Women on Aeroplanes by Annett Busch

Women on Aeroplanes—agency for flying ideas is an artistic research project, based on a framework and network that is necessarily constantly evolving and changing. it aims to gain a broader understanding of what independence and interdependence means. Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation, predating the process of independence on the African continent (and elsewhere), the project explores how women were always central to such networks and struggles, in which they played multiple roles. Their stories are however hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. We aim to not only frame their various and heterogeneous contributions, politically and artistically, but also create new parameters and premises of narratives. To recall the notion of independence today necessarily means to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonisation that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete. The project's title is borrowed loosely from Kojo Laing's critically acclaimed second novel Woman of the Aeroplanes, written in 1988. With its deconstructive syntax and implosion of genres, the novel sets the tone for a historical narrative, in which subordinate subject-object relations are negated. Laing’s method of speculative fiction writing can be seen as a making-of-theory using other means. As a reference point, it opens a pathway to a new grammar that makes re-visiting and re-writing history possible.

Issue no 1 is based on edited, revised and extended transcripts of talks and discussions during the first Women on Aeroplanes iteration Editing Room November 30 – December 3, 2017, at ifa-Galerie Berlin, which sparked and informed further research, to get prepared for the next take off to Lagos.

Coming to a decision to make a cut, to leave some material in and leave other material out, includes a process of making something visible and something else invisible. However, even though a person, a gesture, a matter, a landscape is present in the picture, in plain sight, we might just not see it. And whatever remains invisible, wether we see what or who is absent or not, is not least a question of knowledge and wether we care or not. The ambitious endeavour to change the grammar of a dominant narrative requires an entire reboot of a (mediated) perception we are all too much used to. How can we edit against the grain?

# 1 FILTER, EDITING