Workshop with
Kathy-Ann Tan | Dorine van Meel

In this third session of the Plural Wombs Research Group, Kathy-Ann Tan will address the work of the Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers, best known for her article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, and relate it to the questions of her own practice as a curator and scholar, committed to exhibition-making and institution-building that are attuned to issues of social justice in the contemporary moment.

The first part of the session will consist of a presentation by Kathy-Ann Tan, followed by a discussion with the participants. After the event has taken place, we will make the presentation by Kathy-Ann Tan publicly accessible on the website of diffrakt and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen.

Plural Wombs Research Group | #3 Kathy-Ann Tan reads Hortense Spillers from Dorine van Meel on Vimeo.

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Plural Wombs Research Group

Plural Wombs is a collaborative project that brings together a number of cultural practitioners, theorists and activists working on the subjects of social reproduction, reproductive justice, and the political dimension of parenthood. In confronting these subjects, we are committed to a multi- gendered feminist approach and the exploration of different possibilities of familial relations beyond their bourgeois, patriarchal and heteronormative forms.

In light of the current crisis, we believe that it has become only more urgent to explore what a commitment to polymaternal kinship might look like today and how the experimentation with such forms of kinship could make different structures of support and care possible. We have therefore rethought the project under the present conditions and changed its form to an open research group organised around online meetings where participants each time discuss and work through one text of a relevant thinker. These sessions will be led by invited artists and theorists engaging with these themes and texts in their practices.

Plural Wombs is initiated by the artist Dorine van Meel and has been made possible through additional financial support from the Mondriaan Stichting. The Plural Wombs Research Group is organised in collaboration within diffrakt’s reading group programme as well as Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen.