Introduction
Esther Schipper is pleased to present Paul B. Preciado and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Une Valise Transféministe, first presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2019 in the context of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (DGF)’s program Textodrome at the literature festival “Extra.”
Une Valise Transféministe is an ensemble composed of different suitcases, books and a film.
The film brings the books to the screen. Between a portable library and transition kit, Une Valise Transféministe gathers photographic excerpts of feminist, lesbian, queer, anarcho-libertarian, and trans texts. A visual representation of shared reading, the film poses (and seeks to give one possible answer to) the question of how text and books can be exhibited. From the underlined sentences, highlighted passages and footnotes of references marked for further study, a portrait of a reader—or several readers—emerges, as well as a powerful legacy of feminist and transfeminist thought.
All the texts depicted in the film recur as physical books in the three suitcases summarily entitled Une Valise Transféministe. The three used suitcases are filled with sets of books from different eras—one with books published before 1900, another with works dating to 1900-2000, and a third with publications since 2000—and come to represent epochs of feminist and transfeminist thought. Among the books are novels, memoirs, historical and political treatises, philosophical tracts, manifestos and theoretical essay, classic and foundational feminist and transfeminist texts, on topics that include, among others, class and race relations, colonialism, suffrage, the rights of women, human and nonhuman animals, gender and sexuality, and love.
Feminism, it has been claimed, begins again every generation: a fragmentation that can undermine the achievements of previous generations. Une Valise Transféministe, then, is also a gesture of recuperation, against this forgetting, stipulating a long trajectory of feminist and transfeminist thought and activism. In addition to histories of thought and activism, the book-filled suitcases also evoke transitional spaces, both literally—travel—and metaphorically—the state of becoming. It also recalls DGF’s series of works entitled tapis de lecture, composed of carpets and piles of books forming the bibliographies of the work itself.
Among previous collaboration between Paul B. Preciado and DGF are, for example, songs written by Preciado for Exotourisme—DGF’s musical collaboration with Julien Perez—and the development of the sculptural work, In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), presented in the park outside the Serpentine Galleries on occasion of DGF’s 2022 solo exhibition at the institution.
Concurrent to the presentation, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's exhibition Panoramism and the Abstract Sector features a new panorama, especially conceived for the exhibition, which draws on the history of Berlin in the 20th century. Continuing her creation of an artistic, emotional and intellectual genealogy, begun at the Vienna Secession in 2021 and at the Serpentine Galleries this past Summer, the new panorama also includes a special focus on abstract painting, paying tribute to artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner but also actress and film maker Musidora (from Irma Vep) and transformative art world protagonists Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Okwui Enwezor.