ACT II

About the project

The proposal is simultaneously a conceptual artwork, a manuscript for a play and a political call to save the Women’s House in Copenhagen.

I wrote a text piece and manuscript for a play called In Godot’s Waiting Room in collaboration with dramatist Gritt Uldall-Jessen that was performed in the space for contemporary art at the Opera House in Umeå. We have both been active in the queer-feminist community in different cities for many years, and the piece came out of the idea of making a feminist re-writing of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It combines text from Waiting for Godot with a diary written by about 50 women who squatted a house in Umeå in 1983. The demand put forward by the women, who occupied the house for more than three months, was to get support from the municipality to set up a Women’s House that could also serve as a Shelter. The text piece was performed once as a staged reading with three of the women who took part in the squat almost thirty years ago, Gritt Uldall-Jessen and myself. Artist Malin Arnell performed as the tree.

Almost immediately after this work was finished, the Women’s House in Copenhagen, Denmark, came under threat of eviction after nearly 40 years of activity. This event sparked Kajsa Dahlberg to feel the urge to continue the work started in Umeå with a new collaboration involving Gritt Uldall-Jessen and the Women’s House.

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Kajsa Dahlberg, ACT II (not yet with a title), 2011, Documentation from the reading performance in Umeå, April 2011.

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Kajsa Dahlberg, ACT II (not yet with a title), 2011, Documentation from the reading performance in Umeå, April 2011.

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Kajsa Dahlberg, ACT II (not yet with a title), 2011, Archive material from the Women’s House occupation in Umeå 1983.

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Kajsa Dahlberg, ACT II (not yet with a title), 2011, Archive material from the Women’s House occupation in Umeå 1983.

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Kajsa Dahlberg, ACT II (not yet with a title), 2011, Documentation from the reading performance in Umeå, April 2011.

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Kajsa Dahlberg, ACT II (not yet with a title), 2011, Archive material from the Women’s House occupation in Umeå 1983.

ACT II was proposed for the Visible Award as a dialogue, an investigation and an archive that would have built on participation and activity intended to offer another axis of engagement. The piece would have used the everyday experiences of the activists, the discussions, monologues, speeches, actions, demos and documents in their struggle to secure their future existence.

About the artist

In my work, I’ve been investigating how narratives are constructed and mediated in relation to questions of political representation, history and identity, as well as how they relate to the medium itself. I’m interested in how collective ‘agency’ can be constituted beyond normative categories of identity and how these are represented in terms of imagery and language in ways that could potentially move beyond normalizing narratives.