With my husband Miško Šuvaković, I spent October 1998 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It was a time when Serbia expected a NATO intervention, which happened in the spring the following year. I was intensively reading the selection of Slovenian poetry translated into Serbo-Croatian by the Slovenian-Bosnian poet, Josip Osti. As someone raised as a Yugoslavian by nationality, the wars in Yugoslavia were a personal drama. Inspired by Osti’s translations and the political situation, I wrote fourteen poems titled “Eseji o slobodi kretanja” (“Essays on the Freedom of Moving”). At the centre of most of these poems were the questions of borders in materiality and in our minds, and of the impossibility of moving through the new countries’ borders that appeared during and after the Yugoslavian wars. The emotional relationship to the war as well as the geopolitical and geocultural changes in this region are at the center of these poems. The two poems presented here were published in my collection of poetry, All-Over (Belgrade: Feminist 94, 2004).
In this article, I will discuss the appearance and meaning of the terms
feminist avant/garde and feminaissance. I will point to the differences in
the mediums of these two fields of cultural production (verbal art and
visual art). I am interested in the way these terms help us to construe
histories but also impact the contemporary production of radical feminist
practices. The notion of the feminist avant-garde was introduced by the
American critic Elizabeth A. Frost in 2003 in order to point to the feminist
avant-garde poetry tradition. In 2016, the curator Gabrielle Schor
introduced the same term, using it for the international exhibition of
performance artists from the 1970s. In both fields, the term avant-garde had
been used to refer to male artistic and poetry practices. By applying it to
radical women?s poetry and performance practices, these practices became
visible, valued and recognizable. Feminaissance was introduced in the US in
2007 and referred to the several exhibitions dedicated to female art. The
term expressed the optimistic re-actualization of female art, but at the
same time, it provoked polemics regarding the contemporary construction of
feminist art history. In the field of experimental poetry, feminaissance was
used with the same meaning in 2007, at a conference dedicated to feminist
experimentation. Within the visual arts, the term feminaissance foregrounded
the problematics of the historization of female art, while in experimental
poetry this discussion took place around the feminist positions of
essentialism and anti-essentialism.
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