DROPPING IN AND OUT is an interdisciplinary research project initiated by Dr. Jessica Goodman, Prof. Mathilde ter Heijne and Vanessa Gravenor, exploring how different historical and geographical contexts shape the ways in which the artistic legacies of women and non-binary people are conceived and experienced, and how we, as authors today, can rediscover the works and impact of those who came before us. Aiming to address gaps in the genealogical narratives of feminist producers and foster reciprocal solidarity across time and space, the project will track the erasures of women artists’ biographies, and interrogate the significance of feminist perspectives in artistic production.
In today’s climate of economic, political, and ecological instability, the landscape of artistic production is increasingly precarious. For women and other marginalised groups, however, the conditions shaping their practices have often been uncertain, their careers wavering between moments of visibility and obscurity. Professions fuse, fracture, shift, or are lost altogether, while art or scientific works are destroyed or forgotten. Our turbulent times call for new ways of navigating the social and material world, leaving the Western-Eurocentric feminist perspectives; ways that embrace personal failure and falling into obscurity as part of the process, rather than treating them as endpoints to be avoided. A study of the careers of female artists and authors and how their works survived can provide a blueprint for these new approaches.
Combining archive materials with newly produced texts and artworks, this interdisciplinary project uses interviews and (impossible) conversations with the already deceased as experimental materials for collective and individual artistic production. Participants will uncover and reconnect with neglected or forgotten artistic practices and voices, creating a contemporary aesthetic or poetic response inspired by an earlier text or artwork by a female or non-binary individual. In parallel, theoretical responses will evaluate the gaps of knowledge in artistic practice through a feminist or decolonial lens.

PROJECT KICKOFF
May 5–7, 2025, University of Oxford
Interviews and conversations

CONFERENCE
July 7-8 2025, Berlin University of the arts
Hybrid Conference with participants, guests and invitees

PUBLICATION
December 2025