‘It was an unusual way of doing politics: there were friendship, loves, gossip, tears, flowers…’
In Who’s Afraid of the Neo Avant-Garde, Hal Foster calls for new genealogies of the avant-garde that complicate its past and support its future. Australian artist Alex Martinis Roe is working on a series of films that take a similar approach to a number of feminist collectives and currents, the earliest of which became active in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and Australia, and all of which still exist today. Her film ‘It was an unusual way of doing politics: there were friendships, loves, gossip, tears, flowers…’ (2014) was presented at The Cross Art Projects, Sydney, as a two channel installation, curated by Jasmin Stephens. One section of the film was projected onto the wall, while another was played on a small monitor. The subject of the film is a week long meeting in 1972 between two groups of feminists, Psychanalyse et Politique and some of the women who went on to found the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. It opens with a close up shot of a horse that shows all of its minute movements, its nostril flaring in and out, while ambient sounds can be heard from the local environment. Shots of the rural landscape on the West Coast of France, where the original meeting took place, are accompanied by a spoken text, composed of interviews that Martinis Roe conducted with some of the women who participated. The narrative mentions ideas of ‘consciousness raising’ and ‘sexual difference’. It suggests that sexuality and relationships were central issues to the group. The artist asked a separate group of young women involved in feminist projects in Nantes to re-enact the meeting. According to Martinis Roe, this situation provided a way