GraceGraceGrace

GraceGraceGrace make visible an invisible crisis: femicide of older woman, asking why society fails these victims. They approach the question through self-identification as ‘crones’: identifying as ‘older’, their describe their performances as situated knowledge in the ageing female body. They focus on the fact that Invisibility, devaluation and derision towards the older woman, added to everyday misogyny, results in a disproportionate number of women over 55 being murdered by men every year. Many cases are dismissed as accidents and not investigated— ‘mercy killing’ defences are falsely used to ensure perpetrators are given lesser sentences. Overkilling (when excessive force is used) was identified in over half of the femicides in the UK from 2009-2018.

On 28 August and 18 September, 2021 GraceGraceGrace visited the sites of nine murders across London and near Birmingham to make visible and call out the killing by men of nine older women as FEMICIDES, and to reflect on these women’s lives.

GraceGraceGrace is a trio of artists, who identify as women, and say they have made it their rebellious business to discuss strategies of visibility, doing their best to ‘chuck out our marginalised status from the patriarchal push chair’. They have performed internationally and nationwide, held workshops, featured in multiple publications and written a book ‘Gen Age’ published by Unbound. (Link to Unbound: https://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/products/gracegracegrace-explore-gen-age)

MANIFESTO:

We demand recognition of our grace which has been hard won over many years on contested ground, not handed to us by approval.

We share and recognise our debt to each other.
We reject an art market capitalising on the myth of uniqueness and narratives of the singular heroic figure, with traction and trend dominated by the cult of youth and warped notions of beauty.
We intend to rupture the symbolic from within, and borrow from the saboteurs of the big daddy mainframe.
We demand the abjuration of male-controlled and imperialist systems of oppression which we understand as exploiting women for labour and demeaning our grace.

We hold violence in contempt.
We hold deliberate ignorance and narrow horizons in contempt.
We hold patriarchal geo-political justifications for greed and power in contempt.
We hold the laws of our fore-fathers and current tyrants which renders a person illegal or deserving of poverty, in contempt.

We demand vegetables, tenderness and trust.
We demand clean water and poetry.
We demand blankets, dappled light and a woman’s right to choose.
We demand mechanisms to grace and protect feminist liberties.
We demand pluralism, promotion of ideas and innovative methods to break the monopoly enjoyed by patriarchs and messianic preachers of cultural orthodoxies.
We demand an understanding of life as a truly communitarian experience and expect a population that is respectful of older women as infinitely precious and possessed of capacities for reason, art and love.

Therefore:
We demand the revocation of all contracts for military purposes, and a total ban on the use of fossil fuels. We demand sustainable agriculture, a comprehensive re-nationalisation of our public health and social care, education and transport systems and all other commonly held necessary structures. We demand rigorously implemented, loophole free, fair and progressive taxation to pay for the well-being of all – according to need and awarded with grace.

AND WE DEMAND our rightful place in the aesthetic values of our culture, securing and ensuring the recognition that we are exquisite, beguiling and learned, for ourselves, for each other, and for all to see.

Signed:

Grace
Grace
Grace

KM for GGG with acknowledgement to Valerie Solanas, Mary Wollstonecraft, VNS Matrix et al.