What the group wants the quilt to look like. Courtesy of FORCE.
The National Mall is regularly used a platform for groups to raise awareness about their projects, from the recent One Million Bones campaign to the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Activist-artist effort FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture hopes to bring a quilt of their own to D.C. to start an honest conversation about sexual violence and “promote a culture of consent.”
The group is trying to raise $25,000 to create the quilt through Kickstarter. With 11 days to go, they have raised just over $12,000.
Gifts for donations include a specially wrapped condom and a temporary tattoo that says either “No means no” or “I love consent.”
FORCE organizers Hannah Brancato and Rebecca Nagle, both artists who live in Baltimore, told DCist the quilt will be patched together with survivors’ stories, which are currently being collected. An online collection of the stories will be launched next week.
The installation is planned to take over the Mall next summer. “The idea is to create a physical space where the public can come and sit and eat and talk,” Brancato said. “And just give another example of what it means to create public and supportive space for survivors to heal.”
FORCE, which started in 2010, has created several public exhibitions. Their most famous may be the fake Victoria’s Secret underwear campaign, “Pink Loves Consent,” which was launched to coincide with the televised Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
Earlier this year, the group floated giant red letters in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that read, “I can’t forget what happened but no one else remembers.” FORCE also projected the phrase “Rape is rape,” as well as survivors’ stories, on a wall near the Capitol building last year during the presidential election.
While the Mall quilt will hopefully begin a dialogue about consent, Nagle and Brancato said it’s also meant to mobilize the action needed to create a permanent monument to survivors of rape and abuse. If created, the monument would serve as a symbol to “help our country imagine a day without rape,” Nagle said.
When asked why FORCE chose to use Kickstarter to fund the project, Nagle replied, “The whole project is crowdsourced,” from the way the stories are collected to the workshops that will take place to sew the quilt.
“What we would like for the Monument Quilt project to be is a lot of people contributing, so that people can have a personal relationship to it and can feel like they’re making this important thing happen,” Nagle added.
Brancato and Nagle said they were confident the quilt’s Kickstarter meeting would meets its goal.
