Conversation with Salem Collo-Julin, Chicago, 2004

In this conversation, Salem Collo-Julin reflects on her artistic, feminist, and activist practices, as well as her role as an organizer in the gender-balanced collective at the experimental cultural center Mess Hall in Chicago. Collo-Julin shares her experiences with other activist groups, where women are often outnumbered, and men dominate conversations. This dynamic, she notes, even occurs in pro-choice groups, where self-identified feminist men “get into a meeting and won’t let a woman talk.” Collo-Julin has also been active in a collective distributing information about sexual health and condoms at high schools. Despite frequent disruptions by security staff, the outreach persisted as a dedicated effort to provide teens with vital information.

Critiquing a narrow American perspective, Collo-Julin reflects on the restrictive labels often placed on feminist art, reducing it to a 1970s aesthetic and limiting it to women’s issues. She questions how to broaden the conversation: “Is the answer to continually have these dialogs with people that are going to be difficult… getting them out of a comfort zone of what their definitions are?” Collo-Julin also examines different waves of feminism in the U.S., contrasting early 20th-century feminists, shaped by labor and socialist movements, with second-wave feminists of the 1970s who pursued equality beyond civil rights, “finding out what their own desires are and striving to act upon them.” She emphasizes that achieving gender equality requires deep, systemic transformation, calling it a “lifelong movement.”

Collo-Julin highlights feminism’s global impact, noting how women from the Global South are rising to power and shaping the movement worldwide. However, she warns against complacency, stating, "It feels like we've made it… that’s just not the case... young girls are given nothing but a media image of what a woman is like." She critiques media portrayals of young women of color, who are often reduced to sexualized roles neglecting their intelligence. Referencing the Bechdel Test, Collo-Julin underscores the lack of diverse, empowering female representation. She also shares how her gender-neutral name often allows her to bypass certain biases, only to face them later when recognized as a woman. “Since I collaborate with two men in Temporary Services, I arrive somewhere where I've been corresponding with a curator through email… and they think I'm an assistant or one of their girlfriends, like I’m kind of an add-on, and they're looking for this other third member, the mysterious Mr. Salem.”