‘In hidden, remote places around the world from the jungles of South America to the steppes of Asia, women still hold close the arts of brewing. Praying to their ancient goddesses, the women of non-technological societies continue to pass down to their daughters the secrets of beer. The old ways have not gone but soon will be.’ Alan D. Eames, The Secret Life of Beer
Despite the recent extensive writing on the feminine role in beer making all over the world, from the moment this divine drink was created, 30,000 years of history documenting women’s dominance in the craft is now almost as universally forgotten as once it was practiced.
femAle places itself at the intersection of historical currents, which created the conditions for the dispossession of many of us: queers, people of color, women, plants, microbes, and other creatures. All the artificially invented levels of variety or strata allowed industrialisation and the white/straight/western/cis world to dominate and extract value from everything deemed inferior. Beer is a medium of storytelling, connecting us in a quantum, and time-collapsing manner with our ancestors, who used to craft fermented beverages in ways that were respectful and mindful of nature and seasonal changes.
Those drinks were always divine, spiritually and physically nourishing, supporting the communities they were made by, in conversation with yeasts and microbes, with whom we mysteriously learned to collaborate. As with all fermentation processes, beer making is part alchemy and part straightforward magick of transformation, an encounter of elements that enhance and improve one another.
femAle at SpreePark, August/September 2020
As a collective that operates on the borders of art, activism, and alternative support systems, we are zooming in on events that led to the enclosure of the commons: witch hunts, industrialisation, capitalism. The erasure of traditions, cultures, and differences - the disconnect with nature around us and our inability to sustainably and responsibly inhabit spaces - triggered the loss of relation with the wider world that nourished us, and the disappearance of the skills and passion for food making.
In more and less clandestine ways, femAle has been brewing for almost two years, allowing ourselves space for failure, humility, curiosity, fun, and experimentation. We’re thinking of our project as a vehicle for building up alternative, small-scale, community-led economies - and as such, we’re part of a UBI experiment called Circles in Berlin.
We think of femAle as a learning and solidarity space for queer and marginalised peoples. As such, we work towards establishing the project as a safe environment for folks like us to join and collectively propel it and move one step closer to reclaiming the industry in the future. Also, we’re a space of artistic labor that brings the practice of doing art back to its core, as we like to see it: centered around attention and intention of what we choose to do. femAle considers itself a return of artistic work to what it used to be before imperialism and colonialism turned it into a white-cube-oriented, elitist discipline for a select few: art as a community, art as communion. Art at its most ordinary, joyful, and political. Open, welcoming, and warm.
femAle is an open collective started in the summer of 2020 at the art residency Amusement Now in Berlin, in the abandoned amusement park Spreepark by Nat Skoczylas migrant, queer artist, and activist living and working in Berlin, Jennifer Aksu urban practitioner based in Berlin. It has been hosted by the Moos Garden community since the autumn of 2021. Currently, it consists of a group of activists, artists, makers, engineers, cooks, and queers living and working in Berlin. It is also making waves in other spaces: the brewery was presented at the Beursscheuwbourg in Brussels as one of the projects invited by the Tashweesh curators in December 2021, had a launch at the Hexen Kuchen event in Berlin last autumn, and hosted a tasting event at the Floating University in October 2021. It was awarded a generosity grant by Starling Collective in the summer of 2021.
Link to video: https://youtu.be/r3sUcIdRd8g