Gossip Girl: Collective and Anonymous Authorship as a Tool of Rumour, Kinship, and Calling Out

Reckitt, Helena. 2024. 'Gossip Girl: Collective and Anonymous Authorship as a Tool of Rumour, Kinship, and Calling Out'. In: The lost-and-found: revising art stories in search of potential changes. Art Academy of Latvia, Riga, Latvia 6-7 June 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]
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Reflecting on her experience contributing to two co-authored articles over the past year, Helena Reckitt considers the potential of group writing for circulating critical insider information and calling out institutional power. Citing feminist and queer theorists of gossip and anecdote, including Sara Ahmed, Gavin Butt, Mason Leaver-Yap, Jamila Prowse, and Irit Rogoff, she offers an auto-ethnographic account of co-authoring a review of a major feminist art exhibition and an essay on tactics of anonymity as part of the ‘And Others’ research network. To contextualises her experiences, Reckitt draws on examples of anonymous and group authorship from feminist art, writing, and activism. She argues how group authorship can provide a supportive format for the nurturing of creative expression, as well as a ‘safe’ framework for voices that call out systemic abuses. Nonetheless, citing Liz Kinnamon (2016) on the perils of over-estimating the positive affects of collectivity and togetherness, and Paola Melchiori (2015) on the ‘shadow sides’ of feminist group work, she acknowledges some of the limitations of collective formats: from the suppression of divergent views under a dominant shared voice, to struggles over editorial control, and the lack of value given to collective endeavours in today’s neoliberal climate.
Item Type Conference or Workshop Item (Talk)
Additional Information

The talk took place as part of the session 'Unweaving Collective Labour,' devised and presented with Lina Džuverović and Karolina Majewska-Güde as part of the international network 'And Others: The Gendered Labour of Art Collectives.'

As the And Others collective, we continued our exploration of collective artistic work within the Lost and Found thinking/making community that we began at the first 'Lost and Found' symposium, in Lisbon in 2023. This time our focus was the limitations and challenges of collective and collaborative work, as well as the question of paradigmatic relations of value in collective work. How are different kinds of work valued within a collective? What are the overlooked actions and processes that enable the development of artistic and cultural production? We understand collectives as safe but venerable refugias from mainstream academic and artistic worlds, and postulate a critical look at how they internally operate by understanding the forms of labour involved in maintaining collective work. We are interested in examining historical and contemporary processes of evaluating material and conceptual labour within collectives.

Our contribution consisted of three parts:
1. Introduction about And Others collective and the materialities of gendered labour (online) Lina Džuverović
2. Gossip Girl, talk by Helena Reckitt
3. Workshop and Award Ceremony led by Karolina Majewska-Güde
Departments, Centres and Research Units Art
Date Deposited 08 Jul 2024 09:41
Last Modified 08 Jul 2024 09:41

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