Skirts, C3 West, Kingswood

Skirts, C3 West, 2021

A women-focused project articulating shared aspirations, values and wants for the community

Linda Brescia: Skirts. Produced by C3West on behalf of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in partnership with Penrith City Council.

Photographs : Jessica Maurer

When
From Sunday 30 May 2021

Where
Wainwright Park, 19 Bringelly Road, Kingswood, NSW 2747

Skirts brings women from Kingswood and surrounding suburbs together to demonstrate the power of collective voices. A group with a vision, the ‘Skirts’ are women who live, work, study and socialise in Kingswood and who want positive change for themselves, for each other and for their community. Coming together alongside Western Sydney-based artist Linda Brescia, Skirts is an act of rebellion – against gendered expectations, ageism, violence against women, and the barriers that can come between individual lives and community wellbeing.

A collaboration with Penrith City Council, Skirts seeks to address concerns around public amenities, community safety and connection with a focus on local women’s aspirations. Since September 2020, Linda Brescia has engaged with a diverse group of women previously unknown to each other, enabling them to connect and forge friendships through creativity and dialogue.

Collaborating with award-winning writer Felicity Castagna alongside Brescia, the Skirts have devised a manifesto – a public declaration that combines poetic personal observations of women’s daily experiences and desires with a list of actions. The Skirts will be known to each other and to the greater community by their specific apparel worn as markers of their affiliation to each other and their vision. Working together and in collaboration with Brescia, artworks and activations for Kingswood’s public realm will unfold from May 2021.

Skirts

In 1910, German-born poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was arrested for promenading on Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue dressed in a man’s suit and smoking a cigarette. ‘She Wore Men’s Clothes’ was the headline in The New York Times. Proof exists that the Baroness, not Marcel Duchamp, was the artist responsible for Fountain (1917). The male (Duchamp) has been credited a genius for the very work that belonged to a woman (Freytag-Loringhoven).

The Baroness is the starting point for this women-focused project.

American actor Billy Porter wore a ‘tuxedo gown’ to the 2019 Academy Awards. Porter wasn’t arrested, but the backlash was palpable. The Sydney Morning Herald quotes him saying, “But what does that mean, to be masculine? To be strong and powerful? Women wear pants all the time, and nobody bats an eye, but a man puts on a dress and that’s disgusting?”

So, 100 years on and we’re still hearing that women are inferior to men. To wear a skirt in public would not only make a man look like a ’sissy’, but he would feel vulnerable.

Skirts aren’t for sissies. Let’s skirt the shirtfronters. Make a beeline to the a-line.

The Manifesto, Felicity Castagna

We are skirts

The force behind the outfit: see-through plastic, gathered, micro, midi, flimsy. We are unzipped. We are unzipping. A jagged edge. The bias binding. We are hitched up. We are swaying at the edge watching you. We are your assumptions and your judgements: We are threadbare and frivolous and hungry. We are covering a multitude of sins. We are the slit up your side and the look how short it is. We are the who does she think she is?

And we are here.

We are period-stained tight figure-hugging things. The fabric of our communities, the soft and long and loud. We’re the wasp at the doorway and the unmown weeds. We are shameless and seductive, like the Catholic School Girl finally doing it. We are a handbag in a food court, feral cats terrifying feral kids. We are climbing into our neighbours’ windows. We cast ourselves over the neighborhood like machine gun spray. We are a desperate compulsive machine: all sugarcoated rage. Screeching birds on the signpost. Screaming. Screaming. Screaming.

I’m supposed to be in Paris!

The last time you saw us we were your broken stove, your forgotten street, your public calamity – all those schoolboys smoking at the station. We were walking down dark alleyways with no streetlights. We were warped concrete blocks, clutter and dust, festering mold, sinking soil, housing commission. We were a searing pain plugging along. But now we’ve moved time. And now we are markers of depth and brilliance. We are preserved light. We are the lingering smell of the takeaway. We are brains intending to be utilised. We are tired. Tired. Tired but we are also joy. We are pink polka dot skirts. We are everything.

We need

We need to collect communities and to extend our gaze beyond them. We need the sound of children playing. We need to burn our bare feet on Nepean Square. We need our fleshy dough to be allowed to rise. We need to protect our ground. We need to be needed. The last time we needed you to see us always giving ourselves to those who cluster on the grass: hummingbirds and hygiene products, earthly delights and mulberry trees. Blistering grit. Dancing. Crying. Wailing. Song. Light. Light. Light.

The next time we will visit all the places we want to see. We need you to help us rip up the ground, negotiate a treaty, light some candles and give us dignity. Dignity. Dignity. Dignity. Destroy the emotionally limited institute. Give us light. Light. Light.

We want

We listened, felt ourselves alone. We gave generously of our bodies and ourselves. We unzipped and unravelled. Now we want and want and want.

We want to pull it down, hike it up, cover and reveal.
We want to avoid the brazen heat and the blistering afternoon.
We want all the bells but not the wolf whistles.
We want an end to colonisation.
We want a sarong that works as a wedding dress.
We want to be safe.
We want no restrictions.
We want patterns of form and meter, aniseed, basil, chives.
We want vitality, health and a zillion stars.
We want paradise and street wall graffiti.
We want an alone kind of freedom.
We want a framework for lasting solutions written in embroidery.
We want you to share your joy. Bring us joy. Bring our joy.