Woodpecker Projects – förlag

THE MINAJ BOOK is a soft-cover book with 152 pages and writings about and around the American rapper Nicki Minaj. In a new body of work presented in this book, one of Woodpecker’s own folks, Ditte Ejlerskov, investigates feminism and the gaze of the white middle-class pop consumer, with American rapper Nicki Minaj as the focal point. Minaj has climbed to the top of a male-dominated business and, in the artist’s view, critiques sexuality, power relations, racial stereotypes and patriarchal hierarchies through her acts and lyrics. In order to convey a deeper understanding of Minaj’s unconventional feminist methods, THE MINAJ BOOK unpacks the contemporary mainstream through a body of work which appropriates the rapper’s aesthetics and lyrics. The book endeavors to highlight the gap between pop culture’s feminist efforts and an academic feminism. Primarily via the act of painting, Ejlerskov aims to support the rapper in the mission of spelling out, enhancing and superimposing loaded images. She reuses Minaj’s method of challenging race and gender stereotypes. But since the artist is a white European middle-class consumer and not the Afro-American producer of the material, the focus of the show is twisted. As well as exploring elements of Minaj’s logic, Ejlerskov also explores her own consumption, her gaze, her body, her appropriation, and even her own role as an art practitioner.

Efterklang/Reverberation is a reconstruction of Henricson’s childhood microcosm in which references to the child, its games and its way of looking at the world unfold. Where the past solely exists as fragments, insinuations, grand tales and incomplete testimonies. These data, facts, despite being interpreted, contribute to the story. Henricson returns to the playgrounds in the beach forest and along the coast, fully aware of how hard it is to capture the elusive image of himself as a child. However, locations have an ability to preserve a piece of life – finding himself on location, he once again experiences the rattling of the leaves and the light, and the colours become clearer and deeper when he rediscovers the imagination and playfulness of the past.

The publication MAKING VISIBLE by Maj Hasager is the extended version of the film project We will meet in the blind spot, which takes its point of departure from the architecture in and around the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR) area in Rome. We will meet in the blind spot is intended as a document of stories and voices that are often lacking in the discussion on migration, both in an Italian context as well as within a broader European perspective. Through encounters with a local Filipino community that is centred on a church in EUR, stories and voices were revealed and the project departs from their personal accounts. MAKING VISIBLE consists of writings and interviews by Thom Donovan, Francesco Innamorati, Maj Hasager, Silvia Litardi, Karen Mette Fog Pedersen, Lorenzo Romito and Alina Serban. The EUR was built during the fascist rule and was meant to be the site of the World Exposition in 1942, in addition to being a celebration of the 20-year jubilee for fascism in Italy. The World Expo of '42 never took place due to WWII, and the area intended as Mussolini"s "Third Rome" wasn"t completed until the 1960s - though not in the shape the utopian project was given from the onset.