FOR WHOM ?
We target organisations of the cultural and creative sectors of all sizes, including micro-organisations and small-sized organisations, and from different countries that actively work to develop initiatives and solutions for a greater gender equality in the artistic and cultural sector.
WHAT DO WE OFFER ?
Three break-out rooms will be proposed, each one built on a specific question/subject related to gender equality. Each participant will be invited to choose and contribute to one topic of discussion.
The number of participants will be limited to around 10-15 per group.
nb : we limit registration to one persone per organization
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(Registrations are closed for this group - max number reached) #GROUP 1 – Supporting career development for women, gender minorities in culture and arts
What levers can we raise to support and improve careers development for women and gender minorities?
In some EU countries, an equal or even higher share of students, enrolled in arts programmes at higher education institutions, are women. However, men still tend to outnumber women in important creative positions in the cultural and creative sector throughout Europe. It means that due to professional barriers and societal pressures – for instance, potential expert bias in proposal evaluation processes in public funding calls or prevailing sexist stereotypes that some artistic fields are more suitable for men – women leave cultural professions or face challenges in reaching higher positions and better recognition. Becoming an artist and staying one is even a more acute problem for women with socially vulnerable backgrounds, so the issue of intersectional discrimination should be addressed as well. Therefore, in this group we are going to discuss the main obstacles that women artists face in different stages of their professional development and to think of potential ways to support them in their careers.
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#GROUP 2 – For a better recognition of the artistic contribution of women and gender minorities in the arts
What levers can we pull to document, preserve the artistic works (both historic and contemporary) of women and gender minorities in Europe, while making them visible and accessible ?
Despite notable progress, artistic works created by women and gender minorities continue to be underrepresented in today's artistic programs in Europe, including in the fields of music, cinema, performing arts, or literature. Works created by women and gender minorities have long been hidden and undervalued for historical, cultural, or sociological reasons, resulting in a lack of representation, reference and model for programmers, artists, and audiences today.
In classical music, for example, we know that there is a vast corpus of works composed by women, but the scores are not always available, edited, and therefore neither accessible nor recorded. In the visual arts, the contribution of women artists to the history of art has long been ignored.
To ensure better representation of women’s creations and narratives in the European cultural heritage and to recognize their contribution to arts, a joint and collective European effort must be undertaken.
Therefore, in this group we are going to discuss what would be the needed initiatives / actions to enrich European art history with a more gender-equal perspective? How to produce information on women artists and their works at an European scale? How to document, index them, while ensuring their circulation?
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#GROUP 3 – Gender equality in the context of audience development
How to think strategically in art creation and distribution and how to create and deliver participartory feminist art to different social groups?
Although we use the word audience as a general term, we should be aware that under that term we have a number of social groups with different perceptions of art, perceptions based on different identit(y)ies: gender, race, class, nationality, education, age, religion, sexual orientation, political awareness...
audience development opens the questions of WHO is creating, WHAT is creating (what kind of narrative and message), for WHOM is it being created and WHY is it creating that story (expected impact). Today, according to general statistics, we have mostly middle-class or upper-class white men as the creators of patriarchal narratives and middle-class and upper-class white women as the audience for art (men prefer to watch football and sports). Therefore, the main challenges for audience development in the context of gender equality are the development of male audiences and the accessibility of art to various socially marginalized female groups, and especially the development of male and female audiences for feminist narratives and approach to art. That's for audience development on a quantitative level, on a qualitative level the main challenge is how to develop critical and analytical thinking about art among different audiences and their ability to actively participate in art, in order to overcome consumerism of the patriarchal cultural model.
