Proposal * Manifesto * Soul Writing  for our upcoming project

 

 

 

 

We have realized that our diversity is our strength. Our public presence has become more powerful and colorful as we have included more women from different backgrounds. Our sisters are soul people with strong visions. Our main approach has been to manifest solidarity and empowerment through providing space for women to discover, establish and express their own path - may it be rooted in culture, arts, business or education. We have wanted to fill the existing gender gap by supporting our active role and asserting our presence in the front rows of the public scene. In the end SisteRRiot has evolved to be an online platform through which we found a way to make art, question, debate and provoke. Supporting each other on this path made us louder and more active than ever!

 

However, if we would make an evaluation after the pandemic, the conclusion would be that this project did not have the expected effect yet. First, as SisteRRiot we were all separated physically during the lockdown and experienced a harsh backlash in our way of collaboration due to the lack of social interaction and propinquity.  For our purposes, digital collaboration calls for even bigger organizational and personal efforts whilst still working less efficiently in crisis moments. As SisteRRiot is founded in direct interaction, we want to maintain the  focus on it.

    The pandemic inflicted backlash and helped us to realize a more general issue as well. Digital media and social media content and usage are not that well established in Hungary as in Western European countries with a longer existing and more grounded online media culture. Women do reach out less to digital platforms in order to exchange and support each other. The trust in solidarity and independent resources is not as strong also because of the domination of mass media. People, notably women, here are scared to have a strong political voice in public, thus online. Alternatives and critical resources, if existing, are focusing on their specific target groups and are usually not known or accessible to a wider public. That's why it was insufficient to try to reach out to women digitally rather than physically. 

 

Based on our personal and collective experience, digital failure was a crucial issue during the pandemic in Hungary. This reality made us step back and think twice regarding our purpose and mission. Here, in this country we really need to put down our roots more strongly; particularly regarding women’s rights and women empowerment. Hungary experiences  only just a  spring of feminism and empowering movements, whose flowering is impaired by strong neo-conservatism politics. The traditional role of women is enforced through public image. Hungary country of segregation concerning gender, nationalities, ethnicities and class. We want to offer more diversified images and raise the self - image and pride of women.
 

 

How can we solve this gap? How could we meet, exchange, share knowledge, power and the spark? We feel an urgent need to find a physical space which guarantees us safety but is at the same time public.  The solidarity between us could have only been established in the present through being in the same physical space. Therefore, we believe that in order to expand our culture of solidarity to a wider group of individuals and communities, face-to-face interaction is a basic necessity.

 

 The notion of public space has radically changed during and the right after the pandemic. The spheres which we were used to define as public became unsafe or even disappeared and the realms which were used to be private were forced to serve as public space. The dichotomy between private and public either disappeared or merged together. This is how the idea of Mobile Sisterhood- Incubatora was born. The need for a third space which is not stable, but mobile was really clear for us. A mobile public space is going to make us stronger, independent and accessible without being dependent on any power decisions. The Mobile Sisterhood would give us the means to reclaim public space and channel it into a realm where finally civil society would benefit from it.

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Stay tuned! More details and infos are comming soon ....