For Freedoms was pleased to partner with Fight For the Future, Plan C, Project for Empty Space, and Women on Web to launch the initial activation of Body Freedom For Every(Body) in Austin, TX coinciding with SXSW 2024. Each partner organization agrees that building a coalition and community is necessary and that Choice/Bodily Autonomy/Body Freedom is an issue that impacts every. single. person. Working at the intersection of art and social change, Body Freedom For Every(Body) is a multifaceted art activation celebrating and addressing issues of reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and queer liberation that will tour nationwide throughout 2024 seeking to broaden awareness and generate action.
Acting as a teaser for what is to come, this multi-pronged activation and collaboration emerged as a response to a relentless wave of attacks on reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare. Given the specific context of the 2024 edition of SXSW, the activation leveraged the festivals platform to have a wider reach, recognizing the power that art can have to galvanize the public. It specifically aimed to call out Big Tech’s complicity in the attack on body autonomies and role in fueling these attacks through invasive data collection and abortion information suppression, striving to fight for a digital landscape that is ethical and rooted in privacy, as well as laws that protect everyone’s right to live in their power and choice.
Coinciding with the first few days of the festival, the partnering organizations launched a campaign presenting bright, large-scale typographic calls-to-action produced by Project for Empty Space in collaboration with Plan C, Fight for the Future, and designer Chantal Fischzang. It included graphics on Big Tech’s abortion surveillance and censorship, artworks from the Body Freedoms program, and a variety of past For Freedoms billboards speaking to related issues. Mobile billboard trucks circulated around Austin on a route trafficked by Big Tech attendees, Health and Tech conferences, and additional points of focus including the Blanton Museum of Art, the Texas Capitol, Hotels patronized by SXSW attendees, and the Future Front House. In collaboration with the Texas art collective Essentials Creative, the curated artwork and messages were also projected in various central locations in downtown Austin and SXSW gathering locations, including the Line Hotel and the Austin Convention Center .
Artworks and For Freedoms commissioned billboards presented include artists David Antonio Cruz, Amaryllis R. Flowers, Eric Hart Jr., Aurora James, Marilyn Minter, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Zhaleh Phillips, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Thank God for Abortion, and Jasmine Wahi. Originally commissioned by For Freedoms during the previous 2020 election season, the billboards on display focused on the new four freedoms: listening, healing, justice, and awakening. In the lead up to this year’s election, For Freedoms continues to encourage and promote the creative use of one’s voice, one’s body, one’s mind, and ultimately one’s vote. Still as relevant as when they were commissioned, the presented billboards focused on what it would look like if advertising, like art, asked questions instead of answering them to create new ways of thinking and talking about contemporary civil issues in America.
ABOUT THE PARTNERS
Fight for the Future is a digital rights organization working towards a world in which technology is a force for liberation— not oppression. fightforthefuture.org
For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that centers art as a catalyst for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action.
forfreedoms.org
Plan C is an information resource on direct access to abortion pills and safe self-managed abortion options, from any state in the US. plancpills.orgplancpills.org
Led by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol, Project for Empty Space (PES) is a multifaceted arts organization in downtown Newark, NJ, and downtown Manhattan, NY. PES is a woman-run, femme-powered, People of the Global Majority/BIPOC, Queer, and unapologetically radical ecosystem for creatives. Today, PES provides safe, equitable spaces for artistic innovation and complex public engagement by supporting artists whose work is oriented toward social discourse. Our programs lean towards discourses that have been historically and systemically erased such as marginality, inequity, and visibility. In our efforts to support socially-oriented artists, we maintain a commitment to holding space for radical future-making. www.projectforemptyspace.org
PES’ 2024 program Body Freedom For Every(Body) mobile art exhibition will travel across the country, partnering with nationwide organizations to present artists and artwork centering on body autonomy. The Body Freedom campaign identity was created in collaboration with designer Chantal Fischzang. bodyfreedomforeverybody.org
Women on Web provides safe abortion pill access by mail globally. Request Mifepristone and Misoprostol abortion pills online.
Womenonweb.org
