In the framework of the Berlin Biennial, September 2, 2022, “The Yes Women Group “is organizing a new public artwork in collaboration with a self-organized group of elderly women from the former GDR (average age 80).
After the German reunification, these women were deprived of a significant part of their pensions.
Divorce was not uncommon in the GDR, whereas it was often ridiculed or a stigmatizing cause in the BRD.
The cuts of the pensions thus can be read as symptomatic of a structural injustice that entailed the reunification and that affected the former GRD on many levels, therein the women of this group as their perhaps most vulnerable and invisible part.
In this workshop, The Yes Women will create collective graffiti using pre-designed stencils with a logo referencing Banksy’s “The Flower Thrower,” where a protester holds up flowers instead of a Molotov cocktail and iconic activists graffiti “Don’t panic, organize!”.
The participants’ clothes will be decorated by Extinction rebellion artists, as they should be during Carnival.
Everyone who wants to join us will receive sprays, stencils and carnival paraphernalia.
Let’s make the solidarity parade as big as possible!
The Yes Women Group was started by the late David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky in 2018 as a part of the wider project Museum of Care and the “Care in Freedom instead of Consumption and Production” Movement.
Nika Dubrovsky with the support of Sonja Lau