Women tend to take special care of their relationships with one another. Yet until the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s few accounts of friendship’s importance for women existed. Building on this revaluation of women’s affectionate bonds, this podcast explores friendship as a vital force in feminist organising, community-building, and practices of mutual care.
The podcast explores feminist understandings of friendship as a plural space of interaction through which women have found mediation between themselves and the public domain. It reflects on how bonds of friendship nurture acts of alliance, resistance, and reciprocity, in which participants both listen and feel heard, see and are seen.
Recorded at the end of year marked by Covid-19, during which many people have felt isolated and anxious, “Nothing worth doing is done alone” reconsiders the importance of sharing and holding space, collective thinking and reading. It also celebrates the sheer pleasure of being together.

“Nothing Worth Doing is Done Alone” was commissioned by Annette Hans, Marie Kuhn, and Anne Meerpohl as part of See U th3re - Dialogue between Windows, a 2020-2021 collaboration between Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and HFBK Hamburg (the Hamburg art school) on visibility, friendship, feminism, organization and care.

Concept: Helena Reckitt and Sabrina Fuller
Editing and Composition: Sabrina Fuller

Contributors include regular Feminist Duration Reading Group participants and collaborators as well as people who have hosted recent meetings within institutional and domestic settings. Also featured are excerpts from recordings of FDRG sessions at the South London Gallery and Hypatia Trust in Penzance.

The podcast’s name comes from “Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” a 2019 interview with Mariame Kaba by Eve L Ewing, referenced in the contribution by Lucy Lopez

Podcast References
Joan Anim-Addo, “Activist-mothers maybe, sisters surely? Black British feminism, absence and transformation,” Feminist Review, no.108 black british feminisms (2014): 44-60.
Khairani Barokka, Indigenous Species (London: Tilted Axis Press, 2016).
Svetlana Boym, “Scenography of Friendship: Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and anchovy paste,” Cabinet, Winter, Issue 36 Friendship (Winter 2009–2010) https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/36/boym.php
Adriana Cavarero, “On the Outskirts of Milan,” in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1997), 55-66.
Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro, “Politica and Pratica politica,” Critica Marxista, no 3-4 (May-August 1992), 3-4.
Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps (London: Book Works, 2014), https://celinecondorelli.eu/text/the-company-she-keeps/
Céline Condorelli, “Notes on Friendship”, Mousse 32 (February 2012), 222 -227.
Eve L Ewing, “Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” Adi Magazine, Domestic Dissonance, (Autumn 2019), https://adimagazine.com/articles/mariame-kaba-everything-worthwhile-is-done-with- other-people/
Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, the not again issue, (January 2016), http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-Theory
Johanna Hedva, “Get Well Soon!” (2020), https://getwellsoon.labr.io/
Taey Iohe, Care for Collective Curatorial Practice, https://taey.com/ccc
Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung, The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, HD Video 16:9, single channel. 72 minutes. Colour / B&W, 2010
Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, “More Women Than Men,” in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, eds. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 110-11.
Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Socio-Symbolic Practice, trans. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press, 1990), 30-31.
Naomi, Petra, Jane, Julie, Rachel, Kate, Jane, Lucy, and Nicole, “Finding Each Other at School;” in Spare Rib Reader, ed. Marsha Rowe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 595

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33344