Weak resistance, Mapping, Friendship, Care, Feminist cartography
Maria Sobczak is a student, researcher and cultural worker. She currently studies at the Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and works in the documentation department of Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In her research, she focuses on relationships between women* artists and their impact on subjectivity, artistic processes and knowledge production.
Maria and I are meeting for the first time in my friend’s friend’s apartment. We first interacted in the digital sphere, where Maria slipped into my Instagram DMs. Together, we are working on a map, investigating the role of friendship as a relationship that simultaneously supports artistic processes and teaches survival. Maria's interest in artists' collaborations began during her research on Polish women artists in the alternative scene of the 1980s. In the process, she realised how important and valuable as a source of cultural knowledge the relationships that are developed within the art field are. Our practices complement each other on the scientific, theoretical and artistic ground. That’s also why I decided to invite Maria to this conversation, where we will locate my inquiry in a dialogical exchange and contextualise it. Both of us are big gatherers and we regularly share and exchange our carrier bags, because as we know, sometimes the purse fits the outfit more than a sporty crossbody bag. Throughout this text, we’ll use the word women with an asterisk to emphasise the diversity of experiences of womanhood that have been excluded and deemed unfit for the Western feminist imaginary.
interview
Very early in our collaboration, which takes place mostly through cyber interactions, our references overlap. One of the first concepts which tied our artistic-research-friend practices was ‘weak resistance’, which both of us encountered through Ewa Majewska’s text. For me, it’s crucial because I think a lot about how we can resist many issues and problems connected with the body / corporeality and how we can regain the feeling of agency, especially in a particular political context we are both familiar with as Polish young women. Having experience but also being part of the ‘young girl’ category - a human having reproductive function - is very important for capitalist exploitation, but is also not taken seriously. I was trying to break this chain and emancipate through many harmful stereotypes tied to conservative gender roles and narration, very early, but I still feel like some of it stayed in my body. I keep catching myself being self-disciplined, self-optimised, and self-regulated. I also have two younger sisters, who are in this coming-of-age moment. Even if this is not the main area for my artistic enquiry, I treat it as a big motivation behind my artistic practice. Through ‘weak resistance’ we can understand forms of resilience, which characterise ‘anti-heroism’, being grounded in everyday life and relationality, which often become unseen in narrations around art and its production. For me, it's very interesting to think about how this can be translated into artistic language grounded in the material and relationship between applied methods and medium. Maybe it can be a ‘warm-up question’, but I would love to ask you what you understand by this category? What motivated you to work with it, and if you have some practices from everyday life which can be seen as weak resistance?
The word that comes closest to my mind when thinking about weak resistance is - unspectacularity. Weak resistance was one of the key categories that led me to study collectivity in the work of women artists in the 1980s. Curiosity about the lack of strictly women's groups in the 80s motivated me to look for the unspectacular manifestations of support between women artists. Most of the time, it was simple acts like tenderly looking at each other's practices, being together, taking care of each other's children, and offering each other affection. Maybe that’s why your artistic practice felt very familiar to me. One of the first works of yours that I came into contact with was Practising Soft Forms of Resistance as Artist - a visual essay, and through your storytelling, I immediately recognised a narrative deeply rooted in your relationships and personal experiences. As for myself, I think that each of us creating a safer space for ourselves and our friends and sisters is already practising weak resistance. Whether it is remembering to check on your friend if she arrived home safely, or telling each other about the world in words from us and for us. I always try to thank my girls, who motivate what I do whenever there’s an opportunity, and each time I feel like I’m sticking the knife in the myth of the genius individualist.
I feel that my practice is in a weird ‘grey zone’ between political art and something rooted in material investigation. As a woman* artist from a particular political context, I feel something pulling me into socially engaged practices and awareness raising. At the same time, working closely with materials like metal, pigments, and textiles, gives me a very empowering feeling of deciding on my own - something which was taken away from me as a woman. Of course, this feeling might be illusory, and maybe I am falling into the individualistic trap, but what I am trying to figure out is how through material practices we won’t lose collective voices, if these different processes can go together or if I should separate them and accept that I have two different types of practice. I am wondering if you see some forms of relationality that can be translated into material investigation. Do you see a space to work with weak resistance beyond activist actions?
I think that the process of very sensitive and in-depth work with material, as opposed to focusing on simple representation, can be seen as weak resistance. Following the thought of new feminist materialisms, matter is an incredibly important factor of everyday social life, and it is impossible to talk about everyday life without thinking about how we co-exist with its material dimension, but also how we exploit it. Working with material, both intuitively and thoughtfully, is like a process of negotiating agency, challenging binary oppositions and the anthropocentric relationship between humans and other beings. Building a relationship with the material you are working with is one step further than just respecting it. Your works also work on two different levels - one telling the story of the material and the other telling the story of girlhood or togetherness, like braiding each other's hair or taking a bath together. Then they come together in an object that emulates weak resistance.
I think now we are moving towards the territory of care, which is becoming a very popular word among artists. After the pandemic, it even becomes a ‘buzzword’, as Tian Zhang pointed out. But also, as she claimed in Manifesto: "Care is not distributed equally. It is intricately linked with power – instrumentalised as reward, denied as punishment or erasure. Certain people are expected to perform care; certain people are more likely to receive it. Patterns of care arise from histories of oppression and permeate our structures". Ecosystems of care is for me a mixture of empathy, control, interdependency, intimacy and care. As an older sister, I see a very interesting dynamic between these complexities, particularly in the relationship with my young sisters. I know the line between care and control is particularly thin, because even I was trying to protect my sisters from certain situations, decisions, and I felt that what irritated me the most was their resistance towards my good intentions. That’s why I am always very sceptical about using the word ‘sister’ and I prefer ‘sister-friend’ to avoid connotations with bloodline, creating the connection between sisters. Care operates on the individual level but also collective - we can even say vertically and horizontally. What do you think about this spectrum?
First of all, caring is not something simple; caring is also a responsibility. And I think it's worth talking about the fact that it's often difficult to care, especially from a precarious position, as Zhang wrote: "If I'm expected to do care work, who will care for me? And if someone cares for me, who cares for them?" I'd like to think of care beyond a closed system, care as a network. And also as a challenge to myself to let the care I feel and give in my immediate environment flow out somewhere beyond. A very important element that Zhang points out is that the distribution of care, as you mentioned, is tied to power, which places people who have historically been and still are expected to provide care work outside the institutional politics of care. Moving towards the map, I would say that care can be a wild river, but also a barely flowing stream. The territory doesn’t support its natural development, which makes it more difficult for the stream to break free. I think that in designing our map, we have given care, perhaps a little abstractly, the power to materialise everywhere, even where it is simply hard to see or imagine. We leave it up to care practitioners to decide where their care for themselves, care for each other and care as part of artistic practices, can take them.
Very important to me is also thinking about geographical situatedness, the distance separating me from experiencing everyday life in the Polish context. I think we have a very blurred line between insider and outsider. In my enquiry, this was the problem hidden under the skin, which slowly became more and more noticeable - like a pimple before the first date you want to avoid. Through psychogeography, a cartographic way to map my situatedness and the geographical distance involved, spatial aspects become closely connected with time and non-linear relations between past, present, and future. I love digging in the past. Last time we spoke about a medieval map made by nuns and a 16th-century map presenting the romantic sphere. I want to ask what ‘map’ is for you? Are there things that should be mapped? And what shouldn’t?
In a way, I think feminist cartographies and maps can be almost anything that's related to how we move through space, how we experience it, and how the power structures within it affect us. A feminist geographer, Gillian Rose, has written about the idea that power structures can be thought of as a kind of ordered landscape, something that can be represented visually and spatially. Representation in feminist mapping doesn't mean appropriation of territory, but quite the opposite - it grows out of the reflexivity of the researcher herself and the situated knowledges of the subjects she works with. The decision of what to map and what not to map has to be rooted in the researcher's tender approach. As Donna Haraway said, it is never innocent to adopt a marginal perspective, even if our first assumption is that we belong to the group we choose to represent, we still have to remain critical of the subject and our situatedness. I think that's why deciding on our map as a project willing to be in a constant state of becoming was something that changed the perspective of what maps are and can be for both of us.
Many times during my MFA, I was wondering what makes a particular method, aesthetics, medium, feminist, and how to justify it. We both know what artistic education in Poland looks like - we don’t often challange the relevance of the mediums we are using, if the right medium can serve well for a particular topic and if the areas and ways that we work are our own, or if we become trained in them due to educational process. I heard from some of my teachers here that I basically should unlearn many things. But the real problem is how to ‘re-learn’ again without getting stuck in the despair. In my re-learning process, I came to think about how we can think about feminist methods in art. Maybe here we can use cartography as a good ‘landing’ point and talk about what makes mapping practices feminist.
In fact, I believe that the very process of re-learning is the key to feminist thinking. But re-learning is a process of being open to redefining what we know, while still engaging with our lived and embodied experiences. Feminist cartography and mapping practices, like all feminist science, should work with the category of femininity* itself because it's a difficult category, rooted in a tremendous amount of exclusion, and yet it seems to me that it should be worked with. As Johanna Hedva concludes in Sick Woman Theory: “Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans/non-binary/gender-fluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared-for, the secondary, the opressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematic of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those problematics in its own way. [...] I'm inspired to use the word "woman" because it can still be radical to be a woman in the twenty-first century". There is no womanhood without black feminism, decolonial feminism, transfeminism, class-diverse feminism, disability studies, queer theory and what we should be putting the most pressure on right now - the freedom of Palestinian women. This is what feminist cartographies should try to map - spatial-social relations, our commonalities and our differences - creating a web of different understandings and experiences of womanhood.
I think we are reversing the rules, but bringing our practices a sketchy character. The map we are developing can be transformed into a battle field through interventions of reclaiming the spaces by artists, theoreticians, practitioners, curators, educators, and students. Cartography of care is counter-narration against a map rooted in exclusion, it helps us find ourselves and together locate spaces grounded in practices of care, which make the lack in the initial version more visible. This map is made by the lost for the lost - to help each of us draw some passages. Going from point A to point B, maybe we should finish by talking a little bit about cyber realms, since most of our interactions happen through online meetings and conversations. Gathering, sharing, talking, exchanging, and brainstorming happen somewhere between Warsaw and Gothenburg. What does this distance mean for you? And do you think that the topics we are exploring here can resonate beyond the Eastern European context?
Before I even talk about distance, I should perhaps mention that it's incredibly important to me that I feel our collaboration validates the assumption that thinking about friendship and care as a certain way of functioning in relationships in the art field - can have a huge impact on how we work with people we're just getting to know. I even liked how each cyber meeting and developing content in the form of a “mind map” allowed us to create a shared space, somewhere between Goteborg and Warsaw. I think that what we talked about a moment earlier, the map as a sketch, opens the way for it to work in many contexts, I'd like to think of the proposal we're coming out with as a sketch in every sense of the word - I wouldn't mind if, as part of some collective practice with a specific group, we completely wiped it out and created a new map, together.
Maria has chosen this quote from Sick Women Theory to finish our conversation:
“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminised and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility, and precarity, and to support it, honour it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care. Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of what helps, what we need, how we cope, what makes it feel better, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the parts of our bodies that are sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, difficult, deviant, and fantastic, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt”.
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