Featuring works and documents by more than 20 artists, the chapter emerged through repeated engagements with the re.act.feminism archive. Given its breadth, Mayer chose to focus on feminist artists from across Latin America whose works and stories remain insufficiently known and accessible. Kovač, in turn, was particularly drawn to the archive’s focus on East German performance artists, whose work has received comparatively little attention outside Germany, even within major collections of Eastern European art. She therefore focused on some feminist performance artists from the former GDR, bringing lesser-known artistic positions into view.

Mayer and Kovač also introduced new artists and works to the re.act.feminism archive, following three thematic threads: Infrastructures of Care, Archival Acts, and Resistances. Together, these threads connect different artistic practices, geographical contexts, and histories of feminist performance, featuring: Milijana Babić, selma banich, Laura Anderson Barbata, CADA, Graciela Carnevale, Ana Čigon, Diamela Eltit, Exterra XX, Else Gabriel, Regina José Galindo, Anna Bella Geiger, María Teresa Hincapié, Magali Lara, María Evelia Marmolejo, Mónica Mayer, Lorena Orozco, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer), Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, Maja Smrekar, Gabriele Stötzer, Cecilia Vicuña, Lorena Wolffer.

The larger project brings together Pinto mi Raya (Mexico City), an archive built by the artists Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma, focusing on experimental art production and writing since the 1970s with a particular emphasis on performance and feminist artists; the project re.act.feminism (Berlin), which has been travelling as a living performance archive across Europe in several instalments since 2008; and City of Women (Ljubljana), with its significant, but dispersed archive accumulated over 31 years of festival and programme activities. The exhibition has been developed through a yearlong dynamic dialogue between the three archives and archivists Bettina Knaup, Iva Kovač and Mónica Mayer, focussing on selected works and documents and a set of archival methods fostering mutual relations, resonances and effects – which we have termed “archival chain reactions”.