As primary subjects of reproductive labour, women have historically depended on access to commons – from clean air and water to collectivised reproductive labour – and have therefore been at the forefront of struggles to secure them. We rooted ourselves in an imaginary genealogy of those women who inspire us and from whom we want to learn, drawing on their tools and strategies, their hopes and fears.

With Shania Anand, we imagined our archive not as a dusty folder, but with the idea “to actually use and consume things, to keep them in, or bring them into, circulation, and to literally throw them forth (Latin: proicere), into a shared and distributed process that operates based on diffusion, not consolidation, through imagination, not memory, and towards creation, not preservation”.

These reflections are represented in a collage designed in collaboration with Jenni Baus, a first attempt to represent our imaginary feminist genealogy: who inspires us? On whose shoulders do we want to climb to see more? Who carries and nurtures the legacy of the Flint* groups and the creative and diverse forms of their struggles: from protests and attacks, to occupations and encampments, to demonstrations and carnivalesque performances, to self-organised services or the creation of women’s cooperatives and communities?

*Anand, Shaina (2016): “10 Thesis on the Archive”. In Artikişler Collective (ed.): Autonomous Archiving, dpr-barcelona, pp. 79-96.