Sometimes unexpected things happen in life...so it happened to me. I planned to come to the inspiring and great festival Rdece Zora, to it 10th anniversary, were I got, one year ago the idea for my thesis. This year I thought not to come just for plessure and a "helping hand" with the blog, but I wanted to distribute something to a great event, by presenting the plotki femzine and finding new "inspiration". But, normally everthing happens different than we think it will happen.
...I got a flu and the others from plotki femzine, supposed to come got a job, personal trouble and so on. At the end, the announced presentation, tommorow at half past five, cannot take place instead of this I just want to give a short idea of the femzine.
Plotki femzine started with some women from the plotki network. Plotki itself is a zine with rumours from around the bloc, the sphere of central, east, southeastern...europe. It was supposed to tell diverse stories, to present some images, pictures, snapshots, instead of presenting an entire picture. (to read more about plotki: http://www.plotki.net/cms/ ). In the whole picture of plotki the feminist point of view was missing. The activists from the femzine wanted to spread different rumours and wanted to disintegrate myths, maybe create new alternative myths - the femzine was born(taken from a text of the last issue by Anna Voswinckel).
The femzine tries to present different feminisms from different spheres. It contents contributions from different places and different point of views and what holds them altogether is the common reflection about feminist thoughts. The issue includes contributions from Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Germany, France ... , pictures, graphics, texts, letters,... a format in between zine and magazine.
During the project of the zine another project appeared - the pilotki fashion, made by pilotki for pilotki. The "feminist flexworker´s uniforms play with gender and cultural boundaries." (taken from a text of the last issue by Nicole Doerr). It is fashion, inspired by the Russian avantgarde artists Varvara Stepanova and Ljubov Popova, trying to play not just with gender, but also with materials, using "migrant bags" that are mostly negative conotated, used clothes - breaking fashion boarders.
The collective of the femzine is very fluent, people that worked on the first issue, are not involved anymore, new people (like me) joined the group and all of them, still interested are spread over the whole sphere of the "bloc". We are thinking about an new printed issue, but until then we started a blog ( http://plotkifemzine.wordpress.com/)to collect ideas and to make a forum to exchange ideas and news. We are thinking about a topic for the new issue and we are looking for people that would like to engage to make a zine, that is overcoming boarders, to contribute art, ideas articles or whatever can be imagined in a zine, that tries to make contribution on an widespread look on the feminist pictures in the "bloc".
Tomorrow, at the time were the presentation should have taken place, you can get some plotki femzines and if you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact me (antjehoehne@gmail.com), to join the femzine email group (at the plotki page)or the blog!
enjoy the festival. antje
Re.act.feminism / performance art of the 1960s and 70s today
