loveMELT newsletter #027: Manifestos and Mark Making
Picking up oil painting a few years ago got me digging into visual inspiration from a new perspective. I’ve made many walls of images and mood boards in my day, especially as it relates to making wearables or building installations, but moving into another discipline, I’ve noticed a pattern across mediums of my desire to incorporate words and text as key to the starting point.
If you’ve followed my recent works in progress, you may have noticed that poems I’ve written have inspired artworks and vice versa. Even further, words themselves have made their way onto the canvasses and mixed media pieces I’m creating. On most of the pieces, the statements I implement are simple: “joke”, “late bloomer” “if this then that” and “this is water”. However, the piece I’ve recently started, ‘manifest-her’, contains many different texts, texts from feminist manifestos written around the world, from the past and present century.
Breanne Fahs of ‘Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution discusses manifestos as:
Full of contradictions, ironies, and clashes, manifestos operate on unsteady ground. The genre combines the romantic quality of dreamers and artists imagining something new and whimsical together with the cursing power of a Mack truck bulldozing over established traditions, trashing accepted modes of thought, and eradicating the past…part of the attraction to the manifesto is that it remains a surprisingly complex and often paradoxical genre: flippant and sincere, prickly and smooth, logical and absurd, material and immaterial, shallow and profound. This complexity arises in part because manifestos have no reverence for the past, no homage to what has come before. They want only what is new, of the now, in the present tense, and they want it immediately.
My own writing sometimes speaks as a manifesto does, and often leaves with a question or a challenge to the reader to consider how they will move forward.
Gender freed, what’s gonna happen to you and me?
Sadie Monroe
The end of gender What could it do for you? What could it do for me? Think about the possibilities No more gender based violence No more fake shoes to fill No more toxic masculinity No more stereotypes No more fragility No more pay gaps between you and me Bro, y’er gonna do some housework, right? Let your berries swing in lilac pleats I’ll swag too in wide cargos Or choose neither we’ll nude beach this city No more bindings No more bindings No more bindings holding back you and me But it’s never that easy You already know Innovation changes rather than rights and latches on to anything if money is in sight A to Z is Capitalism A to Z is Domination A to Z is Exploitation A to Z is Fantalization A to Z is Gentrification A to Z is Hostility A to Z is AI, AI, AI Uh ohhhh we’re in it now We’re here now Type, type on that keyboard Double tap that meme Started elementary But you can’t stop now Keep on moving for the Meta machine New money made New money made New stock alert I’m curious, how will nonbinary fare when life is brought to us by CEOs of software? And what about our memories, Mine, yours, and theirs’, Whose will they be? Surveilled, living in a virtual reality with AI alongside How’s it gonna augment the way we think about you and me? Maybe that’s when consciousness will finally be freed cause it won’t be stuck inside our minds always thinking about I, myself, and me But life’s always been a bitch even though the word, the world may go genderless These unprecedented times we live in These worlds we’re entering These new identities we’re creating Who’s building their infrastructure? Where will they be? How will our history be charted? Will it be found? Will it be seen? I can’t say I’m confident in what’s spinning ‘cause New money made New money made New stock alert And what’re you gonna do with all this fresh paint? A new game to play, what dance’re you gonna shake? Don’t screw anyone over though this could be it Or maybe you do ‘ and that’s just it ‘Cause we all know how much we’re lied to how we lie to ourselves how we act like there’s no one else when it’s New money made New money made New stock alert How’re you going to survive? What stories’re you going to write? Will you live more aware and stand up for what’s fair? Or will you Sims your way into some new version of a Dick?
In the poem, I’m supporting freeing identity from constructs but also questioning how we’ll actually push this movement forward amidst tech innovation as history has proven, greed transforms ideas and movements into entirely different beasts. One manifesto from ‘Burn it Down’ directly hits on the matters I’m questioning. ‘Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation’, created by the international collective Laboria Cubonicks offers a new perspective on 21st century feminism with its focus on how technology challenges understandings of nature. See a snippet of the manifesto below:
The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. This is not an elision of the fact that a large amount of the world’s poor is adversely affected by the expanding technological industry (from factory workers labouring under abominable conditions to the Ghanaian villages that have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers) but an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination. Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsively.
You can read the entire manifesto here.
If you’re interested in checking out some art-focused manifestos, check out Widewalls’ list of 10 inspiring manifestos. And if you want to listen to some radical music while you’re exploring, check out Leila Adu’s new album, Moonstone & Tar Sands.
More soon.
With love,
Sadie