Womenstate is a project about women, for women, by women

The project was initiated by Wroclaw-based actress Agnieszka Bresler, who has been since 2012 co-creating and co-leading the theatrical projects of Jubilo Foundation, all aimed at people in danger of social exclusion.

Womenstate is an attempt of creating a space for the beauty of excluded women, beauty that is often being rejected by the women themselves, overlooked by their environment, hidden and in need of discovery and exploration. The project expresses an immediate need of recognising and showing the excluded woman in the contemporary perspective of women’s empowerment, equality and emancipation.

Womenstate wants to raise those topics in a direct contact and artistic dialogue with the most incapacitated groups of women: women suffering from depression, domestic violence victims, female prisoners and homeless women. These meetings are taking place in their own spaces, in the places of social exclusion: prisons, homeless shelters and community care houses.

2016: pilot project

In 2016 Womenstate won the 4th edition of the Competition for NGO and social cooperatives organised by Artist-in- Residence Programme A-i-R Wro. Agnieszka invited London-based Italian theatre director Irene Ros to collaborate with her on Womenstate; as Irene has been actively experimenting and creating within the theme of gender equality and the role of a woman. Wroclaw-based photographer Magdalena Mądra participated as a guest artist.

Over the course of two weeks the artists led a series of meetings and workshops in two places – Female Detention Centre of the Penitentiary Prison No 1 in Wroclaw and Saint Brother Albert Shelter for Women and Mothers with Children. They presented the results of their work in a form of an artistic installation which took place on 4th December 2016 in Barbara.

Project was implemented in the framework of Artist-in- Residence Programme A-i- R Wro as a part of the European Capital of Culture Wroclaw 2016 programme. Artist-in- Residence Programme A-i- R is sunsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.

2017: WOMENSTATE

In response to the great interest generated during the pilot edition Jubilo Foundation decided to run a full-term version of the project in 2017. The project’s author invited several female artists to collaborate with her this year: theatre director Joanna Lewicka, dramatist Magdalena Mróz and photographer Paulina Anna Galanciak.

In July and August the artists led a series of meetings and workshops in four places – Female Detention Centre of the Penitentiary No 1 in Wroclaw, Penitentiary in Krzywaniec, Saint Brother Albert Shelter for Women and Mothers with Children and Opieka i Troska Foundation. Working with the mentees of those institutions will feed the artists in the process of creating an original script, inspired by the meetings and the exploration of the contemporary state of women. Presentations will take place in all those places from which the artists took their inspiration and held meetings. An open performative reading will take place on 19th November 2017 in Klub PROZA.

Subsidised by the National Centre for Culture under the programmed Kultura – Interwencje 2017.