Ženska glavo
Maria Belic

Measures: 11 x 38 cm

This zine walks along my ongoing project about withdrawal, about retreating. The material inside the zine consists of a number of portraits from a larger collection of “heads”. In their original form, they are portraits drawn with felt-tip pen on Post-Its. Drawn by women who stayed within the structure of Swedish labor immigration for up to 60 years. They have drawn them after the end of the working day for their last three months before retirement. Including my own mother and some of the women she was placed with in an Eva home, as it was called, to work at the Cloetta factory. As with my father, she came to Sweden from former Yugoslavia in the 60s as labor immigration. Like many others, she wasn’t entirely meant to stay, but she had a family and the later civil war changed plans and means of envisioning. What interests me in this zine is to, through an artistic process and a social practice, get closer to a chapter in labor history, hardly and never listened to or written about. To contribute to an archive
and discussion. In my mother tongue Ženska glavo is used as a curse word used to disparage someone, in eng. You head of a woman. Glava has also the double meaning of head and chapter.

In that sense, the zine consists of 24 heads, thus 24 lived chapters.
(Propuh, pa da.), in eng. Cross winds, of course. The project is part of wanting to approach intersectional experiences about working life, about having to withdraw, retreat to another state, what awaits, about the withdrawal in relation to class and socio-economic structures, as well as structures around the boundaries of the feminine the head. This in a format of
multiplicity and byrochratic materials as paper, staples, Post-Its, stamp and a pen, that also carries the function of remeberence. Three parts stapled as an accordion, a musical instrument, playing
the sound of this chorus.