Thirteenth PitchWise festival of women’s arts and activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina 2018!
CURE Foundation marks the thirteenth year of the festival of women’s arts and activism PitchWise, which starts on the 13th of September 2018, and lasts until the 16th of September 2018 in Sarajevo.
The festival has grown out of the need to take derelict and neglected areas and transform them for a meeting which will bring together socially engaged artists, activists, theorists, feminists and all others interested in women’s issues in BiH and the region.
Central topic of the thirteenth PitchWise festival is:
WITCHES’ BALL”FAIRY TALES AND FOLK SONGS“– Deconstruction of patriarchal norms
People’s beliefs have contributed to the fact that many believe that the number 13 brings bad luck (it is considered that the 13th guest at the Last supper betrayed Jesus, in Scandinavian mythology, an important dinner for the gods was interrupted by the 13th guest). Often the number 13 is also associated with witchcraft and witches.
The stories of witches, according to traditional beliefs, still cause shivers today, and the historical fact is that women who were accused of witchcraft were being tortured and burned at the stake in the most cruel ways possible. Identifying witches was followed by some “basic rules”, and some of them were: You are a woman; You are very poor/you cannot support yourself; You are very rich/you can support yourself; You have one or more friends – a group of unaccompanied women was a clear indicator of a meeting worshiping the devil; You’ve had an argument; You are very old or very young; You help women at birth; You have too many or too small number of children; You have behaved stubbornly or you have resisted; You have a birthmark; You have a non-marital partner; You have committed adultery; You were raped; You allowed a witch to live …
Ever since the Middle Ages, the “aspect of the female” has been associated with witches. Women who were independent and who wanted to make decisions independently, those who could financially support themselves without the help of a man, in short, women who did not fit into the imposed norms were considered witches. What are feminists today? Women who do not want to fit into the imposed patriarchal norms and advocate against them. Today, women around the world, due to patriarchal traditional customs, are daily exposed to the most severe forms of torture, mutilation, burning, cutting off parts of the body, rape, murder, and that happens only because they are women. Witch hunting is not over.
