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Every year, starting from 2019, an international network of women meets in countries in development. They create podcasts, residency program and new forms of exhibition where individually and collectively they challenge the idea of women intimacy in places where the topic is taboo.
Heroines is a non profit organisation which celebrates diversity in cultural, social and artistic backgrounds.
The network is composed of artists, cultural managers, and researchers. It was initiated in 2018 by the French art director Celia Stroom. She first imagined THE ENCLOSED GARDEN, a nomadic PopUP exhibition program in countries in transition.
It happens every year in places where women cannot express themselves freely. Then 12 emergent artists from East, North, South and West are selected for a month of experimental artistic practice.
THE ENCLOSED GARDEN #1 took place in Tbilisi (Georgia)in October 2019 and was organized by the Georgian producer and filmmaker Salome Jashi.
THE ENCLOSED GARDEN 3# is invited in December 2020 Bangkok (Thailand) by Thai artist Bussaraporn Thongchai who also works as a cultural mediator in a shelter home for migrant women in Berlin.
On 2020, Celia Stroom has launched as well THE ROOTS, page dedicated to archives of female pioneers in art and research.Diane Barbé, the French composer and urbanist researcher will start THE WAVE, a channel of podcasts and sound design about teh concept of intimacy.
01
How do women form their vision of the world? How do we cope with unequal education, coercive norms in society, and monotonous role models? How do we feed future imaginaries?
In THE ENCLOSED GARDEN, artists question their physical and emotional behaviors. How free are we? How locked away from our intimate realities are we? What is this constrained world we have mentally built since childhood?
All the artists who apply are focusing their research on the study of the reality of what intimacy is, from a psychological, political, sociological and anthropological perspective.
02
True intimacy implies reciprocity, transparency, unreserved exchange, as well as deep communion. This is the statement that unites the artists selected every year to participate in THE ENCLOSED GARDEN.
Every year, 6 artists from the host country and 6 from abroad are meeting.
Through a collective residency, isolated in nature, we build a community of local and international women who would have never met outside of THE ENCLOSED GARDEN. Here, we strive to dismantle explicit and implicit forms of censorship in order to better apprehend together the social and ontological resonances of intimacy in contemporary society.
03
One of the challenges of the selected artists is to create a series of artworks within 2 weeks of residency and to exhibit them a week later. With such an intensive format, we nourish creativity and deliver spontaneous art. The artists take up the challenge to create in immersion, living together and working continuously in order to blend their different visions of the concept of Intimacy.
Winter + Spring: Fundraising
Summer: Call for artists by a board made of independent people (no affiliation to institutions).
Fall: Residency + Exhibition
04
The cost to maintain a residency program can be quite significant for a nonprofit organization and only few programs are covering expenses.
Producing such an ambitious project every year in a new country represents significant costs. Therefore, the organisation raises funds to prepare the project, to finance the residency space and to cover the budget for the production of the exhibition. It also provides artists with accommodation on site and daily stipends. If artists cannot apply for a travel grant, HEROINES may support travel fees as well.
Moreover, all artists receive a small but equal compensation for the exhibition
LISTEN
What inspire the artists who join Heroines.
Text by Celia Stroom on
Soundscape composition by Diane Barbe
Voices of the artists of the edition 2019
Together, let's open the door of the enclosed garden,
this inner world, the shelter, the prison or the pyre, the greenhouse.
With such willful extravagance, gardening the unconscious, providing every reason to let go its hold, from beating heart to wild grasses, immersing in the heart of female psychology, gardens of quills,
colors and
thrilling sounds,
all the selected artists of this annual event know well how to bewitch,
and
weave dreams
& reality.
© 2020 HEROINESWAVE website StudioStroom