The AWID Forum takes place every 4 years in different cities around the world. This year it was organized in Costa do Sauípe, in Salvador, with the theme Feminist Futures: Building Collective Power for Rights and Justice. Its objectives were:
• Celebrate the achievements of the last 20 years achieved by various social movements and critically analyze the learnings we can take forward
• Assess our current reality to identify opportunities and threats regarding the promotion of the rights of women and other oppressed groups
• Seek strategies to strengthen solidarity and collective power among the various movements
• Inspire, energize and renew strength and purpose
About 1800 feminists from around the world attended the event.
The role of the ELAS Fund
The ELAS Fund was part of the Forum's planning committee and embarked on a two-year journey to collectively reflect on the current state of the feminist struggle and create the Forum's programming.
The planning committee and programming reflected the diversity of feminist movements. Intersectionality was central to the organizers, who placed themselves under the auspices of Audre Lorde: "There is no single-theme struggle, because we don't live single-theme lives." The program and the participants represented this diversity, of black women and the Black Feminisms, LGBQs, trans women, and intersex people forum for Indigenous women, farmers, and women with disabilities, etc. It also reflected the variety of causes (rights of domestic workers, prostitutes, environmental activism, sexual and reproductive rights, etc.) and forms of activism (theater, direct action, lobbying, unions, etc.). In designing the programming, the goal was to represent feminisms through the multiplicity of their causes. The Forum's logo sought to represent this: how the intersection of all threads constructs the canvas of feminism.
However, if the causes can be singular, the identities are not. We are únic@s, unique and múltipl@s at the same time. In this sense, the logo also represents each and every one of us: how our intersectional identities build the ever-changing canvas that we are. This encounter also entailed recognizing the unequal power dynamics between these identities, the privileges that accompany some of them, and the active work required to deconstruct them. This was planned through the creation of separate spaces and intersectional sessions on decolonizing feminisms.
Amalia Fischer, general coordinator of the ELAS Fund, fondly recalled how these singularities and multiplicities came together during Saturday's party, with women from so many countries and feminist causes talking, drinking and dancing together, doing politics in a different way.
O que aprendemos durante as sessões