is now. We have a dream and in it we live in someone else’s dream. We have a dream and we are dislocated; you are invisible; she is forgotten. We have lived this alienating dream and we know it is not our dream. We have a dream and it is in the future. We sleep every night imagining that dream. We wake up every morning planting the seeds.

This is a call for »the female future«. The feminism that is more than women; it is a philosophy of non-male, non-cis, non-white, non-western. All those people who have at one time or another been considered »less than« by the social systems that oppress them. This is a call for re-configuring reality towards other futures, so that we can collapse the political notion of linear space and time as an act of resistance.

Many of us live in a present time where the systems that we exist in are not built to address and promote our needs, fears, hopes and dreams. How do we re-imagine new possibilities, claim non-linear time, non-contiguous spaces? How can we tell stories of alternative (and specially non-western) futures that are not that of silicon valley? How can mythology, fiction/science fiction, and other forms of digital storytelling become practices for being more visible? To take over agency and ownership of spaces (outer space) and time (futures) initially not designed for us.

This call is addressed to artists, activists, poets, writers, feminists and dreamers for challenging existing histories and speculative futures through storytelling and counter narrative imagining using web as their platform. It’s a call that asks: what does »the future is female« actually look like? It’s a call for crafting of the future that truly belongs to us.

Format

Web performances, web sculpture, various forms of Net art and online interactions. All types of work are accepted as long as they fit into the format of storytelling and fabulation: websites, videos, writing, 3D objects, music, or applications. If specific software or environments are needed, please contact us in advance.

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator. She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Morehshin was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives struggles in the twenty-first century. Morehshin is the coauthor of The 3D Additivist Cookbook in collaboration with writer/artist Daniel Rourke (published on December 2016 online in 3D PDF format and in print by the Institute of Networked Cultures). Her modeled, 3D-printed sculptural reconstructions of ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS, titled Material Speculation: ISIS, have received wide spread curatorial and press attention and have been exhibited worldwide.