Apurahat ja residenssipaikat

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Feminist art centre – Setting up a support structure

Support Structures Collective (SSC) is a transnational group of art workers based in Helsinki, requiring a kickstart grant to research and develop the operational model and organisational structure for a feminist art centre in Spring 2019. Planned to inaugurate in 2020, the centre will nurture and support the work of feminist, female identifying, non-binary, poc, queer artists and art workers. Its work may encompass curatorial advice, strategic networking, learning opportunities, and a sharing structure through which members can educate and help each other to form new collaborative relations. The centre will become a nest and a home for art projects and practices, allowing its members to move and develop within it, while collectively developing the centre itself. It will document, archive and promote the work of its members, and form symbiotic alliances with other actors in the fields of art, culture, activism and research. In 2019 SSC will organise a series of semi-public events about turning activist organising into a decentralised and democratic organisational model; sustainable fundraising; and experiments with feminist working methods. These will be facilitated in dialogue with a group of invited workshop hosts. SSC is driven by a need to get organised with and for others who need support within the Finnish art field; by a need to build an organisation that encompasses and strives from activist, feminist politics; and that sustains these politics as it develops.

6 Month Kickstart Grant: Building the Organisational Structure for a Feminist Culture House

BACKGROUND AND AIMS
The Feminist Culture House (FCH) was started by a transnational collective of arts workers based in Helsinki, who are fostering international networks. They are driven to find ways to live and practice feminist thinking through curatorial research, artistic work, and organising practices. Anna-Kaisa Koski was a member from Jan-April 2019. The current members are: Katie Lenanton, Neicia Marsh, Orlan Ohtonen and Selina Väliheikki. Koski remains on the official board of the association as an advisory member.

MISSION
FCH functions as a peer-led supportive structure for those who are practicing in the Finnish art field, but due to—for example, structural racism and cis-sexism—have to work harder to be recognised. FCH creates a caring and inclusive feminist working community that is based on sharing, togetherness, celebrating, and supporting one’s peers.

In addition to support and sharing, its core values are: empathy and solidarity over competition; wellbeing over exhaustion; radical softness as a means to implement change; listening, longevity and reflective dialogues to collaboratively build relationships and networks; and fostering understandings of feminism as intersectional and radically inclusive.

Rather than emphasising pressured forms of production and promotion, it aims to incubate, nest and nourish its collaborators. FCH will not ask people to work for free, and will provide all collaborators with a written scope of work, which will be discussed and amended as necessary, and developed into an agreement.

VISION 2023
To be the peak body advocating for intersectional feminist values and working conditions, resulting in an art field thoroughly occupied and built by different kinds of bodies and identities.

CURATORIAL RESEARCH AND ORGANISING PRACTICES
FCH understands organising as a part of curatorial research, and consciously privileges collective and thoughtful organising over conventional exhibition production cycles. Its curatorial work might therefore materialise as documents, templates, shared google folders, guidelines, reading lists, toolkits and flowcharts, in addition to more conventional artistic forms, and text, image and audio commissions.

CORNERSTONES OF OUR PROGRAMMING
- Peer groups: support through sharing and listening at the intersection of lived experiences and artistic practice
- Artist nesting program: long-term nurturing, guidance and solidaric networking to raise profiles and create safer working relationships
- Online Platform: privileging transparency, self-education and sharing to enact change
- Active Network: exchanging information, assistance, care, knowledge, expertise and resources; housing welcoming and differently formatted collaborations
- Youth Board: strengthening future communities through being shaped by and for a younger generation of artists and cultural workers
- Advisory board: learning and receiving guidance from peers whose work we recognise as crucially important to the feminist art field
- Acknowledgements & compensation: ensuring all labour, guidance and contributions to our work is publicly recognised and compensated for with equal and fair pay

PUBLIC OUTCOMES
- 2 artist-led peer groups—of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming artists, and artists dealing with the Finnish Migration Office—who meet regularly to share with each other and with us. Invited artists host the peer groups as situations where artists come together in shared intersections of lived experience and working life. The groups discuss & share, and work together on artistic projects that bring forth the discussions, for example as publications, zines and exhibitions.
The peer group for trans and non-binary artists has been hosted by artist Ana Teo Ala-Ruona. The group for artists dealing with Migri, called Occupying margins / Occupying uncertainty, has been hosted by Martina Miño Pérez. Both of the groups are currently working on text based publications.

- 3 open studio events: 1 dinner in Poimu work space and 2 meetings around snacks and drinks at Oodi Library. These were situations in which our feminist artist peers were invited to give us feedback on our plans and share their needs and wishes for the Feminist Culture House.

- 1 public grant clinic workshop at Globe Art Point that was directed at artists that have moved to Finland from elsewhere

- An active archive of feminist tools enshrining fair and clear working conditions, such as contract blueprints, toolkits and guidelines for both individuals and organisations in the art field. These were gathered through local and international networks, and will all go onto our online platform in 2020.

- Offered guidance, conversation and support for other feminists working in the Finnish art field around questions of artistic practice; taxation and contracts in Finland; unionising; editing texts; networking; emotional labour; health care; etc.

- We have publicly talked about our activities in different arts events after invitations from organisations such as HAM, Publics, Frame, Museum of Impossible Forms, Globe Art Point, Ateneum, the Fine Arts Academy, Theatre Academy and Urban Apa.


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