In 2002, visual artist Kirsten Dufour (b. 1941), one of the first feminist artists in Denmark, initiated the video archive Let Us Speak Now. The project is both an artwork and a video archive about feminism, activism, and artistic production, based on interviews with international feminist artists. During travels and residencies, especially in the United States, Kirsten Dufour sought out feminist art communities. These encounters resulted in conversations that touch on a wide range of subjects, with a primary focus on the intersection of feminism and activism.

The archive contains more than 80 interviews with key figures who were part of the feminist movement in the 1970s, as well as with younger generations of artists working within feminist frameworks. The premise of the Let Us Speak Now archive was to investigate the feminist strategies that have developed over the years and to discuss how these strategies have been translated into current discourses and projects that shape the artists and their work. The archive presents an oral history of the feminist art movement from the 1970s up until 2007, when some of the last interviews were conducted. It gathers several generations of artists from across the world and offers insight into feminism’s contemporary status as well as significant historical moments in the movement. Over the years, Dufour has conducted interviews in the United States, Costa Rica, France, Armenia, the United Kingdom, Austria, Mexico, Lebanon, Türkiye, Denmark, and Sweden.

In the archive, the developments of the 1970s are retold by those who took part in them, while artists such as Julie Ault and Kaucyila Brooke position themselves at a slight distance from that era. Brooke explains that she feels far more connected to the lesbian collectives of the 1970s than to the poststructuralist readings that have later been applied to her work. Ault sees her own practice and her work with Group Material as an extension of the feminist practices of the 1970s, where figures such as Lucy Lippard, bell hooks, and Nancy Spero serve as important reference points. Let Us Speak Now arises precisely within these cross-references, where the feminist movement is understood from shifting vantage points across generations and art historical periods. The archive holds an activist potential in its feminist standpoint and in its inscription of this perspective into an art history that has thus far not been visible within a Danish context.

The project began in 2002 in Los Angeles, where Kirsten Dufour was awarded a residency by the Centre for Danish Visual Art. Dufour explains that while she was familiar with the Danish feminist tradition, she wanted to learn how her international colleagues had worked with similar issues over the years. She therefore used her residency to set out with her video camera and a list of questions. Sometimes the questions were used; other times the conversations unfolded freely. Often the interviews take place in the artist’s studio or home. After each conversation, Dufour would ask the interviewee to recommend a colleague she could seek out and interview next.

When Dufour initiated the project, it underscored the importance of revitalizing the feminist art movements of the 1970s and relating them to the present moment. Artists from this period were in the process of being rediscovered and incorporated into a new historicization of late-1960s and 1970s art movements. The various feminist movements that emerged throughout the 1970s generated a rupture within the arts. The intersections between activist and artistic spaces cultivated by the feminist movements laid the groundwork for a wide range of socially engaged art practices. These practices included interaction with publics within art institutions as well as with groups in the surrounding community. A notable example is the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, which played a significant role in these new approaches to art.

The archive also relates to queer-feminist practices through a series of interviews with a younger generation of artists. In this sense, the perspective of Let Us Speak Now traces feminist movements across the last 50 years and the transformations that feminist thought has undergone. Although it is no longer relevant for the archive to be an exclusive space for women (defined biologically), it is important to emphasize that the archive continues to concern itself with the discrimination attached to the gender marker “woman,” understood in its broadest sense.
A crucial aspect of Dufour’s project was to give the floor to the artists themselves and to broaden the narrative by connecting the “heard” voices with the “unheard.” The archive contains an important range of canonized feminist artists as well as a large number of lesser-known artists who took part in the collective feminist movement and formed a vital foundation for the movement’s development and for the experiments that emerged from these collective spaces.

Kirsten Dufour graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1965–70). During her studies, she co-founded Kanonklubben (1968–70) and was active in the associated feminist artists’ group that produced some of the earliest major feminist manifestos in the 1970s—for example, the exhibition Damebilleder at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (1970). Since then, Dufour has remained committed to an artistic practice centering on collectivity, activism, and feminism—an approach that is entirely unique in a Danish context. In this work, the boundaries of art and its potential for change have been explored through collaborations such as Tøj til Afrika (1975–86), YNKB (Outer Nørrebro Cultural Bureau) (2007–12), and Astrid Noack’s Atelier (2009–).

Pia Rönicke and Johanne Løgstrup

About the archive

The archive contains oral accounts of the many struggles the feminist movement has undergone over a span of 40 years. With the archive, Kirsten Dufour is not only interested in mapping out feminist discourses and their positions, but also in reactivating these positions and experiences within a contemporary discussion about feminism, and in bringing them together in a network of voices and narratives. The complete archive presents an entire era of feminist history and should be viewed in its entirety, through all its particular differences and cross-references. The interviews were collected through a non-linear method akin to a fractal pattern of “who recommends whom,” primarily conducted during Dufour’s many travels.

The archive is thus based on local networks that are connected within an international perspective. The collection method of “who recommends whom” allows Let Us Speak Now to reach voices not already inscribed in art history. At the same time, the archive is influenced by the idiosyncrasies and possible closedness of these networks. The American portion of the archive, in particular, reveals a certain exclusivity, representing a majority of white artists and activists. We see this as a weakness of the collection method, but also as a reflection of the structural racism that has meant, for example, that Black artists have often been excluded from the institutional art world. This is an issue that is important to underline, since the Let Us Speak Now archive is fundamentally concerned with learning from the artistic experiences and practices that have been exposed to and shaped by exclusion and discrimination. When approaching the archive today, it is essential to ask which practices and positions it does not contain, and how these missing perspectives might be incorporated in meaningful ways, in relation to both historical and contemporary contexts.

In the archiving process, we have employed a similar non-linear method, in which selected keywords taken directly from the interviews are made searchable both within the individual interview and across the archive, enabling cross-referencing. It is also possible to search for specific events and names such as people, schools, exhibitions, and events.

For each interview, visual artist Pia Rönicke has written a summarizing text highlighting key aspects of the conversation and providing insight into its content. We chose this approach in order to facilitate working with this time-intensive material.