• Tue 07 05 2019 •
EMANZENEXPRESS_GEMEINSAM SIND WIR GEMEINER To archive and activate feminist resistance

With EVA BUSCH, MADHUSREE DUTTA, RITA KRONAUER, JULIA NITSCHKE, DOROTHEE SCHMIDT and KATJA TEICHMANN

18:00 – 21:00

Venue: atelier automatique, Rottstraße 14, 44793 Bochum
In German and English language
Free admission


‘Meaner together’ — this call to arms from the 1980s is today the subtitle of the Memory Station by EVA BUSCH and JULIA NITSCHKE, who shed light on the history of feminist struggles in the 1980s and ’90s in Bochum. The two creators borrowed the title Emanzenexpress (Women’s Libber Express) from a magazine that was once published by the AUTONOMOUS Women’s & Lesbian Studies department at Ruhr University. Bridging different generations is a decisive element of their project. Their underlying position is ‘somewhere between a declaration of love to the feminist fighters of the time and a critical examination of them’. Much of what earlier generations wanted to achieve, what they negotiated or fought for is no longer understood or is now taken for granted.
It is crucial to the site-specificity of this project that it is located in the atelier automatique, which is a young, self-organised studio community with a queer feminist focus to their programme. Three largely analogous Bochum women’s archives come to the fore: ausZeiten Frauenarchiv (ausZeiten Women’s Archive), the archive of the Studentische Frauenbibliothek Lieselle (Lieselle Women’s Library), and Madonna — Archiv und Dokumentationszentrum SEXARBEIT (Madonna — SEXWORK Archive and Documentation Centre). The atelier automatique presents materials from the archives and functions as an intergenerational feminist meeting place. Visitors are invited to immerse themselves, ‘living la vida loca’ style, in a pool of copied texts and images. At the same time, the feminist history of Bochum is charted geographically on a wall-sized map, as so many of the movement’s important sites have in the meantime disappeared. The meetings, events, and discussions will generate a new crop of archive material that incorporates historical knowledge and renegotiates it in the context of the present day.

In cooperation with Urbane Künste Ruhr