Archive of City of Women: In Between Remembrance and Contemporary Feminist PraxisZlatović, Nataša (Avtor) Antić Gaber, Milica (Mentor) Bartulović, Alenka (Mentor) activismadvocacyaffectCity of Womencommunity-buildingcontemporary artsfeminist praxisfestivalgrassroots archiveNGOOffice for Women’s PoliticsSlovenia’s IndependenceThis thesis is the product of ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the feminist cultural and artistic organization City of Women (Mesto žensk), based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It situates the emergence of City of Women (1994) within the broader socio-political transformations following Slovenia’s independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Founded by the government’s Office for Women’s Politics, City of Women began at the highest institutional level, establishing itself through the International Festival of Contemporary Arts. Over time, organization’s activities expanded; today, the organization’s work includes a feminist library, publishing and production projects, feminist pedagogy, the creation of performance archive in the Web Museum, and the WoW feminist awards. In this sense, the research is based on archival fieldwork and analysis of the City of Women’s Archives (both material and digital), complemented by personal testimonies of individuals involved in the organization’s development. Theoretically, it is framed through scholarly discussions on community-based archives (Harris 2007; Cook 2002, 2011; Caswell and Cifor 2016; Caswell 2014, 2021), the archival turn in feminism (Burton 2005; Eichhorn 2013; Cifor and Wood 2017), and the affective turn in archival research (Cvetkovich 2003). In addition, these theories are complemented by debates on the importance of ephemeral materials (Munoz 1996; McDonald 2024) in reconstructing the organization’s development. I approach the archive as a process through which the evolution of City of Women is mirrored. This research follows organization’s development since it’s foundational years, with aim to address gaps in post-Yugoslavian case studies of NGO’s, to show potential of archives as source of reconstruction of its development, and contest materiality of archives with personal testimonies and affective relations. This contrast highlights how organization’s history emerges through material documents, and how it’s experienced individually. Finally, this approach shows how both material and affective relations within the archive are not contested but complementary resources for the reconstruction of the history of the City of Women.[N. Zlatović]20252025-10-04 07:16:19Magistrsko delo/naloga174550sl