Collaborative Reflections on The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative

The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC) is a research group consisting two architectural historians, Ana María León and Olga Touloumi, and two art historians, Tessa Paneth-Pollack and Martina Tanga in 2013. The group formed to conceive of alternate models of teaching and research, ones that would overturn the art and architecture historical canon that they had inherited, upend traditional teaching methods, and place the construction of class, race, and gender at the center of the understanding of history in the two disciplines. FAAC considered those subjects historically excluded from these canons, such as women, non-whites, and lower-income peoples, problematizing agency and authorship in art and architectural history.

Combining each member’s expertise, FAAC conceived the syllabus ‘Contested Spaces: Art, Architecture, and Politics.’ The course ‘space’ as a structuring device, tracing the construction of modernity and critically examining how specific sites and objects have participated in unfolding of power dynamics and repressed identities. FAAC co-taught ‘Contested Spaces’ at various institutions, collaboratively transecting different institutional settings: Bard College, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan. FAAC has also carried out a number of other academic initiatives, such as conference presentations and publications, seeking feminist allies and accomplices in the fields of Art and Architecture.

One such initiative was FAAC YOUR SYLLABUS, which was funded by the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative, and held at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University, New York City, April 21-22, 2018. The workshop provided the opportunity for peer-review of each participant’s syllabus, and to discuss the challenges we face at the level of the classroom, the institution, the discipline, and in our scholarship. The product of this collaborative workshop was the drafting of a Manifesto, which has been published in Harvard Design Magazine.1

In this contribution, three participants, Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga share their personal experiences of the workshop FAAC YOUR SYLLABUS, highlighting the ways that feminist collaborative endeavors challenge normative forms of work in academia and highlight the ways of tracking the performative aspects of working with others. While we see collaboration as productive, we challenge the concept of collaboration as simply utopic or idealistic. Collaborations are, instead, a conscious, intentional engagement with others’ situations and ideas. To demonstrate this, as well as to show the challenges and process of a collaborative effort, our essay presents the personal experiences, the reflexive engagement, and some of the critical positions we embraced and embodied throughout the workshop experience.

After an initial conversation about the organization of what we would present, this essay was produced across several Google docs, both individual and collective, as well as multi-person Skype calls. Those technologies permitted the chronological flexibility necessary in academic lives that are not simply about teaching, research and extensive service work, all while juggling complicated, sometimes transnational, personal lives. Across the text, we have tried to model the effort of collaboration, the kind of self-reflexivity that is necessary to work honestly with others. This requires recognizing your own experience, considering the experience of others, and developing a method to cohere as equals. In the end, collaborations depend on the specifics of the group and so our experience is an example, not a dictate.

Katherine Guinness:
I was initially reluctant to work collaboratively, having labored in a series of temporary adjunct positions for years prior to this experience. The isolation of precarity had me feeling the ever-growing strictures of hierarchy throughout the neoliberal university. I thought that collaboration would be a good way to challenge institutional structures of power and question my own wavering marginality. Working through the parameters of the FAAC Collaborative renewed my faith in the power of non-hierarchical collaboration and alternatives to the limitations imposed by academic labor, while pointing out just how much I had unknowingly internalized the injurious and individualized norms that define intellectual labor.

For instance, while writing the manifesto I found myself not sharing, hesitant to add my imprint to the group’s document. I was not alone. Offshoots and pairs spoke to each other separately. This was, of course, antithetical to the project, and one member began loudly directing us to, ‘SPEAK OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!’ to break up the insulating pair-speak. This woke me to my own worst, isolating impulses. My whole life I’ve sought the primary ‘authority’; throughout second grade, whenever I wanted to participate, I would raise my hand, wait to be called on, then walk to the front of the room and whisper my sentiments in the teacher’s ear – to share with the class only at her discretion, to be my ‘power-interlocutor’. It can often feel, in academia, that the weight of power-locutors are inescapable; there will always be someone else to boost your voice, or to take control of it. The FAAC collaboration pointed out this problem, and just how powerful speaking in one’s own voice, speaking out of one’s own mouth really is. There is a difference, as Sara Ahmed points out, in being positioned at the table versus actually being orientated towards it.2

Charlotte Kent:
As someone who relishes a schedule, when the introductions started running late, I got nervous. I wanted to interrupt and hurry others, who seemed to me oblivious of the time slipping away from what I perceived as the far more important work of the group: the assignments and syllabi to be reconsidered from a more inclusive perspective. The irony did not escape me that I wanted to exclude–or at least minimize–voices in order to maintain a schedule most of us had no part in creating; I was devaluing individuals for the sake of paperwork. When the organizers acknowledged the time yet allowed things to continue, I decided to merge into the experience. This was my first lesson in collaboration: whatever ideas and plans I have must morph to sustain the relationship.

We split into groups of four to review our individual syllabi. Sitting at a square table, my group became two sets of two. I was nervous that we were breaking rules but also recognized that in the loud room, a two-person review worked better. This anxiety surrounding following rules made the lack of formal guidelines, in much of the efforts produced at the workshop, particularly challenging. Collaborations are dynamic. People work as they are able. The experience can shift away from a preconceived end goal or product, but attention to those changes and self-reflexivity around why they appear and whether they serve a purpose permits projects to become more interesting, with opportunities for new challenges and discoveries.

Since the collaborative had no hierarchy, decisions had to be made as a group. I find this particularly difficult as it leads to ongoing points and counterpoints. Attentive to others without the need for a set conclusion, I learned about issues and concepts that I had certainly missed in the past by insisting that a schedule be maintained and decisions made. Collaborations are challenging because they require overcoming cultural conditioning about the how groups produce together. Committing to real collaboration requires a willingness to rediscover how work can work: conceptions of time shift, labor changes, but the rewards are generative and transformative.

Martina Tanga:
Despite the best intentions, it took FAAC a few years to learn to work collaboratively. We needed time to understand each other’s strengths and to step in to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. After working on ‘Contested Spaces,’ I was curious to expand my network. I wanted to forge new relations – find feminist peeps, co-conspirators – to break the silo of academia.

The workshop had an ambitious agenda: to collectively write a manifesto outlining our shared voices. I was concerned that producing a collective manifesto would be a nearly impossible task, especially with only one day designated to it. I experienced one of the pitfalls of non-hierarchical collaboration is that it feels as if too little is accomplished; too many disparate points of view lead to a lot of positive conversation, but no tangible consensus and results. The crux is how to balance process with results. Yet, I am also aware of the enrichment that is lost in moving through conversations too quickly, and that time for discussion is essential for collaboration. The original, messy google doc that recorded our manifesto writing beautifully reflects this; it is raw and erratic, and highly cryptic. And yet, it was a beginning, because we each continued to work on this document after the workshop, each putting in time on her own terms at home, to continue to refine and define this collaboration.

THEORIST AND ACTIVIST REFERENCES

These texts represent a sample of some of the ideas we brought to our collaborative experiences. Citing them as influences but taking a personal distance from them (through limiting their names and voices to this bibliography) allows us to inform and cite without being as dependent on hierarchical citational practices, and to allow you, our reader, to recognize that these minds, and many others, permeate this text, and are not limited to these individual lines.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
— Ahmed focuses on the material, perceptual ways that bodies come together and appear to and for each other. In her citational practice, she often purposefully chooses to not cite white men (which she perceives as ‘an institution’ needing to be seen as such, so that this countering work of visibility can begin).

Arendt, Hannah. ‘Crisis in Education.’ In Between Past and Future, 170-193. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
— This 1954 essay positions the pedagogical challenge of historicity versus contemporaneity. Its insights on wanting students to know ‘classics’ even as the world changes and it becomes urgent to share with them new insights, alongside its discussion of the awkwardness of being an ‘authority’ in the classroom remains vital.

Boys, Jos. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London: Pluto Press, 1985.
— This book, produced by the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative–one of the first architectural groups in Britain to take an overtly feminist stance in their way of working and designing–explores the socio-political context of designing the built environment, and traced the implications of feminist theory and critique on urban design, such as the viewing of domestic work also as a form of labor. One of the main claims is that because women are brought up differently in our society we have different experiences and needs in relation to the built environment.

Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine. Translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
— The philosopher Hélène Cixous reflects on the writing process, encouraging us to consider the requirements for great writing, even as she lucidly dismantles the power structures of language. She presents a more dynamic intellectualism, one with a place for the personal or aside, with a typography full of meaning.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
— The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari continue their argument from Anti-Oedipus in this second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The essay on the rhizome is one of the most accessible sections and a good introduction to the bee-bop aesthetic of their intellectual activity. The non-linear presentation is notoriously challenging but the opening ‘since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd’ helped set the tone for thinking about collaboration.

Negri, Antonio. Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. New York, NY: Verso, 2005.
— In 1970s Italy, Marxist theorist Antonio Negri conceived of two critical workerist concepts to challenge capitalist structures of labor: ‘Refusal to Work’ and ‘Self-Valorization.’ The first indicates the workers’ rejection of wage labor to terminate their dependence on the capitalist system and its ability to define them. The second term calls for defining one’s subjectivity in one’s own terms as a corrective to exploitation in the factory. By refusing capitalist mediations of productive and reproductive relations, workers could engage in liberated labor, which would lead to a process of self-emancipation. This process was a means of seizing agency over the formation of one’s identity.

Nochlin, Linda. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays. Ed. Maura C. Reilly. London: Routledge, 2018.
— In this essay, Nochlin explores the institutional – as opposed to the individual – obstacles that have prevented women in the West from succeeding in the arts. The essay was a groundbreaking moment not only in feminist writing but in considering the social structures of the discipline of art history.

Wittig, Monique. ‘One is Not Born a Woman.’ In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 9-20. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
— Monique Wittig grapples with how identity is negotiated, formed, and reformed – and how to acknowledge that an individual is only produced as an individual (or individuated) within a collective body. She explains that while everyone must act both and simultaneously as an individual and a member of a class, and one does not mean the suppression of the other.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this process, we each took time to reflect on each other’s experiences, distilling the ideas that resonated with our personal involvement in the workshop. Some of the parallel themes to emerge were about output and efficient production, collectivity versus individualization, hierarchies within academia and beyond. The question of voice within a collective working dynamic is a delicate balance. Guinness was grateful to see Kent discuss how the collaboration was also a challenge to her due to cultural conditioning since childhood (and to be honest relieved that she wasn’t the only one discussing this). We all noted how collaboration challenges power, as it is constructed in space, time, relationships, which we have absorbed–at least since our childhood as Guinness poignantly shares with her anecdote about being in second grade. Finally, time – what is lost when we move too quickly and the negotiation a personal desire to stay on schedule. Time is especially a challenge in a 24/7 society that always wants to know the results before you’ve even started. What’s important to remember is chronological flexibility.

In all our narratives, we heard our wariness, our fears that a collaborative ideology could complicate our desires to become established in academia. We are all early-stage academics, vulnerable to power, to hiring and tenure clocks, to showing up as expected. We hope writing about collaboration encourages others to discover a new point in what we do. But for this to be successful, we need time, patience, understanding, and most of all, courage.

1 Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative, ‘To Manifest’, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 46, No Sweat, available at: http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/to-manifest
1 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).