Creative Women’s Week Showcase
International Women’s Day happens every year on March 8 when women around the world unite to celebrate themselves. It was first officially recognized by the UN in 1977 and has continued to be celebrated since then.
The Goldsmiths MCCS Community celebrated by presenting a showcase of creative work by women at Goldsmiths University on their Instagram page.
The idea was developed by second-year media students and community leaders Charlotte and Delia, who believed it would be a great opportunity to have creative students get involved. Charlotte explained that Goldsmiths University has a big population of women, and the celebration was a perfect opportunity to not only attract followers to the MCCS Community page but also to celebrate the female community at Goldsmiths. ‘I just wanted people to feel like they could get involved’, says Charlotte. ‘The whole idea was to have something with no right or wrong answers. Everything and anything fit.’ Delia added that being away from campus made her miss seeing creative projects at university. ‘The showcase created some space to celebrate both women as artists and as subjects of art. Most of the projects we shared mean a lot to me personally since they challenge patriarchal views and demand liberating women’, she says.
Most importantly, the creative showcase allowed people to see the work of talented students of Goldsmiths University. I spoke to a couple of them to learn more of what’s behind their work.
Day 1: Hannah’s short film ‘That’s my body and I’ve had to modify it to reflect who I am’
Hannah is a filmmaker drawn to character-led documentaries that speak to wider societal issues. As Hannah explains, many of her films are concerned with the intersection of body and social politics, exploring themes around gender and sexuality. ‘I started out working for the Teddy Award, the queer film prize at the Berlinale, before making my own films. My work has screened at the UK film festivals and this documentary was released by the Huffington Post at the start of the year’, she says.
Hannah deeply questions the celebration of women’s day: ‘I'm not sure one day a year is enough to celebrate the abundance of women's movements across the globe’, she says. But Hannah believes ‘it’s a designated time to amplify women's voices and issues that are going unheard - and now more than ever that must involve prioritising the voices of queer women, women of colour and women living with disabilities.’
For the creative showcase, Hannah submitted a short documentary telling the story of a young non-binary person called Isaac, going through the process of gender transition and top surgery. ‘I hope it shows in the film that the relationship I formed with Isaac and their partner Vi was both trusting and caring’, explains Hannah. The young filmmaker also claims that there is a lot of negative representation surrounding the topic of transgender identification. ‘I wanted to try and make a documentary that gave an insight into the experience of transitioning through the celebratory lens of drag’, she says. Hannah hopes that the documentary will reach the hearts of people who are going through similar experiences as Isaac did. ‘What had begun as a film about gender dysphoria and body positivity, increasingly became a film about being the importance of visibility and recognition as a non-binary person’, she explains.
Day 4: Anna Walker’s ‘Addicted to Glamour’
Anna is a first-year Media and Communications student and one of the student community leaders. To her, Women’s day signifies how much the world has progressed in terms of women’s rights and independence.
Anna’s source of inspiration was a Russian photographer’s Danil Golovkin’s work that shows the dark side of the fashion industry. The piece she presented was a collection of pictures portraying a woman having pieces of jewellery in her nose and her mouth to signify an addiction to glamour. Anna explains this kind of addiction can eventually lead to actual drug addiction, and she aims to teach people about it. She mentions that the artwork she presented on the showcase means a lot to her as it was the first piece of work that she was proud of. ‘I think the images highlight an issue of an addiction to glamour which is not talked about between women’, says Anna.
To see the other creative projects from International Women's Day and more, follow the MCCS page on Instagram!