Critical Pizza Lists
Critical Pizza Lists
Offset, A4, double sided, 2007 -
The on-going series of double sided handouts in form of pizza list, which are made for specific events and exhibitions. The topic of each list varies according to the theme or topic of the event. Six handouts are released all together so far.
"The third phase of the Centrifugal project - curated by Taru Elfving, Susan Kelly and Nicole Hewitt - concentrated in critical explorations and excavations of urban transformations and complex layers of cultural identities in Helsinki. As a part of these investigations a number of interventions into to the city were organized. These included the Postcolonial Pizza list, a book and word list delivered to households in Helsinki. It was the artsists’ - Kalle Hamm, Minna L. henriksson, Dzamil Kamanger and Sezgin Boynik – reaction to what seemed a continuing lack of public discussion and awareness in Finland of the postcolonial problematic.”
Taru Elfving
"The Critical list of Politics and Sexuality, which was produced in collaboration with Sezgin Boynik and Minna L. Henriksson, is the third edition in the series titled Pizza Lists. This pizza menu deals with the topic of sexual minorities in the light of post-colonial conceptual vocabulary, focusing on social groups that are excluded from hegemonic power structures on more than one group. Thus, for example, homosexual Sámi and Roma, who are stigmatized for their ethnic affiliation as well as their sexual their sexual orientation, comprise dual minorities in the Finnish context. However, in modern liberal democratic societies, sexuality is not only repressed, but it is also an instrument for oppression and exclusion – at the time when the industrial Western countries justify aggressive military policies with the argument that they are fighting for gender and sexual equality, these democratic countries annually reject the asylum applications of thousands of sexual refugees. In addition to that, the diaspora communities living in Western societies are traditionally treated as the perpetrators rather than the targets of homophobia, without taking into account that sexual minorities also exists within them. Today, the hetero-normative ideology, which that queer-feminist movement has tried to abolish for decades, is supplemented by a homo-normative discourse that reproduces racial, class-based, sexual and ethnic ideals, treating migrant rights and sexual rights as mutually exclusive. The Critical List of politics and Sexuality highlights a series of examples that prove that queer politics cannot be viewed separately from anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-nationalist struggles.”
Airi Triisberg