On show from Nov. 1-4 in Washington, D.C., Tiffany Shlain’s Dendrofemonology remakes the historic tree ring right into a timeline of the story of ladies and energy in society.
The structure of Washington, D.C., was self-consciously designed to evoke energy, permanence and historic Greek and Roman beliefs of democracy and liberty, as espoused by the Founding Fathers. Nevertheless, with erosion threatening architectural and human rights landmarks, artist and activist Tiffany Shlain says it’s time to think about a brand new nationwide monument. Sponsored by the Nationwide Ladies’s Historical past Museum and Ladies Connect4Good, she has undertaken such a challenge.
Shlain, a veteran commentator on the trendy human situation, is orchestrating a moveable monument on the nationwide mall: a tree ring roughly 5 toes in diameter, with textual content burned into the wooden displaying a timeline of the story of ladies and energy in society.
Her bold tackle the historic tree rings was impressed by her childhood visits to nationwide parks. This ring begins by noting that goddesses have been worshipped in 50,000 BCE. It ends with the outermost ring demarcating the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade as “eviscerating federal safety of reproductive rights within the U.S.” (See a full record of the tree ring’s milestones on the finish of this text.)
Shlain’s feminist historical past tree ring is known as Dendrofemonology, a play on the time period dendrochronology—the science of “courting occasions in former durations by the comparative research of development rings in bushes.” It affords an intentional counternarrative to extra typical patriarchal fare—akin to narratives that credit score colonialist Christopher Columbus for setting sail in 1492, because the Cross-Part of Time landmark does at Muir Woods Nationwide Monument, an instance of what Shlain calls “mansplained historical past.”
The feminist historical past tree ring shall be on show from Nov. 1-4, 2023, between the Washington Monument and the imposing Capitol constructing.
In contrast to the stone buildings that may tower over it on all sides, the tree ring is evocative of a once-living factor, majestic in its personal proper, that has witnessed historical past and aspires to be part of correcting its oversights and injustices.
“I actually was ending it because the Dobbs choice occurred,” mentioned Shlain of the challenge.
The Dobbs ruling “felt like a punch to the soul”—the identical one she skilled in 2016 when she “thought we have been going to get our first girl president.” After the 2016 election, she once more turned to artwork as activism, creating a world occasion about gender fairness known as 50/50 Day in 2017, which featured a 20-minute movie, “50/50: Rethinking the Previous, Current and Way forward for Ladies + Energy.”
As rights for underrepresented teams, by no means totally realized, are being threatened by a deluge of authorized setbacks, Dendrofemonology affords itself as a bullseye for collective motion. The concentric circles in its chronology level to eroding standing and reproductive rights for girls, mortally threatening their well being and autonomy.
“We’d like a visible, and we want a coming collectively,” mentioned Shlain of her motivation for the challenge, with the taglines #ReclaimOurHistory and #VoteOurFuture.
And what higher place to return collectively than the U.S. capital, the place federal legal guidelines are made and adjudicated—just like the 2022 choice that overturned Roe v. Wade and the 2013 Shelby choice that dealt a devastating blow to voting rights. Each opened floodgates to additional restrictive and reactionary state legal guidelines.
Because the dendrofemonolgy occasion’s promotional supplies attest, there are 93,000 races on the poll throughout the nation in November 2023 “that would have an effect on ladies’s rights, trans rights, reproductive rights, and our local weather,” so there aren’t any off-years, no negligible races.
This artwork set up and rallying level on the Nationwide Mall is deliberate as a sequence of occasions elevating consciousness about what’s at stake. It would embody dwell and digital occasions, live-streamed audio system, instructional sources and a participatory element, through which individuals shall be requested which tree ring entry most resonated for them and, extra importantly, what entries they want to see added to the remaining area on this new monument as historical past unfolds.
“I actually am on this concept that monuments are made out of fabric that lasts too lengthy … and I truly actually beloved this concept of this monument. It received’t final perpetually. And it’s moveable,” mentioned Shlain of her tree ring challenge, which has been proven in San Francisco’s Ferry Constructing, the place she was artist-in-residence in fall 2022, and can make its approach across the nation to D.C., New York and different cities within the years forward.
“Whether or not the monuments and the historical past books don’t embody ladies and folks of all genders, we all know that we exist, and our rights matter,” Shlain mentioned. “Timber don’t lie … they’re witnesses to historical past, of local weather.”
In accordance with Shlain, the widths of the rings are primarily based on how a lot it rained or whether or not there was drought, wind or fires. This tree is about 250 years previous. Shlain mentioned she loves taking part in with the conference of tree rings equaling time, providing an alternate perspective and intersectional and feminist lens to take a look at the world.
Shlain’s profession as a filmmaker, creator and founding father of the Webby Awards (aka the “Oscars of the Web”) has developed to this newest manifestation within the three-dimensional medium of sculpture. Whereas Shlain nonetheless makes movies, she mentioned that she additionally favored the concept of the wooden sculpture medium, which affords the chance to face up near and contact the art work. “It’s bought an actual odor to it … the tactility of it’s thrilling to me.”
“In some ways bushes give time a bodily dimension,” mentioned Shlain of the challenge. “I like the concept that it’s one other medium, which at all times helps. We’ve to satisfy individuals wherever they’re, by each possible angle. … I feel that that’s what I’ve been so enthusiastic about working in sculpture.”
Shlain mentioned “the temple within the nature that we incessantly went to rising up,” among the many bushes of Muir Woods and elsewhere, as foundational to her psyche. These recollections finally helped her innovate the tree ring timeline involving pyrographers burning textual content into the wooden utilizing that historic artwork kind and recalling the secular sanctuary of her youth.
D.C. edifices have been designed to seem as if they’ll endure, like the overall welfare and blessings of liberty that the U.S. Structure professes to safe for posterity. However backsliding on rights as soon as thought secured, like reproductive and voting rights, suggests cracks in these façades. Symbolically, even the seawalls surrounding D.C.’s Tidal Basin, residence of its iconic cherry blossoms, at the moment are deemed “unfit to guard the land surrounding them from rising water ranges pushed by local weather change.”
Interjecting this tree ring timeline as a feminist point of interest and image of nature amongst man-made monuments invitations a coming collectively of affected teams to reclaim their historical past and safeguard their rights by the ability of the vote. The exhibit intends to carry stability by totally representing collective voices and identities. It affords one of the best hope of safeguarding the foundations of democracy and environmental integrity towards the present existential threats.
Shlain hopes the tree rings will provoke motion and underscore interdependence and shared options, akin to supporting efforts to enshrine the ERA as a constitutional modification to safe ladies’s and LGBTQ+ rights.
What the tree ring says from prime line downward:
- 50,000 BCE: Goddesses are worshiped.
- 10,000-3000 BCE: Ladies are healers, shamans, and warriors. Plenty of societies acknowledge a number of genders.
- 3100 BCE: Literacy develops, and seeds of patriarchy unfold.
- 2400 BCE: Mesopotamian legislation declares: “If a lady speaks to a person out of flip, her enamel shall be smashed in by a burnt brick.”
- 200 BCE: Goddess worship is forbidden in Judaism, and later, in Islam and Christianity.
- 690: Wu Zetian turns into the primary—and solely—feminine ruler of China.
- 1100: Matrilineal and matriarchal Hopi tribe establishes the neighborhood of Oraibi in present-day Arizona.
- 1450 to 1918: 50,000 ladies tortured and executed as witches throughout Europe and America.
- 1576-1610: Queen Amina guidelines over Zazzau (present-day Nigeria).
- 1690s: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz turns into the primary printed feminist within the Americas.
- 1776-1860s: Abortion as much as 4 months of being pregnant is authorized in america.
- Eighteen Eighties: Impressed by indigenous and abolitionist leaders and British suffragists, first-wave feminism good points momentum in america.
- 1920: nineteenth Modification grants U.S. ladies the precise to vote, though most ladies of coloration are disenfranchised till the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
- 1920: The Soviet Union legalizes abortion.
- 1960: FDA approves contraception tablet in america.
- 1960: Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) turns into the primary girl to be elected to guide a democratic nation.
- 1962: Dolores Huerta co-founds the U.S. Nationwide Farm Employees’ Affiliation.
- Sixties: Second-wave feminism begins with leaders together with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinman, Flo Kennedy and Shirley Chisholm.
- 1963: First girl in area Valentina Tereshkova flies a solo mission and orbits Earth 48 occasions.
- 1972: Title IX in prohibits gender-based discrimination in U.S. federally-funded instructional packages and actions.
- 1972: The U.S. Senate approves addition of the Equal Rights Modification to the Structure. (The states haven’t but ratified it.)
- 1973: Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion in all U.S. states and territories.
- 1974-1980: The Combahee River Ladies’s Collective calls out the interconnectedness of sexism, racism and homophobia, and calls for change in mainstream feminism and civil rights motion.
- 1975: Icelandic Ladies’s Strike held to protest inequality within the office and the house. Ninety p.c of ladies take part, and 15 years later Iceland elects a lady president.
- 1989: Kimberlé Crenshaw defines the idea of intersectionality and ushers in third-wave feminism.
- 1993: Ladies allowed to put on pants on the ground of the U.S. Senate.
- 2006: Tarana Burke begins #MeToo motion.
- 2016: Hillary Rodham Clinton receives nearly all of votes within the U.S. presidential election.
- 2017: An estimated 5 million individuals attend Ladies’s Marches globally. #MeToo goes viral.
- 2017: Oregon turns into first state to incorporate nonbinary gender class on IDs.
- 2020-2022: U.S. elects first feminine vice chairman, Kamala Harris, and first trans state senator, Sarah McBride; Ketanji Brown Jackson turns into first Black girl confirmed to Supreme Court docket.
- 2022
- Roe v. Wade is overturned, eviscerating federal safety of reproductive rights in america.
- Globally, 65 international locations have legalized abortions, 4 within the final 12 months.
- Globally, 86 ladies have been elected president or prime minister up to now.
Up subsequent:
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