Suzanne Lacy: Silver Action

when you walk in the room you see this very expansive tableau of women sitting around yellow cloth cupboard cables the audience is then drawn into the sphere of the visual they are also part of the performance genetic illness children finances each projection has in front of it a person sitting at a computer spend some time and early 70s that person is transcribing their personal narrative as they write themselves into history and it was a million word corpus and half of that was spoken feeling I should say very clearly this is actually not a project about aging and not a sentimental project about older women and no isn't that nice house that we should take care of them this is a project about discrimination and inequality so they understood that in paid learning they created a series of workshops they brought a 250 women each of whom participated in helping us frame the discourse that would take place during the peace women inserted their histories on a timeline on the wall there its first moment of Revelation something that prompted them to activism something they noticed early on we were told at school we had to wear suspender belts and stockings instead of socks it was just the school rules and I thought I'm not doing this I rang up my mom and said I've been to green him today and she said oh did you see the picture of you that I pinned on the fence because I've become aware or a mess we're leaving this world in and I feel responsible the last element of the project was the kitchen table they were actually videotaping a series of for conversation because you thought of questioning don't you why are things like this was the first thing many people in the media will want to do is say the feminists have sold out what you decide am I going to have food on the table because it's still exactly there enough the same but in different ways or am I going to go to that meeting those women participated in a very intense and directed conversation about the various forms of activism in their histories and what they thought was needed you know going forward we're here because other people campaign for equal rights for women to be educated like you know even if we felt we had resolved it in some way for ourselves still being his studies struggled over now damage didn't occur the image evolved over six months of people talking so it's a truly participatory work in my role as an artist is to help facilitate the process but it's really not my work you