May 1 – August 4, 2017
Affidamento, or “entrustment,” is one of the most important, and most challenging, practices of 1970s Italian feminism. It asks women to not only acknowledge the disparities between them—in age, experience, and competencies—but to make these differences a generative force in their relationships, allowing them to support, learn from, and urge one another on.
Over the course of their three-month residency at the AGO, EMILIA–AMALIA explored the resonances of relationships of entrustment between artists, curators, and writers, and to experiment with modes of public engagement that activate the productive differences between feminists and to ask how we can want differently together.
The residency hosted a series of related activities, including the production of a set of chapbooks that have emerged from the group’s recent programming, “How to Ask a Question”; interventions into the AGO’s library; a free public screening; and guest residencies by emerging feminist artists Oreka James, Camille Rojas, and Shellie Zhang. This new chapter of the group’s activity investigated gestures of withdrawal, refusal, non-cooperation and abandonment as feminist strategies of resistance.
