The "Fe(r) i dones" conference, organised by the Office of Religious Affairs (OAR) in collaboration with the Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Pedralbes, will be held from June 29 to July 6. Under the subtitle “Communities as agents of change”, the conference seeks to explore and debate the ways in which women of different beliefs and convictions organise themselves and act in the community, always bearing in mind the desire to raise awareness of and appreciation for the role of women in different convictions and beliefs.
The second edition boasts many new features. For instance, the conference will take place over more days and there are more venues and activity formats than before, which, from an intercultural, feminist and accessible perspective, still seeks to attract all kinds of audiences through different forms of expression other than academic speeches. Jenabou Dembaga also joins the curatorship of the conference, alongside the curator of the previous edition, Montse Castellà.
“Fe(r) i dones. Communities as agents of change”
The “Fe(r) i dones” conference returns to the city of Barcelona, with the first edition being held last October with a desire to raise awareness and appreciation of the role of women in the various religious and spiritual convictions, beliefs and traditions. It is foreseen for these conferences to be held on an annual basis and for them to deal with the two axes of women and religion/spirituality, but for each edition to focus on a third specific topic.
This diversity of axes seeks to demonstrate that women can talk about issues of interest to religious communities, beyond talking about women themselves.
In 2022, the conference will focus on the topic of “Communities as agents of change”. In other words, how women’s communities organise themselves and act in the community and spiritual sphere with a transformative perspective. While the first edition focused on how sacred texts, ritual practices and religious and spiritual transmission are understood and experienced from the perspectives of women in different traditions (you can see the video summary for the conference here and the article here), this year we wanted to introduce a new community perspective. We want to shine a light on the need, expressed and shared by women believers, to live one’s faith and beliefs within the community, and how women’s sisterhood relationships create a framework in which they can grow as individuals and be recognised. We also want to highlight the work carried out on a daily basis by women of different faiths in order to promote equality between women and men, the fight against gender inequality and violence and discrimination against women, and the defence of their political, economic and social rights.
As in the first edition, the aim is to give pre-eminence to the opinions of the participating women and to let their voices and reflections be the ones that mark the development of the conference and its main conclusions. The aim is not, therefore, for the international speakers to set the narrative, but to gather and expand on the conclusions and reflections that have emerged from the Barcelona communities themselves.
Co-curatorship: Montse Castellà Olivé and Jenabou Dembaga Susoko
Montse Castellà i Olivé was the curator of the first edition of the conference. She is a translator and editor of Buddhist texts, author of numerous articles on women and spiritual traditions, co-founder and vice-president of the Catalan Coordinator of Buddhist Bodies, president of Sakyadhita Spain and AUDIR and member of the Advisory Council for Religious Diversity of the Generalitat de Catalunya. She herself told us, in an interview she gave a few months ago, that “the need to apply the gender perspective in the religious and spiritual field is evident” and that the conference represents a clear opportunity and seeks “to explore the relationship between women and spirituality; to encourage dialogue; and to give recognition to the female reality, which is often invisible within the same religious traditions”.
Jenabou Dembaga Susoko, who participated in the first edition of the conference, has been added to the co-curatorship. She is a Muslim, Afro-descendant, Afro-feminist and anti-racist activist, sociologist, educator and Soninke researcher. Her activism focuses on the analysis of Islamophobia and the living conditions of Afro-descendant communities in Spain, particularly with regards to gender issues, the Soninke population and their diaspora from western Africa, and the feminist movements in this area. In an article (catalan) posted on the Catalunya Religió website, Dembaga makes the case that women are “totally invisible, as if they have no capacity for independence and criticism of the world around them”. For her, “feminism does not take into account the fact that gender is not the only axis of inequality that runs through women and makes invisible other axes that intersect with it, such as race”. For this reason, she claims that “instead of feminism, it would be more appropriate to talk of feminisms, in plural”.
A more open, accessible and pluralistic conference
The 2021 conference took place on 7 and 8 October and was attended by the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, who said in the opening ceremony that the conference “would help Barcelona to move towards becoming an intercultural, fair and feminist city”. The two-day conference consisted of round-table discussions, three workshops, guided tours of the Monastery of Pedralbes, a conversation with Teresa Forcades, Lama Tsondru and Asma Lamrabet and a closing ceremony with the musical duo Tarta Relena and a reading of texts by Marta Millà. You can watch the video summary here.
This year, the conference will take place over the course of eight days (29 June to 6 July) and will include various activities over different days and times. This expanded format is intended to facilitate the participation and attendance of citizens and members of religious and spiritual communities. Likewise, and following this line, the conferences have been relocated and the programme of activities will take place in different venues and districts of the city. The conference will begin with the opening ceremony, which is due to be held on Wednesday 29 June at the Centre de Vida Comunitària de la Trinitat Vella. Various decentralised activities will take place over the course of the following days, both in physical and virtual spaces, and the Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Pedralbes will host the closing day events.
The conference has been designed with different activity formats that will combine spaces for reflection with more participatory and experience-based activities (such as workshops and guided tours), without overlooking the artistic sphere. The aim is to give space to different forms of expression beyond academic discourses, with a view to breaking down barriers in order to reach a wider audience. It will also take into account the presence of audiences of different ages, and will incorporate young women as role models as well as activities conceived for children. The conference seeks to attract people interested in women’s issues and feminism, as well as people interested in inter-religious dialogue and religious communities themselves. The conference will invite internationally-renowned female role models for believers from different religious traditions, while fostering the participation of local religious communities. It also seeks to make room for virtual communities which, since digitalisation and particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, have gained momentum and have positioned themselves as spaces for debate and reflection. In order to do so, several live events featuring leading women from the field of spirituality will be held on social media platforms.
Why “Fe(r) i dones”?
Equity between women and men —in other words, the struggle against gender inequalities and violence and discrimination towards women, as well as the defence of their political, economic and social rights —is one of the Barcelona City Council’s key goals. Including the feminist and intercultural perspective in a cross-cutting way is the responsibility of all areas of the Barcelona City Council and all residents of the city; and this also includes religious and spiritual traditions. The objective of the OAR has been to design a conference aimed at visualising the role of women in different convictions and spiritualities, as believers and with an active role in the day-to-day life of religious entities, as well as to contribute to the advancement of gender equality within the different convictions and spiritual beliefs.
Several activities have preceded these conferences: in 2019 the OAR and the Monastery of Pedralbes organised “Women and religions: spirituality as a meeting point”, four closed-door meetings between 25 Barcelona-based women faithful to different religious traditions, which ended with a closing event in November of the same year. Two editions of the cycle “Female figures in religious traditions” took place in 2020 and 2021, where women of different faiths presented outstanding female figures linked to their faith.
The diversity of the women taking part, in the current sessions and in previous projects, is a reflection of today’s Barcelona: a big city with a plurality of religions, confessions and convictions. There are over 980 religious communities and organisations in the city from 28 different traditions, which include thousands of worshippers, many of whom are women. No two women believers are the same: women from ancestral traditions or more recent beliefs, believers since birth or converts; they speak dozens of languages and organise themselves in very different ways, among other diversities. We are speaking of doctrinal, linguistic, cultural and social differences, as well as ways of experiencing spirituality. This internal and external plurality paints a modern picture of Barcelona: thriving and heterogeneous.