EMILIA-AMALIA SESSION II:
AFFIDAMENTO/ENTRUSTMENT
Monday, 4 July 2016, 6–9 PM
Gallery 44

Affidamento, or entrustment, is one of the most important, and difficult, practices enacted by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, founded in 1975. Rejecting a narrative of equality and sisterhood, the Milan group sees difference, or disparity, as one of the most generative qualities of the personal and political relationships between women. Looking to historical examples of relationships of affidamento, and discussing how entrustment operates in our own lives, this session explores how practices of writing and narration give form to these exchanges and open up new spaces for feminist politics in the everyday.

Text: Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, excerpt from Chapter Four (Teresa de Lauretis, trans.) (1990), p. 108-131 (Please read in advance and bring a copy to the session).

Conversation: Excerpts from the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective

Writing Activity: “An exercise in the practice of affidamento” devised by Alex Martinis Roe, invites participants to consider entrustment as a practice of “knowing through doing” that combines narration and an individual writing activity.