Women House pays tribute to the groundbreaking Womanhouse, the first feminist exhibition in history, led 52 years ago, in 1972, in Los Angeles, United States, by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, as part of the Feminist Art Program of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) - the first gender studies program in history, also created by Judy Chicago. Conceived as a site-specific installation and performance space, Womanhouse presented the work of 23 artists in a collaborative feminist artistic experience that questioned domestic work and the clichés of women that have been naturalized for centuries. With its themed rooms and public exhibition of artists performing everyday female tasks such as cleaning floors, washing dishes and ironing, Womanhouse was ridiculed by the patriarchal press, while it was making history by transforming the female experience into art and subversion. Womanhouse has famously transformed lived experience into a radical artistic discourse, deconstructing stereotypes about women’s roles in domestic spaces.

—> Catalog cover featuring Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, credits by Sheila de Bretteville, 1972.

“Album of deforgetfulness”, by Mayara Ferrão, unfolds as a visual–poetic gesture of reparation, confronting the systematic silencing and archival erasure of Black and Indigenous women within Brazil’s colonial record. Rather than attempting to fill the absences, the project dwells in the space of what cannot be fully recovered, engaging absence itself as a site of creation. It proposes deforgetfulness as an active, critical practice that resists the violences of forgetting imposed by colonial historiography.

Through a speculative and intimate repertoire of images, the work fabulates submerged histories of affection, care, and eroticism between women of the past. These gestures operate as necessary imaginaries and counter-archives, unsettling the authority and completeness of official narratives while opening space for other modes of knowing and remembering.

In tracing these fugitive intimacies, the project gestures toward forms of kinship and desire attend to quiet, often invisible networks of solidarity and tenderness that may have existed despite (and in defiance of) colonial structures of domination. By doing so, “Album of deforgetfulness” reclaims fabulation as a form of resistance and a critical strategy: a way of reclaiming what has been denied visibility, while honoring what cannot be fully known.

Ultimately, the artist invites viewers into a participatory act of reimagining history, calling for an engagement with (and a looking beyond) the archive, not as a closed or authoritative system, but as something porous, unstable, and open to collective reconfiguration. Within the space between loss and invention, new possibilities for recognition, connection, and repair begin to take form.

The late curator of the current edition of the Venice Biennale was the first African woman appointed to this role. A committed feminist, her work consistently championed women artists and practitioners from the Global South. Women House Amsterdam paid ongoing tribute to her with a memorial at the exhibition entrance, where flowers were regularly renewed throughout its duration. Her passing represents a profound loss to the art world, as her practice brought a renewed sense of inclusivity, diversity, and humanity.

Via an open letter addressed to Brazil’s Ministry of Culture and Funarte, seven Brazilian women artists selected to participate in the Women House Amsterdam exhibition express concern over the unexplained suspension and lack of communication regarding a cultural mobility grant (Call No. 01/2024) for which they applied. The signatories emphasise that their participation in the Netherlands depends on this funding, while situating the issue within a broader context of limited institutional support for women artists and independent feminist initiatives. In doing so, they call into question the institutions’ stated commitment to cultural exchange in light of their silence surrounding the call.