Join us from 11am to 6pm on both Saturday 16 and Sunday 17 September at the Villa Vassilieff to discover the AWARE organization at its headquarters, full of cultural history. As part of the European Heritage Days, the Union Quoi? International·e collective will be on site to offer a range of activities and workshops on the theme of matrilineal transmission.

The AWARE team will be there from 11am to 6pm to introduce you to the organization’s activities and explain the history of the site.

This emblematic location in the Montparnasse district was chosen by artist Marie Vassilieff to set up her studio and found her academy at the turn of the 1910s. This highly symbolic space, renovated by the designer Matali Crasset, and is now home to a centre for research, documentation and mediation dedicated to women artists and feminist art.

Find out more about the programme for Les Journées du Matrimoine here
 

“Murmures de diseuses” – Carte blanche to Union Quoi? International·e

Union Quoi? International·e’s contributions will revolve around matrilineal transmission, drawing on Trinh T. Minh Ha’s work on grandmothers’ stories:

« Diseuse, Thought-Woman, SpiderWoman, griotte, storytalker, fortune-teller, witch. If you have the patience to listen, she will take delight in relating it to you. An entire history, an entire vision of the world, a lifetime story. Mother always has a mother. And Great Mothers are recalled as the goddesses of all waters, the sources of diseases and of healing, the protectresses of women and of childbearing. To listen carefully is to preserve. But to preserve is to burn, for understanding means creating.

Let the one who is diseuse, Diseuse de bonne aventure. Let her call forth. Let her break open the spell cast upon time upon time again and again.
(T. Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, p.123)

The world’s earliest archives or libraries were the memories of women. Patiently transmitted from mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand. In the process of storytelling, speaking and listening refer to realities that do not involve just the imagination. The speech is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. It destroys, brings into life, nurtures. Every woman partakes in the chain of guardianship and of transmission. »

« May my story be beautiful and unwind like a long thread… »

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, p.119 & p.148 (Indiana University Press)

Saturday September 16

• • Continuously: memory game, screening cycle, “Letter to our elders” (creative and epistolary workshop)
• • Story exchange “Braid a lock of my hair with yours” (1h duration): 11:30am, 2:15pm, 4:45pm
• •Writing workshop “In my mother’s house” after Assia Djebar’s novel Nowhere in my father’s house: 3:30pm-4:30pm

 

Sunday September 17

• • Continuously: memory game, screening cycle, “Letter to our elders” (creative and epistolary workshop)
• • Story exchange “Braid a lock of my hair with yours” (1h duration): 11:30am, 2:30pm
• • Writing workshop “In my mother’s house” after Assia Djebar’s novel Nowhere in my father’s house: 3:30pm-4:30pm
• • Readings-workshop reports: 5pm-6pm

 

Screening programme

• • Une fois que les mémoires se mêlent, les frontières s’effondrent : un recueil anonyme et des chuchotements · Yu-wen Wang · 24min · 2023
  For borders that wander, for cracks that allow a ray of sunlight to break through.

 

• • Dear Kimsisters in 1959 · Chaelin Jeon · 17min · 2020
  A film addressed to the Kim Sisters, a trio of Korean singers whose history in the USA 60 years ago echoes the author’s own present.

 

• • So Many Love Stories · Camille Simon Baudry · 7min · 2023
  A letter to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. An act of remembrance and love.

 

• • Language · Hiiona Choi · 10min · 2022
  A heterosexual couple wearing white, and a mysterious couple dressed in black. Intentional girly puns about the desire to procreate.

 

Union Quoi? International·e is formed by students and alumni of art schools: “We take this term “International·e” and use it more sensitively, and reflect together: ‘We found ourselves here, in France, what is it like to live the consequence of internationality today?’ We help and learn together to undo these categorizations violently rooted in our different histories. The convergence of our questions, our thoughts and our plural perspectives has enabled us to create a place open to consideration and imagination.”