themanifesto

We live in a strange time for love. Finding one another has never been so easy, and meeting one another has rarely been so difficult. Meeting has become a marketplace, the other person a profile, connection a transaction ended with a swipe of the thumb. For women who love women, this time has another sharp edge: rights we thought secure are being rolled back in countries that had won them, hateful speech is becoming commonplace, and every woman knows what it can still sometimes cost to love openly.

Beneath this lies a deeper need, and it is immense: a need for connection between women. Many have learnt to see other women as rivals, mirrors in which to compare themselves, rarely as allies. Many women who love women live far apart, with nowhere to recognise themselves in one another, and carry alone questions that would be gentler to share. To connect is to undo what our times teach us: to recreate bonds between women that owe nothing to competition or the marketplace.

In response, there are two gestures. One is to protest; it is necessary, and others carry it forward with courage. The other is to establish: patiently to build places where another way of living becomes ordinary. delicious/mischievous was born of this latter gesture. It is not another statement. It is a place.

Foucault called these real places where the order of the outside world is suspended heterotopias. In ours, what changes above all is the way we are looked at. We are no longer watched, sized up, assessed: we appear, which means we are received by others as we present ourselves. In our eyes, this is the most fundamental freedom: before having rights, we need a place to exist in the eyes of others. Like any true game, these places draw a circle within which different rules apply, freely agreed to, and that is where their magic comes from.

This is what makes delicious/mischievous a feminist project — not what it proclaims, but what it makes possible. A room of one's own, made collective: a place women give one another, where no one looks at them from outside.

This place is also a laboratory: a laboratory of sensory experience. Before it referred to art, the word aesthetics referred to knowledge gained through the senses; that is what we cultivate. At the heart of our spaces live three questions, which each woman asks herself: what does it mean — for me — to be a woman? to be a woman who loves women? to connect with another woman? We do not settle them through theory: we explore them through listening, movement, silence and another woman's presence. Being a woman here is neither an essence to rediscover nor a model to embody, but a living question, which each woman inhabits through her own history. Loving women is not a box to tick: the words used to express it change from one generation to the next, and lives always overflow words. We offer no answers, because no answer given in advance has ever set anyone free. A question held with care, shared between women, opens up more than a certainty.

delicious/mischievous is a work by artists whose material is the relationship itself. For too long, our encounters have taken place in back rooms, at night, in lowered voices. We want them to take place in the light, in exceptional places, composed as one composes a musical score. Beauty is not a luxury for lives kept on the margins: it is what they have been deprived of for longest. The work does not hang on a wall. It happens between people, and when they leave, it continues within them.

There is also an inner demand in this project. It is not a belief: delicious/mischievous professes none. It is a discipline of attention — slowing down enough for the other person to appear — and a trust in joy. Spinoza showed that joy increases our capacity to act, sadness diminishes it, and any power that seeks to diminish our lives feeds on our sad passions. A woman who has tasted, even for an afternoon, the joy of being received as she is becomes less easily diminished. This is our way of being political.

The word sapphic comes from a woman poet of Lesbos who, according to tradition, gathered women around her for song and poetry. Twenty-six centuries later, fragments are all we have left of her. Our culture has long been passed down this way: through fragments, through places that existed and then disappeared, through stories that went untold. We want the opposite: a culture that is passed on, forms that others can take up, a house that outlives those who founded it.

That is why our community is distributed, without a centre. What has a centre can be closed with a single gesture; what lives in its entirety within every circle does not go out.

And here our time offers an opportunity no other has had. For a long time, a form like ours depended entirely on the women who sustained it: when they became exhausted, the place closed and the knowledge was lost. The tools of our time, above all artificial intelligence, make it possible to pass on an entire way of doing things — a voice, a beauty, a framework, an art of holding space — without diminishing it, from one city to another and from one woman to another. This is what makes a new kind of movement possible, in the sense of an artistic movement: it has no centre, it blossoms wherever women decide to bring it to life. What is possible for us is possible for others, and other movements of connection can emerge in this way. This promise has a condition that we regard as inseparable from it: technology serves the encounter, it never replaces it, and nothing that commits a person is entrusted to a machine.

For us, a refuge is not a place to hide. It is a place you leave feeling freer.

The woman who signs this text founded delicious/mischievous. The house now belongs to those who bring it to life.