Produced and Edited by Begonia Santa-Cecilia

This film collects some of the visual materials recorded in a retreat in Parma, Italy, in 2019, which brought together thinker and activist Silvia Federici together with the Feminist Research on Violence, and women from different backgrounds. We gathered to share experiences, feelings, and processes resonating with Federici’s experience, praxis, and theory. Living together in the Art Lab social center, we experimented with different tools to spark processes of common learning, departing from daily readings and discussions about some chapters of the then-forthcoming book of Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, as well as, engaging in art, body, and mind workshops, and cooking and eating together. 

The film tries to capture audio-visually the immanent aesthetics that emerge in the gestures, rhythms, distances and closeness that populate an intentional process of collective learning. Silvia Federici is an activist feminist writer based in Brooklyn. She has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons. 

Begonia Santa-Cecilia is a mother, activist, and visual artist based in Brooklyn. She works in painting, photography, film, and art education.