Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission: Learning from Greenham Common

This text draws on the author’s experience of researching the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common (1981-2000) from an art historical perspective. An important chapter in British and global feminist heritage, Greenham is approached as a curatorial conundrum, in which the requirement for historicization intersects with a feminist desire for reactivation, and as an archival assemblage in the making, where apparent accidents and damage to collections are interpreted as their meaningful components. The peace camp’s archival sprawl is examined as an investment of care that demands reciprocation in the form of careful transmission through scholarly, activist, and further curatorial work. Pivoting on an expanded understanding of assemblage, the chapter argues that contemporary art practice offers a model for dealing with feminist heritage. This model relies on care while tolerating risk, suggesting that the two are in fact interconnected