ABOUT THIS VIRTUAL MUSEUM OF GREENHAM COMMON
(Art) Histories of Feminism as Feminist Resistance
This research blog is for sharing work-in-progress towards a monograph on the art and visual cultures of anti-nuclear feminist activism at Greenham Common and beyond. Please read and comment. Tips, guidance, and corrections will be acknowledged in publication.
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Long celebrated for the performative activist strategies of women protestors against nuclear proliferation and their craft-based DIY interventions on the periphery fence the USAF airbase, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and its Berkshire site are beginning to be recognised as English (and Welsh) heritage with a transnational reach. My aim is to consolidate, elaborate, and further promote this recognition, while also troubling the notion of ‘heritage’ with the toolkit of feminist art history. Viewed through the lens of feminist intergenerational transmission, Greenham Common exemplifies Griselda Pollock’s formulation of the virtual feminist museum: mobilising Aby Warburg’s Nachleben (afterlife/survival by metamorphosis), the virtual feminist museum untethers artefacts, images, and practices from their historical contexts and sets them in motion, tracing their travels, recurrences and transformations across time and space. I argue that the virtual museum of Greenham Common is fuelled by the transdisciplinary intersection of archival research, histories of art and visual culture, and the continuing fight for change, be it against war, the arms trade, nuclear power, global inequalities, or austerity. Yet rather than keeping the spirit of Greenham alive (which is of course worthwhile but others do it better), my aim is to chart the pervasiveness of Greenham's iconographies of world-making protest against the end of the world within and beyond obvious activist alliances, following Warburg's model of erudite intuition.
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Thank you to all those who have supported and continue to support this project through their interest, curiosity and feedback. For funding my travels and especially my time I am grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre (2019 mid-career fellowship) and the Leverhulme Trust (2020 research fellowship).
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I teach, research, and write on art, visual culture, and intersectional feminism. I am particularly interested in aesthetic mobilisations of discomfort to political ends and 'museums'. Some of my publications on Greenham and other matters can be found on the Middlesex University research repository and here.
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A NOTE ON IMAGES: Unless otherwise stated, images are by by Sigrid Møller, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, slides scanned by Holger Terp, June 2006, sourced from The Danish Peace Academy Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp’s Songbook, http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/abase/sange/greenham/sigrid.htm There is a wealth of photographic documentation of the peace camp by both professional and 'amateur' photographers but I rely on Møller's archive thanks to her a priori permission to share her photographs freely as long as they are credited.