Podcast Female Peace Palace

March 8 - feminist fight day!
What better day to launch the Female Peace Palace podcast?

In the first episode, I talk with Laura Freisberg (Women's Studies Munich), Diana-Sandrine Kunis (Social Justice Institute Munich) and Modupe Laja (Netzwerk Rassismus und Diskriminierungsfreies Bayern e.V.) about the history, present and future of feminist struggles.

Intersectional feminism is the buzzword of the hour. No longer fighting only sexism, but also other forms of discrimination, such as racism and classism, are the order of the day.

In fact, intersectional approaches are not new, but have been present in Germany since at least the 1980s. At that time, mediated by the African-American feminist Audre Lorde, Black women in Germany joined together to form a movement. They formulated criticism of the white women's movement from an intersectional perspective, addressed Germany's colonial past, and developed a resistant Black self-awareness.

Why do we know so little about this part of feminist history in Germany? Why is critical thinking about racism only now, a good thirty years later, arriving in the feminist mainstream and in the German public sphere? What alliances are needed for the feminist struggle?

Laura Freisberg is a journalist at BR and has been on the board of Frauenstudien München since 2016. There she moderates the reading club, where feminist classics as well as new publications are read. Together with Barbara Streidl, she also hosts the feminist podcast "Stadt, Land, Krise" (City, Country, Crisis), of which there is a new episode every two weeks.

Diana-Sandrine Kunis
Director of the Social Justice Institute Munich. She studied Communication Studies, Modern German Literature and Intercultural Communication at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. She is a freelance trainer and educator on diversity and anti-discrimination issues. She is currently working for the City of Munich with a focus on racism and discrimination critique as well as intersectionality in the educational context. She is also a lecturer at the Department of Social and Educational Sciences.

Modupe Laja is a feminist educational and cultural activist who works on the representation of intersectional perspectives critical of racism in academic and civil society discourses, with a focus on Pan-Africanism. She has been associated with the women's organization ADEFRA, Black Women in Germany, since the mid-1980s and is a co-founder of the Rassismus- und Diskriminierungsfreies Bayern network (www.rassismusfreies-bayern.net). For many years she has initiated educational projects on socially relevant topics such as decoloniality and human rights and has participated as an author in various book projects.

In the second episode I talk to Jessica Glause and Miriam Ibrahim. Both directors deal with activists of the early 20th century in the context of Female Peace Palace: Women like Lida Gustava Heymann or Hope Bridges Adams-Lehmann are in the center of "Anti War Women" by Jessica Glause. African-American women's rights activist Mary Church Terrell, who championed the rights of Black people and PoC worldwide, inspires "in my hands I carry" by Miriam Ibrahim.

"I indict the writing of history!" With these strong words, Miriam Ibrahim expresses what is the stakes for both directors: the lack of a feminist legacy.

We often know little about the actors who fought against war and violence, against racism, sexism and structural inequality in the past. How can their visions, their courage and especially the power of the collective be made fruitful for the present?
How to deal with the ambivalences and contradictions of these figures; how to deal with language that hurts and gender ideas that sometimes irritate?

These are just a few of the questions that drive the two directors in the development of their works "Anti War Women" and "in my hands I carry".

Jessica Glause works as a director in German-speaking countries. Her focus is on research-based play development and contemporary drama. Glause's productions have been invited to numerous festivals and have been awarded with prizes. Her music theater productions about migration and inclusion at the Bavarian State Opera received great attention. In 2018, the City of Munich awarded her the Förderpreis Theater. She currently directs at Schauspiel Frankfurt, Theater Freiburg, Münchner Kammerspiele.

The German-Ethiopian Miriam Ibrahim was born in Stuttgart in 1981 and began singing and acting at school. After graduating from high school, she attended the Stage School Hamburg, where she graduated in singing, acting and dancing in 2005. From 2005 to 2009 Miriam Ibrahim performed in various productions, including "Mother Africa" at Schauspielhaus Hamburg, "Witch Hunt" at Theater Bonn and "Hair" at Theater an der Rott. Additionally, she taught acting at the Backstage Gruppe Hamburg and for the BINI e.V.. In 2009 Miriam Ibrahim moved to NYC and attended the Stella Adler Studio where she graduated in acting in 2011. In the same year she founded The Shades of Gray, with which she realized her own original plays and performances. e.g. "Sakharam Binder", "Wunschkonzert", "Sterntaler", "Vestiges".
From 2013 to 2016 Miriam Ibrahim attended Freie Universität Berlin and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Theater Studies and Social/Cultural Anthropology. She interned at Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and Staatsoper Stuttgart, assisted for John Gould Rubin (NYC) and Armin Petras, before joining Münchner Kammerspiele as assistant director for the 2017/18 - 2019 season.
There she realized different formats, workshops and installations such as the workshop "Safe Place and Theater", the opera "Lady Magnesia", a street performance "Speakers Corner Repeat", the conversation format "Tischszenen Reloaded".
In January 2020, she directed a play at the Münchner Kammerspiele on the topic of "Doing and Undoing Race"/"Identity-Making" and with the Staatstheater Augsburg she worked on a play on the topic of postcolonial relations in 2021: "Klang des Regens". She is a permanent dramaturg at Theater Oberhausen and will change to Schauspielhaus Zürich as a dramaturg in January 2022. On December 10th 2021, her production "1000 Serpentines Angst" (novel: Olivia Wenzel) premiered Dec. 2021 at the Staatstheater Hannover. 

Miriam Ibrahim is currently part of the dramaturgical Team of the Schauspielhaus Zürich and a freelance Director. From January 2024 she will focus more on her directing, which you will see at Staatstheater Hannover and Schauspiel Dortmund. In June 2023 you can see her work "Blues in Schwarz Weiss" at the Residenztheater Munich.

More animals than women - that is the conclusion of Croatian historian Lydija Sklevicky, which presumably applies not only to Yugoslavian historiography. I talk to political scientist Brigita Malenica and historian Olena Petrenko about why women so rarely appear as actors in history compared to animals, and why female resistance in particular is rarely the subject of historiography.

Violence is at the center of our conversation, and in particular the connection between violence, nation and gender.

What role does the female body play in nationalist discourses, especially in the context of war and conflict situations? Why is the attack on other countries often associated with the violent penetration of the female body? To what extent does the very view of women as victims prevent their perception as actors who can sometimes be violent, indeed: perpetrators?

We discuss these questions against the backdrop of two very different historical contexts: the Yugoslav war in the 1990s and the Ukrainian nationalist underground movements of the 1930s to 1950s.

Brigita Malenica is a political scientist, Slavicist, co-founder of balkanet e.V. and barabern & strawanzen, works in historical-political education and is committed to a diversity-sensitive postmigrant culture of memory.

Olena Petrenko is a research associate at the Institute of History at the Ruhr University Bochum. Her research focuses on the history of Ukraine in the 20th century, gender history of Eastern Europe, economic history of the Russian Empire, and oral history and memory studies.

"What must we not forget?"

According to Jan Assmann, this question is at the heart of the memory culture of a group or community.
This means: through the memory of certain events or figures, a "we" is formed.
And the swearing in to a common remembering, however, always produces exclusions: that which is forgotten; those who do not appear in the "we."

The fourth episode of Female Peace Palace is about the forgotten, the excluded, the repressed in the culture of memory. Eva Bahl from münchen postkolonial, Sebastian Huber from the NS-Dokumentationszentrum and Sapir von Abel from ausARTen are three guests on the podcast who deal with forgotten or repressed aspects of Munich's city history.

In what ways is German colonial history remembered in Munich?
Why does a Jewish-Muslim city tour cause irritation?
How can queer victims of National Socialism be commemorated without queer people being remembered 'merely' as victims?
Which perspectives are not considered in debates about German remembrance culture and why?
Which forms of remembrance culture, which debates are needed?

Sapir von Abel, Middle East (B.A.), Intercultural Communication (M.A.), works full-time in the Education Department of the Jewish Museum. Interested in the intersections of history, architecture, and society. Curator and co-organizer of the post-migrant art and culture festival ausARTen - changing perspectives through art.

Dr. Eva Bahl is part of the group [muc] münchen postkolonial and was involved in the projects "Decolonize Munich" and mapping.postkolonial.net, among others. She has been working as a research assistant in various research projects at the University of Göttingen since 2014. Publications on the topics of migration, borders, and (among others) postcolonial collective memories & memory practices.

Sebastian Huber works on the topics of literature, art, civil society, and LGBTIQ*. Most recently, the literary scholar worked as a curator on the exhibition TO BE SEE Quere lives 1900-1950 at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München.

Many people probably still remember the images of the toppled statues or those sprayed with paint.

In various places around the world, the protest was directed against monuments dedicated to colonizers or slave traders. Through their iconoclastic actions, these protesters vehemently posed the question: who is being publicly commemorated, and why? How does colonial and patriarchal power manifest itself in public space?

These questions mark the starting point for the conversation with the two artists Manuela Illera and Michaela Melián. Both have created artworks in Munich's urban space that critically engage with monuments interwoven with a violent history: colonial history on the one hand, the history of National Socialism on the other.

Based on "Cumbia del Colón irritable" by Manuela Illera and "Memory Loops" as well as "Maria Luiko, Trauernde" by Michaela Melián, this episode deals with the question of how complex historical contexts can be represented artistically.

How do we deal with problematic monuments of the past? Why is irritation a central moment of artistic creation? Do we need other forms of remembrance culture, do we need new monuments?

Manuela Illera is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist who works mainly with time-related media and in performing arts constellations. In her feminist and political practice, starting from the place of migration, she goes in pursuit of radical forms of exchange on decoloniality, the body and subversive identities. Her music, films, and group collaborations across disciplines interrogate the role of whiteness, of capitalism, and of patriarchal social conformity in culture.

Michaela Melián is an artist and musician. Since the 1980s she has been the singer and bassist of the band F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) and has also released several albums of her own. In her artistic work, Melián develops multifaceted fields of memory that create complex interrelationships from content references and quotations. She once described her approach as the politics of memory. Since 2010, she has also worked as a professor of mixed media / acoustics at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HfbK), Hamburg.

What does the future of memory look like?
This is the subject of the last episode of Female Peace Palace.

Preserving the knowledge of the past for the future is the task of archives. But who decides what is worth keeping and what is not? Why do marginalized groups so rarely appear in public, state archives, or when they do, it is often under negative perspectives such as criminalization?

These questions arise with new urgency in light of digital transformation processes. For the analog gaps and asymmetries of knowledge continue in the digital and sometimes even intensify.

How can gaps in the archive be questioned and filled? What might a decolonization of the Internet look like? Do we need new systems of order and knowledge?

Fabienne Imlinger will talk about this together with Katharina Brunner from the Forum Queer Archive Munich, Heike Gleibs from Wikimedia Deutschland and Thomas Schütte from the Monacensia.

Katharina Brunner, data journalist, is convinced that digitization offers great opportunities for analog places like archives. As a member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München, she is therefore concerned with making the collected knowledge available to as many people as possible in digital spaces as well. Among other things, she has implemented the Remove NA project funded by the Prototype Fund. Read more at queerdata.forummuenchen.org.

Heike Ekea Gleibs is a cultural scientist and systemic coach with a passion for learning, knowledge and exchange. She has worked in the nonprofit sector for many years. Among other things, she has done campaign work at Amnesty International and established and managed a scholarship program for student teachers at the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft. At Wikimedia Deutschland, she advocates for free access to knowledge and education.

Thomas Schütte, M.A., M.A., studied Medieval and Modern History, Prehistory and Early History in Munich and Salamanca, and Archival Sciences in Potsdam. 2012-2015 research assistant at the Archbishop's Archives Munich, 2015-2019 editor in the "Critical Online Edition of the Diaries of Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (1911-1952)", 2019-2021 deputy head of archives and data protection officer at the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin. Since 2021 deputy head of the Monacensia in the Hildebrandhaus and head of the literary archive.