Infrastructures of Care: on archival chain reactions

Infrastructures of Care: on archival chain reactions aims to preserve and activate important but precarious archives of feminist art through collaborative research, public programming, and an exhibition. By addressing the historical erasure of women* and gender-nonconforming, queer feminist artists, this project counters the threat of disappearing feminist archives and emphasizes the necessity of networking and exchanging between archives in different contexts globally. The partners include the City of Women Association and Festival (Ljubljana) with its significant, but largely inaccessible archive of 30 years; the re.act.feminism project (Berlin), which has been travelling as a living performance archive across Europe since 2008 featuring more than 180 artists; and the Archivo Pinto mi Raya (Mexico), a project by artists Mónica Mayer and Victor Lerma, focussing on experimental art production and writing since the seventies with a particular emphazis on women and feminist artists.

The partners consider the archive as a vital infrastructure for the arts, as „inhabitable ground“ (Butler), upon which contemporary art production relies. Infrastructure is understood not only in its stable and material dimension but also a social formation that requires ongoing care, maintenance and development, in order to remain such a livable ground for further generations of artists and cultural practitioners. By framing the archive-infrastructure as performative the project foregrounds its usage, its effects and especially the 'archival chain reactions' between diverse archive-activists, artists, archival materials and publics.

The project's goal is to facilitate networking and exchange of methodologies among these diverse archives, to activate and make them accessible through a focussed research and a selective multilingual translation process leading to a public event in the framework of the City of Women Festival, Ljubljana (October 2025) and an exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana (2026).