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How We Behave
Just for the record


Loraine:
There was this 'Art and Feminism’ event organized a t Corner College art space in Zürich. I was there for another reason and I was curious, so I decided to attend the event that day. There, with the artist Caroline Palla who was organizing it and the other participants, I learned about how Wikipedia works, and that there is a huge gender imballance in its contributors and in the topics represented. I also learned how we could change it, by contributing to it. The format was very open, the artist had re-appropriated it from a group in New York, and I instantly I thought 'ok , I should organize something like that in B elgium .' So I organized an 'Art and Feminism’ edit-a-thon in Brussels , and at the end of this event, the people who are now part of Just for the record said 'we should do something like that more regularly’ . A nd so we started a collective.

Myriam:
We came up with this idea to work on gender representation in new media using collaborative publishing tools . We came up with the name J ust for the record which is an expression used to point at something that's been overlooked. It comes from this question of 'what is recorded and what is n't.  We s hare a common interest in how history is written, who is represented, who gets published and how. We didn’t want it to be only an event, we decided to form a collective and to meet every week to be able to reflect on questions with a bit more consistency together.

Sarah:
It's bee n two years since we started to talk about JFTR being a collective, and one and a half year since we started doing events. In our first meeting I remember we were discussing whether we'd use the word feminist or not - I mean now there is no doubt and it seems kind of funny! We are getting better at establishing a dynamic, as a sort of machinery — the social machinery of JFTR ! There are ongoing adjustment s to that dynamic , a s we get to know each other and understand how we should solve things between us, which demands a lot of self-reflection. (8)

Mia:
We have different skills and needs for control or comfort or freedom and we have a different relationship to improvisation, or how improvisation for some people is something very positive and beautiful and for some others it is stressful. And also, with time, life happens, and we get to see each other in different states and different situations, this also improves the collective dynamic. Now we've been working together quite closely, especially last year, and you get to be part of each other's lives and sort of be there when shit happens to each other, and you get a lot closer when you build a stronger understanding of each other's experience of the world. So sharing our personal stories strengthens the collective. 

- (pause)

Myriam:
The most common form of sexism I would say is in everyday discussions - odd remarks or you're just trying to say something and then somebody cuts you off. The most shocking one that recently happened to me was this man who was really into Donna Haraway and those sorts of theories, but the way he was speaking and the way he was act ing felt completely disconnected. 

Loraine:
W e were coming out of her conference , we were three - me, my boyfriend and the ‘mansplainer’ , so it was quite an intimate setting. We were drinking beers outside in the street and I asked something about the conference — how he found it — and trying to express my point of view and with every sentence I would say he would cut me off! I remember saying something and he would start talking about something completely different in the middle of my sentence. It felt like he was trying to explain to me what feminism was about! I asked my boyfriend 'am I being paranoid or is he just cutting me off all the time?' And he was like 'Yes, that's what's happening' , so we decided to leave.

Mia:
T hose situations are not easy because you feel trapped: if you react impulsively, people think you're overeacting or label you as an 'angry feminist' and then if you don't react and just wait , you keep thinking about what you should have said and done afterwards. It feels like there is no right way to react...

- (pause)

Sarah:
You get more aware of race discrimination when you grow up and you realise that it is also strongly connected to being a woman, I can really make a link between the two. That it is the same kind of fight, that these old things, old reactions that people have come from old stereotypes.  
But if you don't feel the discrimination it is difficult to know where to break or change it. It doesn't mean that you can’t, it's just that you can never really know if you are not a woman what discrimination is for women, and the same for being coloured. I find it an interesting field to think about nowadays – how do you integrate people into your fight? 

I have a third collective it is more like a cooperative and we are doing a magazine where one of the goal is to rethink the publication process and its power structure. S ome months ago there was a general assembly and one guy freshly work ing with us remarked that it was sad that there were only 3 coloured people in the room of 50 . After the assembly we ended up the day more casually around a bier and people were very curious to know how I felt about beeing the only coloured person in this collectif or, more widely, as a couloured women in the everyday life . As if they just realise the la ck of diversity and that life experience might have been different than their. I did go on a passionated conversation with the guy who pointed out that unbalanced side in the project. He said for him it was problematic that we didn't push more for diversity , feeling so angry and powerless on the fact that doesnt matter how unfair he found it or how many he could talk about, he would still be and have a white male life. He struggled and was stuck not knowing how to get involved as a white male into feminism or anti racism mouvement . I was telling him that he could be involved but maybe he wouldn't have the same position, and maybe this is something that he would have to accept, that he is not going to be the leader and needs to find another position in those fight, which will maybe be in requestioning his priviledge .  

- (pause)

Myriam:

Working on Wikipedia as a case study helps in these situations. I t's a way to focus on something specific within a platform a lot of people know, and where there is room for many ways of contributing , so it makes it easier to start a discussion between people from different life experiences. It 's really about connecting people during our events. Wikipedia has grown to be a kind of flattened, text-based mirror of our society and its power structures, so for us it works as a way to highlight how blind we are to institutionalised and culturally embedded discrimination.( Things are easier to measure when they are typed out in text, and discussions related to a specific problem need to bridge ideology and theory with practice and solutions which makes things interesting.)


Loraine:
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to present things, and how to speak from our four voices, in a collective way . Usually in our workshops we speak in turns. Each of us talks about something, one after the other, which gives different voices to our common narrative. F or some parts we like to present as a duo, in a sort of conversation. 

Mia:
It always comes with questions of space: how we are positioned in the room, and of course how we welcome other people. It is often hard to escape a frontal setting, as we have to be close to our machines which are connected to the beamer. But now we’re often working with two screens, which was a nice way to get rid of the centralized single-person presentation.  it's also really nice when we're more spread out . W e always want to deconstruct the usual format of doing things. 

Sarah:
It can sometimes be a useful tool, to be conscious of when we should speak for ourselves and when we should mix up our voices and speak as a collective, because depending on the topic, speaking for yourself or as a collective has an impact on how openly you talk about personal experience. For example, on certain topics, speaking as a collective can remove fear of being personally persecuted.

- (pause)

Myriam:
Recently, we were invited as a collective to get a guided tour of an exhibition. 

Loraine:
And so we're on our way with J ust for the record and then just before we go into the exhibition something peculiar happens to me . 

Sarah:
Suddenly I see this man, which I haven't seen for five years, and I have a physical reaction just by seeing him, I have to make sure I don't hyperventilate or vomit, to really focus on staying in control of my own mind to make sure it doesn’t trigger any post-traumatic stress.

Mia:
It is a short encounter, my mind is racing, and right after it happened, the people who were going to guide us through this exhibition came. I didn't quite know what to do with myself, but then the tour started so I joined it. It was overwhelming.

Loraine:
One of the main topics of the exhibition was on violence against women and it made me numb, but I went through with the tour as a way to buy myself some more time to regain control of my mind and figure out how to handle this. I managed to tell another person in the group who I had just seen, but the others were further away. 

Myriam:
Then at some point we took a break and went outside and I could tell them that what had just happened is something I've been anticipating for years. And yes, in that moment, whe n I was trying to explain my physical and psycological reactions, it was also clear how close we have gotten by working together, perhaps specifically because of the topics we work on. 

Sarah:
We are very much behaving like colleagues during our JFTR meetings, but we originally know each other as friends. As an active collective sometimes there's just a lot of administrative things to deal with and you forget how strong the bonding side of this work is, until shit happens.

Myriam:
Outside the exhibition I think they asked what I wanted them to do and I said it'd be really nice to just sit down and have a drink. It was a very warm day so there were lots of people out , so we tried to find a quiet spot, we went to a random street corner terrace that looked empty to have some time for ourselves. 

Loraine:
We ended up smoking quite a few cigarettes and ordering two bottles of wine. We were supposed to go back to see a performance but we told them we wouldn't make it. That whole afternoon turned out to be very nice, it couldn't have been a better group of people to be with when something like this were to happen. Suddenly three, four hours had passed and it was late and we went home. 

Mia:
And in this way, sharing these kind of incidents, our life-experiences starts to intertwine.

- (pause)

Myriam:
Over time we have developed a way to write together , we usually use a collaborative online pad and each concentrate on a specific part because it can be exhausting to work on the same bit of text. 
Usually it works quite well, if we're not writing together at the same time it could also be that someone starts a draft, and then others would have something to start with. Sometimes it's faster and more nuanced than writing on your own, but it's also good to know that writing together can be hard.

Once when we had to write a text together, and we didn't have a lot of time because we had to perform it the day after . We started writing, it took between 2 and 3 hours and because it was late we didn't exactly finish but at some point we had the rough draft. And then we started correcting each other’s stuff removing some parts to make a narrative and th e situation got pretty tensed... 

-

Loraine:
It's hard to take criticism or have your part modified, but it's an experience we're thinking about when we get people to write on Wikipedia, because in th ere you can modify everything. You sort of have to give up this idea that it is your own text and accept that it can and will be modified by others. 

Sarah:
Sometimes it's frustrating because people undo your edits, but it can also act as a chain reaction where you start an article, maybe even just a few lines, and you go back to it later to realise that someone that you don't even know has improved it, s o that's quite beautiful !

Mia:
So we are learning to understand how collective writing asks for a different type of focus, for better communication, and how it also takes more time. 

Myriam: 
But when it works it can be the most satisfying proof that even small actions can be contagious and can have a big impact in the end.