In a conversation Elodie Mugrefya and Femke Snelting outline their critical work at Constant, a space for art and technology based in Brussels working towards interrogating technology from a feminist perspective, making technologies visible and addressable. One key aspect and underlying topic throughout our conversation is Constant’s current shift (and its consequences) from feminist to intersectional practices and technologies – acknowledging intersecting axes of oppression. The conversation took place in the framework of the artistic research and education project «Teaching the Radical Catalogue: A Syllabus 2021–22», which investigates the process of information retrieval as a political project (syllabus.radicalcatalogue.net).
Constant is a Brussels-based space for arts, media, and technology with a 20-year history in critical feminist and collective practice who organized and hosted Unbound Libraries, a one-week work session (June 2020). Different groups, artists, publishers, designers, scholars, and activists worked together on a range of questions: What strategies can we invent to act upon omissions, essentialisms, generalizations, and stereotypes in categorization systems? Can we think of a federation of libraries on the basis of other criteria than uniformity and sameness? How can we open up collections to the multiple forms of knowledge transfers related to orality, situated objects, physical embodiment, self-published objects, videos...? What can we learn from the promise of digital formats to go beyond pages, page numbers and index systems that are bound to the single book only?; and with DiVersions (2016), an artistic research project also initiated by Constant that is engaged with the potential of online cultural heritage. In dialogue with cultural institutions and their digitized collections — DiVersions experiments with digital heritage, databases, metadata, catalogues and digital infrastructures to welcome various forms of collaboration, allowing conflicts to show up, and make space for other narratives; and with the Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01, in the documentation of Constant’s work session Are you being Served? (2014);
