CURE Foundation Presents: 5th PitchWise – Festival of Women Arts BiH 2010
A recognized one of a kind and only women’s and feminist festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina – PitchWise (PW) is taking place for the fifth time this year and between September 16th and 19th 2010.
The original PitchWise invites you to come see films, exhibitions, performances, book promotions, workshops, discussions and concerts/parties all taking place in Sarajevo for this unique PitchWise state of feminist activism and arts 2010.
This year, we are focusing on feminisms present and awake in our country and the immediate region with a simultaneous display of global feminist movements and achievements. This year, PW program especially explores wellness of women both external and internal, and once again we aim to ensure care for intellectual, spiritual and physical health of women.
With artists and artwork from dozen countries and guests from over ten countries, PitchWise is once again sure to achieve its mission – get together with women from all walks of life and celebrate diversity, power and achievements of women. Up until now, the only festival of women arts in BiH hosted hundreds of artists and activists and has presented and produced a large number of artworks – video, sculpture, installation, paintings, performances, prose and poetry, music and other. Each artist and/or activist had addressed, questioned, transformed, and deconstructed identities, issues, relations through his/her unique artistic expression. We are happy to see addition to the thousands of guests and participants at PitchWise who travel from across the country, region and the world in order to partake in this global, yet local, feminist community event series.
Fifth PitchWise Festival of Women Arts kicks off with an opening of an exhibition of young women artists from BiH on Thursday, 16th of September 2010 at noon. The venue is MAK Gallery and the works present breaking taboos around women’s sexuality. PW presents Nina Hadžic, caricatures; Isidora Stamatovic, mixed technique; Nada Berberovic, photography””, Almedina Bajramovic, photography. (This exhibition will be open for the duration of the festival). The festival opening also features poetry reading by BiH poetess Ivona Jukić.
Another exhibition to kick off the festival is Sheroes, a display of close to fifty profiles of powerful women from all over the world – reaching back in time and present while covering all of Earth, displaying inspiring stories of women who persevered and continue to mobilize new generations of human rights defenders. Meet representatives from the world of literature to innovation and science, film, photography, ecology, peace, music and politics. Sheores exhibition is a research and production venture of the CURE Foundation and is created for PitchWise as part of the “Feminist Workshops Tour BiH 2010” CURE initiative.
There will be at least four thematic workshops for participants – all enabling empowerment and personal growth, and what marks the 2010 PW Workshops selection is the spiritual and physical health of women in everyday life.
A three day workshop entitled “Health of women with disabilities” led by Ivana Indin, Bojan Krivokapic, Svetlana Timotic and Jelena Zdravkovic from Serbia will focus on communication and women’s health. This workshop is being organized in cooperation with NGO “Light” and the Union of paraplegic persons and child paralysis of Federation BiH.
Lepa Mladenovic from Belgrade (Autonomous Women’s Center) runs a workshop called “Strong, Myself and Free” The work is focusing on young women participants and aims to discuss how to get to know our emotions and stand up to patriarchy. The aim is to learn violence imposed upon us just for being girls and women, learning to name it and verbalize it, to learn that in any moment we did the best we could to survive a particular situation. Women and girls do not like violence, and through this workshop we rid ourselves of patriarchy so that we can freely choose what it is we wish to feel in life.
Mediation is another workshop aiming at participants’ wellness: How to communicate with our inner being and enrich our daily life? All interested participants will walk through these and other steps of meditation with Ševko Bajic from Sarajevo. Participants will be able to get familiar with techniques of total relaxation which enables total physical and mental relaxation of the body, and also led meditation – technique of visualization that leads to stress release and the technique of auto analysis that helps a person define energy of negative feelings.
Aleksandra Nestorov from Belgrade runs another PW three day workshop, and this one is called “Documenting your action – basics of recording, editing and uploading of audio and video clips to the social network sites”. When the media is not able to cover your event, be ready to document and save your work and later enable other to get familiarized with our work. Contemporary technology has given us the possibility to create our own media through the internet and carry our message over to an endless number of addresses worldwide. Let’s use this opportunity to become more visible, available for the target group, to connect with the women in the whole world – women we can learn from and with whom we can share knowledge and information.
PitchWise Festival of Women Arts accents the fact that this is Election year in Bosnia and Herzegovina and how important it is to include and engage women in the public and political life of our country. The public debate “101 Reason Why Vote for Women” brings known and influential public life figures in order to discuss why they think it is important to vote for women at the October Elections. Young politicians from Serbia, Croatia and BiH will talk about “Women in political and public life” and share their experiences and visions on the importance of including women in decision making positions.
The program will showcase some movies from amazing production company Women Make Movies, Movies displaying various facets of lives of women, movies made by women, about women and intended for a diverse audience. Learn about one of the last matriarchal communities and the concept of “walking marriage” from a documentary Women’s Kingdom. Africa Rising is a powerful film story of a grassroots movement to end female genital mutilation. And, finally the film displaying women in hip hop and R’nB is portrayed in Say My Name.
There will also be presentation on the occasion of PW Film Festival with the topic “Women’s Video Activism” by Serbian activist Nataša Lambic.
As in earlier years, PW secures space for promoting feminist literature. Join us for the promotion of the book “If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution” by Jelena Ðordevic from Belgrade followed by an hour discussion with activist Sandra Ljubinkovic of the Anti Trafficking Center in Serbia with the topic of women’s wellness – how to nurture one’s health. With Jelena and Sandra, there will be room for laughter, inspiration, exchanging experiences and two way support in a space intended for participants only. All present can use this opportunity to reflect on their personal activism and ways in which to hear and listen to oneself, how to support oneself better, and all this so we can dance while the revolution is taking place!
Fifth festival of PitchWise invites you to join in on the discussion “Us, Victorian Women” and a book promotion of “Becoming a Woman” by Adriana Zaharijevic. One is neither born nor becomes a woman at some specific point in time. Being sex – one of the key metaphors of Becoming Woman – involves engagement, personal and collective, which terminates in death and in a certain symbolic sense perhaps not even then.
In continuing this session, Goran Lazic will present “Emancipation of Women Through Fashion” using photos and lecture and encompassing the historic period between the Industrial Revolution (end of 18th and the beginning of 19th century), through 20th century and to date. The accent of this session is on the critical attitude of the overall society and its treatment of women’s fashion and emancipation of women that was altogether reflected through, among other things, the changes in one’s wear.
Young theoretician Paula Petricevic from Kotor (Monte Negro) will have a lecture “The Sweet Pill of Anti-Feminism” depicting reasons for a demeaning connotation feminism has Monte Negro, and the very rare mention of it in the country’s public and media life are mostly limited to demonstrating how unnecessary feminism is today and legitimizing certain attitudes or conclusions for keeping one’s distance from it. The dominant attitudes for this social movement and cluster of theoretic directions is based on a primarily broadly displayed stereotype of feminism as a “NO-NO”, and this being clumsily tied in with European standards that we are approaching (at least formally), still does not stop “Circling round Europe”, obviously making a rare stop and one for a short period of time on the “Hilly Balkans” – especially its western region.
The monodrama „Tell me what to do” of author Nevenka Đurković will be performed by young artist Jovana Boljanić from BiH. The piece talks about the influence of others to form an opinion and personal viewpoints, and once we do it in a way others expect of us, there are some who judge the exact viewpoints and attitudes, thus confusing young people to grow up building and shaping their own identity/identities.
Night program at PitchWise Festival of Women Arts BiH 2010 is to play out at the Cinemas Sloga Club in Sarajevo. All lovers of great music are welcome to indulge to the sounds of Belgrade artist Bojana Bulatovic Bo, Djane Sense from Zagreb, young rapper and feminist activist Lejla Merdžanić – Eyah from Hrasnica, and the much loved band KillingJazzHardCoreBaby from Travnik.
Traditionally, PitchWise events are all free of charge and open to all, with prior signups for workshops only.
Welcome to the Fifth PitchWise Festival of Women Arts BiH!
