Our project is for the greatest part already ended, but some of our collaborators will still be visiting Finland in 2024. We are also editing a collection of articles on the themes of the Women – Music – Futures symposium that took place last March.
At the end of last year, two articles on topics we have been discussing during the project, especially the collaborations across cultural borders, were published in the issue 2/2023 of Musiikin suunta.
The World Wide Women team presented the project publicly for the first time on November 13th 2021 in the Etnosoi! seminar ”Women, Music and the World.” At the seminar, the team members talked about their own projects and showed related video clips or played music. The presentations centered on female musicians and the crossing of different kinds of boundaries. The seminar gathered about 30 listeners into the Maijansali hall of the Central Library Oodi; their participation demonstrated the interest of the audience towards research on women’s musical life.
As a whole, the team’s presentations emphasized music’s great importance as a means of self-expression for women around the world. For many female musicians and their audiences, music is not just a “decoration” of everyday life, not just entertainment (although it can also be that), but musical activities give them a possibility for expressing a social stance, for encaging in activism and for creating visions of a better future.
Our team finally got to meet face to face in Helsinki! We had a meeting on a few hours on the terrace of Musiikkitalo and the meeting was truly inspiring! We discussed the themes that connect our subprojects and made some plans for the future.
There are a few events coming up already this year that we are participating in, for example the Etnosoi! Seminar at Oodi Library in November and the Finnish Conference of Cultural Studies in Joensuu in the beginning of December. See you there!