DIY: 2015 – Tania El Khoury and Abigail Conway ‘FAF’

Armed resistance training for women

Project Summary

FAF stands for Female Armed Forces. A training camp for women who would like to be armed with lethal weapons, slick moves and a love for resistance. Artists Abigail Conway and Tania El Khoury are planning a series of encounters with women who would like to join FAF. The DIY workshop will be one of these encounters. These meetings will involve sharing skills, shooting at enemies and collecting data for the resistance movement. This is an exciting first collaboration between artists Abigail and Tania building on their shared interests in creating immersive, playful and interactive environments for audiences interested in becoming collaborators. FAF is the fruit of many of these interests and methods, an experiment on task-based interactive pieces that offer new skills for audiences who make the work their own. During the DIY, FAF will invite a trainer to give specialist training and demonstrations on fighting and weaponry exploring ides around resistance, what women are fighting, or would fight for, and the notion of power.

This invitation is open to women only. We are in particularly interested in hearing from:

Feminist artists making interactive performance or artists working in the field of political action, movement / choreography, community-based arts
Women who have had any experience with resistance (no matter how broad)
Women who want to share resistance skills with other women

Application deadline: Deadline passed.

Dates, times and location

Norwich in October/November

Exact dates and times to be confirmed 

The Artists

Tania El Khoury is a live artist working in London and Beirut. Her solo work has been shown across Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Tania is currently working on a practice-based PhD between the Departments of Drama and Geography at Royal Holloway College. Her research and publications focus on Live Art in the time of the Arab uprisings. Tania is the co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and performance collective.

Abigail Conway creates participatory installations and live performances – open, interactive environments that draw people in and make space for them to think about big questions in life from a different perspective.  Abigail's interests lie in working with material objects, craft and skill-based actions. She is committed to exploring intimacy within instruction-based works.