Gender Summit "The New Gen(D)eration": The economy of a spectral feminist institution

“Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices: A spectral feminist institute”

The economy of a spectral feminist institution

Presentation at "The New Gen(D)eration" Gender Summit in Skopje, North Macedonia

4-5 October 2023

Elpida Karaba & Ioanna Zouli

Presentation abstract: 

After a brief presentation of the CNMFPP, we will reflect on our status as a spectral institution, based on kinship and joyful persistence. What does it mean to carry the identity of an “official” institution working and surviving with ‘extra-institutional’ means, based on an economy of kinship and exchange,across networks of solidarity? Ηow this condition is particularly related to specific geographies and political economies? Τhe question of sustainability is always critical. Μany forms of alternative initiatives seek longitude and duration in time. However, we need to think critically about the promises of duration, based, for example, not on entrepreneurship but on the cultural politics of intimacy in order to purposefully create inter-local, inter-disciplinary zones relevant to our practice. How might we construct a common “space of appearance” which we conceive of as a more expanded notion than that of visibility, turning it into a site of collective possibility, a space where situated knowledge acts as a breakwater of our precariousness as individuals and as structures/institutions. More than providing results, our presentation aims to share experience, thoughts, ideas, levels of discomfort and tactical practices towards a spectral feminist economy, which does not instrumentalise sharing, knowing, caring.