Flowers in the Basement, Women and Children
January 21 – February 4, 2024
Live Performance, Sunday January 21, 7pm

Structured like a variety show in entropy, Women and Children is a multidisciplinary performance piece by Flowers in the Basement. The in-process showing is a culmination of two years of their meetings, conversations, workshops and residencies. An installation of work within the performance will remain in the gallery through February 4th.

Flowers in the Basement is a collective consisting of Kite, Mel Elberg, Tsedaye Makonnen, Alisha B. Wormsley, Frank Rodriguez and Amy Ruhl, formed to both create a new original performance piece, and to speculate on radical alternatives to our current forms of reproductive labor. Using the “demon  text” of second-wave feminism, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Shulamith Firestone, 1970), as a jumping off point, the project offers a contemporary, polyvocal response to revolutionary demands for gender abolition, artificial reproduction, child liberation, and cybernetic communism. Bringing together a group of core collaborators working in vast fields of inquiry — Afrofuturism; queer, speculative, intersectional, and Marxist feminisms, Lakota epistemologies; and African migration narratives — their mode of collaboration forges collectivity while respecting the autonomy of each artists’ individual praxis.

Women and Children was first developed through a Research and Development Commission from Fisher Center LAB, which receives funding from the Fisher Center at Bard's Artistic Innovation Fund with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman through the March Forth Foundation. Fishercenter.bard.edu

Women and Children was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace FUND 2023 - 24, supported by Jerome Foundation, the Board of Directors, members and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive.

Live Performance
Direction and concept by Amy Ruhl
Videos and performances by Mel Elberg, Kite, Tsedaye Makonnen, Amy Ruhl and Alisha B. Wormsley
Technical Director: Lazar Bozic
Sound: Adam Wolcott Smith
Stage Manager: Abby Noble

Installation
Fabrication: Matthew Grandin and Andrea Solstad
Technical crew: John Brattin, Cate Giordano, Harry Kleeman, Collin Leitch,
and Caroline Mills
Camera: Itziar Barrio, John Brattin, and Marit Liang