Steirischer Herbst is an interdisciplinary festival for contemporary art. Since 1968, it has taken place annually in Graz and Styria, Austria, combining the visual arts, performance, theater, opera, music, and literature to varying degrees. This programme lists events during the 2016 edition of the festival.
Artist/Author: Danielle L. McGuire | Reference: P4194 | ISBN: 9780307389244
In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer–Rosa Parks–to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change.
“(…) What could be good practice, in a moment like this? What is the art organisation needed for a no-future public? and what would a sustainable, feminist organisation look like?…”
The text was previously published in Who’s Art For? Art Workers Against Exploitation, edited by R-set/tools for cultural workers (Impasse) in collaboration with Rete al Femminile, postmedia books, 2019.
This story is a product of lockdown, of not being able to create gatherings and experiences with, and for, other people. It is an account of intensely personal histories and experiences, that usually stay behind the screens. It is also a document of the Heteraclub project and the safe space created there, in which hundreds of women shared their stories of love and pleasure.