Royal College of Art
2024
Varvara Keidan Shavrova
Current PhD student
Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD
Dreamworlds of Flight: Feminist Perspectives on Gendered Labour and Flight Technologies in the Age of Capitalist Anthropocene
This research by practice explores what flight represents today- by defining flying, lifting off, as well as fleeing, escaping, etc.- and whilst trying to re-imagine what a subjectively emancipating, feminist, and politically deterritorialised mode of flight might look like, when dreamworlds of flight are reimagined and reclaimed through poetic technologies and collaborative feminist practices of woman’s work, using textiles and fibre-based artworks and installations. This research aims to reroute trajectory of flight towards more intimate, domestic realms, and activate it as a methodology to radically re-engage with the timeless inspiration of flight, of technologies and of dreams, to envisage forms of state formation conceived through a feminist perspective and celebrated through narratives of collective action through textile making.
Following the explorations into the fields of new technologies made by the artists of the modernist avant-garde in the early 20th century, this research aims to bring together the personal and the historic notions of flight and flying. This research provides an analysis of the connection between private and public conceptualisations of flight, the relationship between the individual and the state in relation to the development of the technologies of actual flight, in part by reference to archival material from Soviet aeronautical engineers that form part of this researcher’s family history.
This thesis analyses the contemporary perspectives on flight via feminist thinking (Federici, Plant, Braidotti and Haraway et al) and creative textiles installations (Bourgeois, Vasconcelos, Hicks et al). By problematising geo-politics of flight in relation to personal histories and feminist thought, this research strives to develop a new artistic vision of flight, to offer a transformative iteration for our future with flight technologies, that sets aside any reliance on male-dominated techno-industrial capitalist, military complex that continues to contribute to ecological collapse, climate catastrophe and global refugees’ and migrants’ crises.
This researcher’s argument suggests that dreamworlds of flight could be channelled, through the softening, haptic qualities of thinking through hand-making and collective creativity of textile artmaking, into empowering women to reimagine their role in relation to technologies, where instead of the automation of labour, visions of a posthuman feminist future can be built around eco-communality and post-technological solidarity.
This research has included a placement at the Science Museum, London, see here
Funding
LAHP (Arts & Humanities Research Council)
Supervisors
Rachel Garfield
Josephine Berry
www.lahp.ac.uk/student/varvara-keidan-shavrova/
www.rca.ac.uk/research-innovation/research-degrees/research-students/varvara-keidan-shavrova/
