Maria Guggenbichler: DJ Workshop for Women

With DJ Troya Modet

The workshops are open to women of all ages, genders and persuasions, and participation is free.

Since 2013, the DJ Workshops for Women are hosted every month in a side room of the artist-run brewery Butcher’s Tears in Amsterdam by the curator, cultural producer and radio host Amal Alhaag (Africa is Hot, Red Light Radio, Amsterdam) and the artist Maria Guggenbichler (DJ Boris Becker).

The DJ Workshops for Women provide a safe space for women to learn, play, experiment and exchange about music, passion, technology, software and skills – which is a conversation we seem to hardly have, not amongst ourselves and neither with our male colleagues. During each workshop a female DJ (or DJ collective) shares her knowledge, love, experience and trajectory with and through music, DJ-ing and the music scene.

The workshops aim to offer alternatives to the self-fashioning, intentionally inaccessible and intimidating myth of the ‘DJ-god‘, and make DJ-ing approachable for women. In the face of fundamental under-representation and, more often than not, merely stereotypical visibility of women in music and culture, our roles are confined to passivity and silence, as audience, discreet recipients, groupies, muses, and so forth. The workshops want to provide and encourage alternative opportunity for self-determined, joyful, visible and thriving action of women.

“We cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls.”

Jack Halberstam, The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons, in: Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Event sponsored by