mainly with GraceGraceGrace

GRACEGRACEGRACE MANIFESTO

 

We demand recognition of our grace which has been hard won over many years on contested ground, not handed to us by approval.

We share and recognise our debt to each other:
We reject an art market capitalising on the myth of uniqueness and narratives of the singular heroic figure, with traction and trend dominated by the cult of youth and warped notions of beauty.
We intend to ‘rupture the symbolic from within, and borrow from the saboteurs of the big daddy mainframe’.
We demand the abjuration of male-controlled and imperialist systems of oppression which we understand as exploiting women for labour and demeaning our grace.

We hold violence in contempt,
We hold deliberate ignorance and narrow horizons in contempt.
We hold patriarchal geo-political justifications for greed and power in contempt.
We hold the laws of our fore-fathers and current tyrants which renders a person illegal or deserving of poverty, in contempt.

We demand vegetables, tenderness and trust
We demand clean water and poetry
We demand blankets, dappled light and a woman’s right to choose
We demand mechanisms to grace and protect feminist liberties.
We demand pluralism, promotion of ideas and innovative methods to break the monopoly enjoyed by patriarchs and messianic preachers of cultural orthodoxies.
We demand an understanding of life as a truly communitarian experience and expect a population that is respectful of older women as infinitely precious and possessed of capacities for reason, art and love.

 

Therefore:
We demand the revocation of all contracts for military purposes, and a total ban on the use of fossil fuels.
We demand sustainable agriculture, a comprehensive re-nationalisation of our public health and social care, education and transport systems and all other commonly held necessary structures.
We demand rigorously implemented, loophole free, fair and progressive taxation to pay for the well-being of all – according to need and awarded with grace.

AND WE DEMAND our rightful place in the aesthetic values of our culture, securing and ensuring the recognition that we are exquisite, beguiling and learned, for ourselves, for each other, and for all to see.

 

K.M. for GracceGraceGrace

(with thanks to Mary Wollstonecraft, Valerie Solanas, VNS Matrix et al.)