Art.Feminist contributor, Emma K, spoke to feminist artivist, Michaela Spiegel about her subversive practice and the Centre Pompadour—the only feminist creative residency in Europe—which she founded.
Michaela Spiegel is a feminist artivist. Her multidisciplinary practice (which spans painting, installation and video art) critically interrogates notions of womanhood and femininity—concepts which “cost her sleepless nights.”
For Michaela, “One isn’t born a feminist and one isn’t born a woman, as we know, but it’s still easier to become a feminist than to become a woman. So I became a feminist.” Her works are playful, subversive and at times provocative, as exemplified by Simone and the Fifth and Sixth Sex or her Collection of Marie Bonaparte’s Pubic Hair. As Michaela asserts, we must “bundle all our strength against patriarchy with a lot of fun, a lot of sexuality and a lot of freedom.” Recently, her practice has centred on pastel floral arrangements interspersed with subtle vulvar forms reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Born in Vienna in 1963, Michaela moved to Paris to train as a painter at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the 1990s. She lived in the Marais at the height of the AIDS pandemic; as she tells me, “my friends were dying like flies all around me.” This experience heightened her awareness of injustice, spurring her to join the Austrian socialist party. Michaela began filming interviews with eminent Viennese women, such as the first Secretary of State for Women in Austria. In her own words, “I wanted to make people know the difference between conservative feminism, which in my eyes doesn’t exist, and socialist feminism.” Michaela has been pursuing this work ever since, creating an impressive archive of video interviews on various conceptions of feminism.
In 2012, Michaela moved to the French countryside, where she restored an old château in a village of the Baie de la Somme for the next three years. Realising her dream of a painter’s studio—a Virginia Woolfe-esque “room of one’s own,” Michaela decided to open it up for other fellow feminist artists to assemble from across the world. She advertised it online and immediately garnered a very vivid response. Michaela thus founded the Centre Pompadour, the only feminist creative residency in Europe. “Centre Pompadour” is a word play feminising the Centre Pompidou, the illustrious French modern and contemporary art museum. While Georges Pompidou was a French President, Madame de Pompadour was the influential mistress of King Louis XV of France, as well as a tastemaker, patron of leading artists and intellectuals and avid printmaker. Since 2017, Michaela has welcomed over eighty artists and academics to the Centre. She refers to the Centre Pompadour as a “neofeminist laboratory.”
With a shared attic atelier, a darkroom, a music room, a library brimming with books on women’s art, history and literature, a writer’s pavilion, a sprawling garden and “exquisite pug paraphernalia,” the Centre Pompadour provides a unique space for feminist exchange; it is “an energy think tank and creative thrill area.” As Michaela writes, “At CENTRE POMPADOUR we detox from patriarchal authoritarian structures and mechanisms, not with austerity or abstinence but with irony, art and alertness. Cheers!” In the morning, residents do a feminist reading of the news, as “the best knowledge comes out of the breakfast table.” In the afternoon, they hold discussion rounds around feminist issues in the garden, organise feminist film viewings or present their own work and practice to each other. Residents are also invited to partake in the Centre’s “My Personal Feminism” interview series. The creatives-in-residency programme runs from July through September, from a minimum of three weeks to a maximum of two months. It is open to creative professionals and researchers in the fields of art history, feminist theory or gender studies. Last summer, the Centre Pompadour also inaugurated a reading residency for anyone with a keen interest in feminist literature. Email your research project (or reading list) to centre.pompadour@gmail.com to apply for the 2024 programme!
