The Womanifesto Way Anthology: Introduction

By Editorial Collective

Please note that this publication is currently under review and will be subject to changes.

Womanifesto is a women-centred arts collective that began in Thailand in 1995. Three decades of inclusive projects and creative reinventions have seen Womanifesto work with more than 150 collaborators from 45 countries.

The ethos of this diverse and dispersed group of artists, sometimes called the 'Womanifesto way', celebrates hospitality, communal activity and togetherness, focusing on the position of women and the wealth of women’s knowledge. Womanifesto aims to strengthen connections between artists internationally and engage local communities while promoting new and emerging forms of artistic expression.  

Through exhibitions, workshops, artists’ residencies, and other in-person and online programmes, Womanifesto links practitioners from Thailand with regional and international artists, highlighting shared cultures and establishing fresh exchanges. Many voices, and many ways of making and knowing are cherished and championed.

This publication aims to share and reflect the Womanifesto way. It intends to document and discuss Womanifesto’s past activities, while also suggesting possibilities for ongoing and future creative collaborations.  

Consistent with Womanifesto’s ethos of inclusiveness and hospitality, this publication features a wide variety of contributions, far exceeding those found in a typical monograph or scholarly volume. Conventional, scholarly essays appear alongside more experimental and unconventional texts, as well as images, and audiovisual contributions. English, Thai, and other languages commingle. 

This publication represents a unique experiment in collaborative digital publishing. Rather than following traditional academic models, the editorial collective has worked together to create content that emerges from and serves the Womanifesto community itself. The process has been as important as the outcome—workshops, conversations, and collaborative exchanges have shaped not only what stories are told, but how they are presented. This approach ensures that the many voices within Womanifesto's network are not just represented but actively involved in shaping their own histories and narratives.

The creation of this anthology also reflects Womanifesto's remarkable ability to adapt and evolve. From the original biennial exhibitions in Bangkok and farm-based workshops, to digital collaborations in the early 2000s and during more recent global disruptions, Womanifesto has consistently found new ways to maintain meaningful connections across distances and differences. This publication continues that tradition of creative adaptation, using digital tools not simply to display archival materials, but to reveal them among their networks of relations, creating new possibilities for encounter, reflection, and ongoing collaboration. 'The Womanifesto Way' stands as both a documentation of past achievements and a platform for future creative exchanges.

In this publication, personal and critical reflections on Womanifesto’s activities are shared alongside curated links to Womanifesto’s archive of [check number] materials, digitised by Asia Art Archive. Our intention here is to enable readers and users of this publication to plot their own paths through the many stories shared here, discovering the threads between the people (‘makers’), their projects (‘makings’), and the formation of their histories (‘musings’), drawing their own conclusions about the strengths and limitations, significance and possibilities—past and future—of Womanifesto.

To facilitate exploration of this rich material, this publication presents a network of content that can be navigated in several ways:  

• A nodal interface allows you to interact with the Womanifesto network as a whole. Each point on this node map corresponds to a different maker, making or musing, the related page presenting information and materials, as well links to related nodes.  
• A facet and filter panel enables you to create subsets of nodes by content types as well as other categories such as media types, languages, dates, and tags.
• An index page presents this same information not as a network, but as a set of pages, organised into three categories.  
• A selection of the material presented digitally in this publication can also be compiled printable and saveable PDFs.  

This publication has been produced by an Editorial Collective comprising the founding members of Womanifesto as well as several other collaborators, listed below:

Editorial Collective: Dr Yvonne Low, Varsha Nair, Dr Roger Nelson, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Nitaya Ueareeworakul and Marni Williams

Power Digital Publications Team: Marni Williams, Lachlan Thompson, Dr Katrina Grant

Website development: Isobel Andrews, Yang Li, Ian McCrabb, and Mufeng Niu of Systemik Solutions.