Trigger

The Matriarchs

They followed Matrifocality.

They were fierce.

They were outrageous, audacious, and courageous.

They were committed;

Committed to the survival and wholeness

of entire people/community.

They loved music.

They loved to dance.

They loved their spirits.

They loved food.

They loved their struggle.

They loved themselves

and other women.

They loved Love.

They were the Womanists.

All this while, they carried a part of me inside their womb.

A part that keeps growing inside me now.

We were always connected.

We will always be womanists.

– Saviya Lopes

The purpose of this article is to situate the notion of ‘care’ within The Crown Letter and establish a dialogue between two initiatives that were born during the first lockdown in Paris: The Crown Letter and the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care. Both were created by women who gathered around the notion of ‘care’, understood as a collective process of learning new paradigms and unlearning dominant ones. Within both these initiatives, care is understood as a process of cultivating responsibility, of paying attention to spaces that lack security. This care emphasizes, as hospitality, sharing, kindness, and listening – among other values – that are needed now more than ever in this current health emergency underpinned by global inequality, racism, sexism, and a rise in fascism. The dire context gave rise to these gatherings of people, all sharing the same sense of urgency to deploy and reinvent ‘care’ for COVID times and beyond.

The Crown Letter was born out of the need to preserve the production and dissemination of women’s art at a time when their lives, their networks, and the visibility of their work has been severely disrupted. Through virtual salons with group members and weekly online exhibitions of new artwork, published every Tuesday on the group’s website since the early stages of lockdown in 2019, the women have created another form of a community or family, a refuge from the different levels of predicament each was experiencing at that time. Now, with a global network of nearly forty-five artists, The Crown Letter website holds a significant archive of women’s art across boundaries.

The Initiative for Visions and Practices of Radical Care was inspired by thinking about the crisis by Elísio Macamo, Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He wrote, ‘COVID-19 is a cruel reminder that crisis is us. As we brace up to look the pandemic in the eye, we would be well advised not to forget what our normal is, namely crisis. History has taught us that you do not master a crisis by setting the return to normality as your goal. You master a crisis by enabling yourself to act whatever the circumstances.’

Natacha Nisic, the founder of The Crown Letter, is a visual artist and filmmaker challenging the invisible relation between images, humans, and their surroundings. Since 1993, she has been capturing bodily gestures by filming them using a Super 8 camera. The most recent photographic image she created from this series, Eternity [cover image], representing hands both hiding and holding a wooden ball, dates to the beginning of the pandemic. This work can be read as a reference to health, protection, and security, as almost a parable of a care-less functioning society. But Nisic’s work also references notions and representations of violence. Considered through that lens, the care she proposes in Eternity is in opposition to ubiquitous violence whilst foregrounding the role that epistemic forms of oppression – the forced de-legitimisation of knowing – play as a key element of domination and humiliation.

A specific example of this begins with constituting a subject as ‘Other’, resulting in an absolutely heartless and inhuman act of physical violence – the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man who died at the hands of a white policeman on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Incidentally, the reform of the American police force demanded by the Black Lives Matter movement still has not been achieved, and various bills on the subject have been stalled. At the same time, #stayathome exposed the social inequalities in many countries and led to an increase in domestic violence. This endless chain of almost incomprehensible cruelty and aggression was already apparent through the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ fuelled by postcolonial conflicts; the increase of neo-colonial global structures; the persistent application of the idea of justice to legitimise a violent migration policy of aggressive persecution; and the strengthening of neo-fascism, exemplified by the contemptuous power and privatisation efforts of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, among other examples.

In times of sadness, grief, or great trauma, it’s to beauty that we turn. We send flowers. We leave flowers. We share stories. Even in the direst misery of the slum or the refugee camp, we decorate the walls of the shack or tent. In times of plenty as well as want, we sing and we make marks. When we’re quarantined and there’s nowhere to go, nature leaves us the escape hatch of imagination. That’s why art is essential, and not a privilege. That’s why art endures.

– Olu Oguibe

Today, it is already eighteen months since the artists of The Crown Letter first shared their collective ‘diary’. On their website, one can find fragments of the recent past in the form of images, texts, and videos, marked and organised by the dates of their publication. This is both a huge collective repository of memory and the broad dialogue between the artists on the ongoing present and the uncertainty of the future. Throughout, there is a sense of spontaneity, response, and exchange between them and our collective circumstances. In most cases, these women have almost never met in real life, but they have created a deep bond based on sharing routines and political and social challenges across different geographic contexts, as well as by maintaining honesty, sensitivity, fragility, and strength together.

Since her first contributions to The Crown Letter, beginning during the first lockdown in London where she lives – a time of sudden disruption to human contact and flow – Michelle Deignan began using her camera to capture her family’s environment and activities, both inside and outside the home. She films daily details: meal preparation, family conversations, play time, errands, journeys, endless walks in the neighbourhood where on one occasion she filmed discarded pieces of bread on the street. In Bread Week (The Crown Letter, week 39, 2–9 February 2021), she describes the image of bread as one of the most obvious historical symbols of reliance. The film places the discarded pieces of bread within the context of the current culture of aesthetic perfection, exemplified by the perfect loaf.

SE Barnet, who is also based in the U.K., considers the tension between internal and external landscape, specifically the relationship between her own body and the environment. The video Crowned (The Crown Letter, week 19, 1–8 September 2020) is a self-paced virtual narrative about damaged teeth and a broader reflection on the relationship between the circumstances of the world and physical or mental health, such as the lack of physical contact and ‘touch without touching’.

At night I see her light on late and the curtains closed and I worry about the possibility of bad news from home. Sometimes the curtains stay shut all the next day and I worry more. But so far, when I pass her open window on the street and check in, her family have survived intact. Soon, once the restrictions here are eased, my daughter and I will cross the road for dinner.

– Liza Dimbleby

Catherine Radosa, an activist artist based in Paris, mixes poetic and militant moments of resistance and struggle. Her works question democracy in the presence of ‘liberty’ within public space and the public sphere. This includes natural and agrarian spaces and the related contemporary context of their deterioration, as well as our restricted access to nature, particularly for French urban inhabitants during lockdown. Her short video Alivio (Crown Letter, week 36, 12 –19 January 2021) is a celebration of women’s intimacy and sexuality, using a motif of flow with fountains as symbols of liquidity, source, and transparency. The video is also a poetic reaction to events of 2020, referring to the Strajk Kobiet (women’s strike) against a conservative Polish government that wants to ban and penalise abortion and the ‘green scarf’ movement campaigning for abortion rights in Chile and Argentina.^{The Argentine Senate finally legalized abortion up to fourteen weeks of pregnancy. This decision is the culmination of a long battle marked by the rejection in 2018 of the pro-abortion bill.}

Filmed in the Vosges in eastern France, Alivio was made at a time when the French government was tightly regulating the movement of people as part of COVID-19 restrictions. Featuring a fountain whose form is reminiscent of female genitalia, the video opens up multiple political questions about the female body, including the limits of women’s control over their own bodies, access to abortion, and the continued persistence of taboos around female pleasure. Significantly, Alivio was created and published during a time of shared happiness, specifically with the Argentine artists of The Crown Letter, as the right to an abortion in Argentina was finally made law on 14 January 2021. Within the limpid water jet of the Alivio fountain, there is an apparition of the crowds from Argentina’s green scarf movement, surrounded by the mountain flora and radiating joy.

All of these examples speak about the strength of unity and of sharing that is embedded in the care and practice of the female artists of The Crown Letter. Here we’re presenting only a tiny fraction of the richness of their archive. As the project evolved, their regular online exchanges have become extremely important to them. They have formed a mutual support bond through making, publishing, looking, and listening – a trans-local interaction. Ivana Vollaro, an artist from Buenos Aires, described how The Crown Letter’s virtual salon – online weekly meetings in which the artists talk about art and imaginary worlds – has become one of her most precious refuges during the pandemic. Her work The Crown Letter como refugio beautifully archives this caring relationship through text inscribed with embroidery (The Crown Letter, week 50, 20–27 April 2021). The shared moments of The Crown Letter salons bring this community that cares for each other closer to home. But how do you take this care and nurture it into the future?

All of us will have to build the corona society, each on our own terrain and each in our own environment. We should start today rather than tomorrow and share all our knowledge, experiences, and victories with each other. One day, there will be a post-corona society, but it will bear the traces of what we are doing now and what we are achieving now.

– Rachida Aziz

Françoise Vergès often speaks of hope as a new emergency. This is not a matter of being too positive or too pessimistic. This hope is a hope of rehabilitation, an imagining of another possible future. The Crown Letter is the archive of the present as a response to our fragile time. The Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care makes specific interventions in the context of the most fragile neighbourhoods and communities in the Île-de-France. Both initiatives transform productivity and creativity into care and solidarity with the aim of having a profound social and personal impact. These are gestures and interventions that are part of a larger reflection on the system of production, distribution, and mutual solidarity in contemporary art.