Digital storytelling in the Womanifesto Online Anthology
By Yvonne Low, Roger Nelson, Clare Veal and Marni Williams

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

Since 2017, the Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories research network has organised symposia and publications focused on intersections between feminisms and art histories of the region. In 2019, we organised a number of events around the evaluation of women’s labour and ephemerality in art practices, which led to exhibitions of the Womanifesto archive in Bangkok and Sydney. Womanifesto is a women’s art collective with a significant but understudied legacy of artistic, exhibition and residency projects that engage culturally and otherwise diverse participants. Womanifesto began in 1995 with the artist-led feminist exhibition ‘Tradisexion’, staged at the alternative art space Concrete House in Bangkok. The goal of increasing women artists’ visibility continued as a series of exhibitions staged biannually in various locations in Thailand, with later iterations moving to online platforms.

Roundtable at the opening of ‘Archiving Womanifesto’ with Varsha Nair via Zoom, 2019, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney, Australia. Image courtesy of Yvonne Low.

One of the reasons Womanifesto emerged as a site of scholarly attention is because its position as a formative transnational feminist network has yet to be fully apprehended within art histories of the region. Yet from our engagements with some of the founding members of Womanifesto — the artists Varsha Nair, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Nitaya Ueareeworakul — the history and ongoing ethos of Womanifesto is undoubtedly one that speaks to and illuminates the many creative ways women have overcome gender-based challenges to achieve self-determination. While studying the histories and networks of Womanifesto we have encountered methodologies and strategies for feminist engagements that are generous, collaborative, hospitable and resistant to canonising frameworks. These are approaches we now see reflected in our own collective practice as researchers.

Womanifesto’s potential to offer new models for network building, art-historical research and feminist collaboration became clear during an exhibition of the group’s archive, curated by its founders and organised as part of the two-part symposium, ‘Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories: Art, Digitality and Canon-making’, in Sydney and Bangkok. The exhibition, which was shown first at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and later at Cross Arts Projects in Sydney, was accompanied by public conversations with the founders where they spoke frankly about their motivations and the various strategies they used to build long-lasting collaborative relationships. These conversations, and the broader discussions of the symposium, foregrounded the potential for digital tools and methods to not only highlight a diversity of perspectives but find ways to represent new voices without submitting them to the totalising effects of canonisation.

Installation view of ‘Archive Womanifesto’, 2019, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. Image courtesy of Roger Nelson.

The Womanifesto Online Archive, a project of Asia Art Archive, was conceived from these conversations, as well as from the long-standing desire of the Womanifesto founders and participants for greater recognition of the project’s key achievements, and for it to be placed in dialogue with related feminist and independent collectives in the region and beyond. Importantly, the Womanifesto project has continually evolved, from exhibitions to residencies to digital projects and diverse other forms of collaboration. The upcoming Womanifesto Online Anthology (WOA) may be considered another iteration in this series of shifts and pivots by the project’s founders. The changes that have been made over Womanifesto’s evolution have occurred in response to new digital technologies or parallel discourses of process-based or socially engaged practices. However, they have also acted as pragmatic and serious acknowledgements of emerging priorities within the collective itself, such as a conscious allowance for family-oriented pauses in some years or periodic moves away from in-person engagement to address an increasingly geographically dispersed core team and community.

Prompted to some extent by our research collective’s efforts to put a spotlight on Womanifesto within the context of our work in building a wider gender-focused history of the region, recent years have seen the collective take stock of its own history by documenting and exhibiting its archive. An intended next shift would have seen Womanifesto return to its roots as a Thailand-based residency program, recreating something of that original space and time for in-person interactions with an emphasis on hospitality and exchange over production. However the pandemic caused a different one: now our Gender in Southeast Asian Art History research collective and Womanifesto have joined with Marni Williams at Power Publications to form an editorial collective where we will attempt to apply the same open approach to the process of publication.

“Informed by Womanifesto’s ethos, WOA adopts feminist principles of horizontally collaborative co-production, intellectual and creative generosity, and long-term investments of care in order to produce voices, stories, histories and exchanges that are of, for and by the community itself.”

Informed by Womanifesto’s ethos, WOA adopts feminist principles of horizontally collaborative co-production, intellectual and creative generosity, and long-term investments of care in order to produce voices, stories, histories and exchanges that are of, for and by the community itself. Unlike academic publications written solely in English for Western-centric scholarly audiences, WOA will treat archives, objects, visualisations, artworks, oral histories, conversations and translations as community-focused content, presented equally alongside scholarly essays rather than embedded within them. These and other materials will be developed concurrently with the scholarship, a process informed by Womanifesto’s tradition of encouraging conversation across practices and documenting process in multimodal forms.

Dr. Siobhan Campbell presenting a paper at the symposium ‘Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories: Art, Digitality and Canon-Making?’, 2019, University of Sydney. Image courtesy of Yvonne Low.

We are in the process of identifying and asking the Womanifesto communities — past and present, internal and external — what they would most like to see reflected in this collected history and how it will be useful to them. We anticipate this will not result in a collection of essays driven by an academic theme, but a non-linear space where scholarly ideas, creative responses and personal reflections are treated equally, and presented flexibly as translated texts, videos, sound, images, data visualisations and other formats. Community engagement with and (intellectual and emotional) investment in our open process of workshopping, commissioning, writing, recording, and ultimately producing a new form of scholarly publication will be reflexively reviewed throughout the project in organic and structured ways. This will include evaluating the participation of Womanifesto’s local, regional and international networks and considering new collaborative relationships that may come out of the process — just as other Womanifesto projects would do. Once content and navigation structures have been designed and tested with our audiences, that same diversity of audiences and contributors become the project’s core audiences. Accordingly, our success will be measured not just through user analytics but with qualitative and quantitative feedback loops. In our most optimistic visions, the WOA will not only serve Womanifesto’s histories and communities, but make the case for a co-produced model of academic publishing that can realise art history’s value as a transmedial conduit that has social impact and might, if taken out of academic publishing echo chambers, be itself a productive spark for transcultural exchanges.

“WOA will not only deliver new research in more traditional, scholarly forms but will adopt Womanifesto’s ethos of experimentation to develop new ways of presenting community-led histories of arts and culture on a dynamic platform.”

WOA will not only deliver new research in more traditional, scholarly forms but will adopt Womanifesto’s ethos of experimentation to develop new ways of presenting community-led histories of arts and culture on a dynamic platform. It will produce inventive and imaginative outcomes that are polyvocal, anti-authoritative, decentralised, generative and open. The platform will drive the exploration of digital storytelling through mapping and visualising data, and, depending on community needs, could enable the crowdsourcing of annotations for archival materials and the collation of otherwise understudied biographical and exhibition data, with the potential to be remixed with other collection databases in other cultural contexts. The success of this co-production process and the innovative digital outcomes intended remain to be seen, However, it already speaks to the impact of Womanifesto’s legacy that there seems to be no better history with which to undertake these experiments, or perhaps, that the history demands we do things differently.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2021, A&M’s first annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.