Second Feminist Spaces workshop: 2nd Jul. 2019

Feminist Spaces hosts face-to-face workshops that bring people together with a range of diverse and allied individuals and projects. These workshops are by invitation only, in order to create safe(r) spaces in which to explore our lived experiences of occupying hostile environments and to articulate some of the opportunities and challenges of creating feminist spaces. We use this time to record and enable acts of resistance to hostile environments – through voice, creativity and action – in order to build a collaborative, capacity-releasing, feminist network.

Reflecting on our #feminisminaction, 2nd Jul. 2019

The Feminist Spaces network came back together on the 2nd of July 2019 to share their Feminist Spaces work so far. Our growing network of partners includes The Racial Justice Network (West Yorkshire), Women in Exile and Women Together (Kirklees), RAPAR (Manchester), the Women’s Media and Culture Organization (Sulaymaniyeh, Iraq), Hidden Voices (Kenya), and an emerging activist network in Botswana. 

We heard from Hidden Voices who had delivered  mental health sessions in two schools in Kenya looking at sexual assault and domestic abuse. Kani Kamil (kanikamil.com) presented artwork where she ​had worked with Women in Exile to facilitate four workshops supporting women refugees to talk about what inhibits/ supports them in their freedoms, forming an artwork created by sewing the statements – using thread or women’s own hair – in mini looms in different languages. Zenebu Hailu shared the work that she had done with Women Together that produced an art-exhibition, ‘Mirrors of Us’, bringing together stories of displaced experiences. And two young refugee women in RAPAR shared their photoethnography of their Manchester’s urban environment and their place within it. 

Lisa Luxx (@lisaluxx and lisaluxx.com), queer writer, performer, essayist and activist, joined us in our Feminist Space on the 2nd of July, 2019 for our second workshop. Lisa crafted a poem for Feminist Spaces based on the words from and stories told on the day. You can listen to Lisa’s performance of the poem, and read the poem, here.