Art and Time | Media

A Conversation with Silvia Federici

In this conversation Silvia Federici presents key ideas from her works on feminist materialism, while a following discussion links her ideas to feminist film and art through analysis of works exploring community, loss, and resistance in contemporary cinema.

24.6.2026, 17h (CEST) | as part of the seminar 15–19h
Online via Zoom

Seminar 15-19 pm
Arthouse Cinema Film Academy | Future Art Lab
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1
1030 Vienna

This event is part of »Counter-Images | Counter-Narratives: Feminist Aesthetics in Art and Cinema« – a seminar and interdisciplinary dialogue between the Vienna Film Academy and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Prof. Dr. Christine Lang / Prof. Constanze Ruhm).

This is a blended event: Silvia Federici will be present via Zoom while Constanze Ruhm, Christine Lang and the audience will be present at the Arthousekino at Film Academy.

Philosopher, activist and author Silvia Federici will present key arguments from her seminal publications Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004) and Re-enchanting the World. Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2019).  Two foundational texts for a feminist-materialist analysis of body, labour, reproduction and the destruction of the commons, these works form the basis of her presentation – which will also relate their arguments to contemporary conditions of oppression, dispossession and enclosure. Federici’s work traces the long history of how women’s bodies, communal lands and reproductive labour have been systematically seized, controlled and rendered invisible in the service of capitalist accumulation – a history whose structures, she argues, are far from over.

In the conversation that follows, Christine Lang and Constanze Ruhm will connect Federici’s thinking to the seminar’s central themes of feminist aesthetics, counter-images and counter-narratives in film and art, as well as discussing two films that engage with those themes in their own distinctive ways: Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice (2018) and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest (2024) – two works that speak of community, loss, and the fragile but persistent forms of resistance to the logics of accumulation and enclosure.

 

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, theorist, historian, and political philosopher who currently teaches at Hofstra University. She is widely recognized for her contributions to feminist theory and women’s history, particularly in relation to the intersections of gender, labor, colonialism, and the development of capitalism. In 1972, she was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective, which launched the Wages for Housework campaign. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the cofounders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and education systems. Her decades of research and political organizing accompanies a long list of publications on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education, culture, international politics, and the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons. Federici’s steadfast commitment to these issues resounds in her focus on autonomy and her emphasis on the power of what she calls self-reproducing movements as a challenge to capitalism through the construction of new social relations. Her major works include Caliban and the Witch, Re-enchanting the World, Patriarchy of the Wage, and Beyond the Periphery of the Skin.