rachel walker-konno

sMother the Earth: stuck between the fool, the hermit & memento mori (2023)

Four wall hangings: mixed textile (tufting, embroidery, crochet) and ceramics

Babies have become complicated beings within the context of the current climate crisis. The latest war on women’s bodies is being led by capitalists as a deflective-fake-fix for climate change. Rather than condemning the reproductive and caring labour that has been taken for granted by capitalists, I believe that we must focus our economy on care, replacing economic growth and profit as the main goal.  The central piece is the manifesto-quilt (ceramic, crochet and embroidery) putting care central and this is flanked by the two warning-carpets (tufted and embroidered) inspired by medieval and tarot card imageries.

This piece was exhibited during Labours of Love at Treehouse NDSM in Nov-Dec 2023.

My Feminist Economy:
cooking up a rebellion (2022)

Performance / Video / Ceramic Installation

I dreamed up 10 feminist economic principles after reading theories by feminists as Shiva, Federici, Fraser and Battacharya. The performance is structured around ten ceramic pieces, each representing a feminist economic principle. During the performance I offer myself as a medium through which the principles are shared with an audience, who together create a pasta pesto and their new world manifesto. Through this piece I bring to life ideas that live mainly in academic texts for audiences to make them their own. This work is available as video solo performance and as group performance. My Feminist Economy: cooking up a rebellion was performed during Momentum at Treehouse, NDSM in 2022.

Murmuration of Mothers: talismans for our seeds (2023)

Workshop / Video Installation

I’m a witch
stitch, gossip, bitch
tapping the matrilinial ancestry well
I’m casting a new eco-nomic story spell

Oh Moyra, Oh O’Donnell, Oh Donegal

Communining my murmeration of mothers 
carrying our babes
conjuring magic futures for them and others
Kneading baby talismans
for a feminist rereading
Together we swarm
feeding thoughtless bodies of neo-liberal evil to the worms

A tomb for what was 
A womb for what will be

It seems we’re surrounded by banality
persistently, an evil of thoughtlessness 
in this mess since women laid with the devil
The witch hunts beconning 
the system with which we’re now reckoning
racism, extractivism, misogny, neo-liberalism
Evils from which we cannot hide
for our faith in this system festers inside

SO BRING IN THE WORMS
Compost capitalism!
Fly my pretties!
Take humanities’ dregs waste and dead
from us for your daily bread
squirm, turn, worm this toil
and cast out our precious soil

The infinity of life from seed to bud
to seed playing out in your feces
1000 years for an inch of topsoil
human, humus, humility
We bow in gratitude to your fertility 

Care in Transition (2021)

Performance / Blanket Fort

Participants are led silently through a blanket fort that creates four quadrants. In each quadrant, the audience is then met with a new story of care in transition and objects with which to take collective action. Arranging flowers for an elder’s final days on earth, balancing an egg for a mother dealing with the loss of a child and washing each other’s hands for a woman seeking safety wanting to be seen.

This installation and performance was shown at Collective Cure in ISO, Amsterdam in 2021.

Collective Story Weft (2022)

Installation

Visitors were asked to think along with how to bring Moyra’s (the goddess of a feminist economy) vision to life with the following instructions:

“Weave together a collective story of art’s role in imagining alternatives and building a feminist economy. Choose a weft question strip that speaks to you. Write your answer to the question on this strip. Weave your story through the collective warp.”

Installation created for Si.Si.Spex at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam in 2022.

This is the collective story that was woven:

My main non-human teacher is time
Art would belong to all of us (the commons) if no system were ever created
An art space makes me feel joy when I can engage
An art space makes me feel joy when freedom for room is there
I walked into that art space and felt instantly cared for when people approached me and started a conversation
What I do to comfort myself when feeling fear is I lie in my bed and find comfort in a book
Art would belong to all of us (the commons) if we embraced it
An art space makes me feel joy when they would give me more money
My main non-human teacher is the moon and the trees
Being an artist and having a family can go together if the art clashes with the family a lot
What I think we need to unlearn in order to be free to imagine is nothing has an essence, everything is process
To imagine alternatives to our current economy we need disruption to create new openings
What I do to comfort myself when feeling fear is tell myself that I am safe, be curious about the fear and comfort myself by making tea
When I want to connect to nature or other species I take mushrooms and join their space/activity
I am grateful for the privilege of being born in Holland and going to Art School
When I want to connect to nature or other species I SIT WATCH LISTEN BREATH
My main non-human teacher is my cat Dima
I think the reward for labours of love (such as creating art of caring for family) should be kindness, understanding, time
I think the reward for labours of love (such as creating art of caring for family) should be space, time, love, good food and a warm bed
I am grateful for being alive 😊
If there was a rule against the private ownership of art then there still will be private owners
To imagine alternatives to our current economy we need to protect and create more playgrounds for us to experiment
I walked into that artspace and felt instantly cared for when I could recognise myself (felt understood)
My favourite room in my house is my bedroom because I feel safe and home there
What I think we need to unlearn in order to be free to imagine is that you’re not expected to stick to the path you’re on
To imagine alternatives to our current economy we need to listen to our heart and speak it out loud
My favourite room in my house is my room because it’s mine
What I do to comfort myself when feeling fear is breathe

UNFOLD: Audience/ Performer/Lens (After Dan Graham) (2020)

Performance 

Re-enacting Dan Graham’s Mirror Audience through Instagram. First audience could watch me describe what I was doing on Instagram live, while watching me live-live too. Then I invited the audience to go live too, creating a never-ending number of action-reactions and lives/ live-lives.

This was performed at the Lima, Amsterdam in January 2020.

Beyoncé Made Me Do It (2020)

Three Performances / Video Installation

My starting point was appropriation and I was fascinated by Beyoncé and Jay Z, music royalty for my generation, appropriating actions by performance artists Pipilotti Rist and Marina Abramovic, as they are all huge sources of inspiration for myself too. 

So I studied their particular appropriation technique and appropriated that in three pieces:

Rachel copying Beyoncé copying Pipilotti Rist (link); Rachel copying Jay Z copying Marina Abramovic (link); Rachel and Sho copying Beyoncé and Jay Z (link).

2020

Manifesto Quilt (2023)

Ceramic / Textile

“Amidst the noise formed of threats, apocalypses and uncertainty causing a monotonous murmur in my brain of impossibility, I first heard your voice. As clear as day, you shared visions that were not new and complicated, but based on values – of which we had forgotten how important they are to us – such as care, pleasure, joy. A consideration that we are part of the natural world and its cycles, not separate. Slowing down and letting go of being productive all the time. That the world has always provided an abundance for us and that scarcity is a human invention.”

This quilted manifesto was created to celebrate and preach the vision of my (imagined) goddess of a feminist economy: Moyra.

More on this can be found in my book “Letters to Moyra.”