Mums@Work opens the exhibition 'Our story'

The exhibition, which includes photographs of the women who have participated in the project, can be visited until October 1 at the Espai Jove La Fontana in Barcelona

How do we tell ourselves? Why is it important to be portrayed? Are our voices heard? Through these questions, the women participating in the European project Mums@Work held a photography workshop. The result is the multimedia exhibition ‘Our story’, which is presented as a space for reflection and participation where the protagonists take an active role in all phases. Photographers and photographed, the participants are the creators and protagonists of the exhibition.

The exhibition was inaugurated on Wednesday and can be seen until October 1 at the Espai Jove La Fontana. Most of the workshop participants attended the event, to which they arrived smiling accompanied by their sons and daughters, as well as their mothers and friends. The coordinators of Mums@Work, Lara Rot and Belén Masi, explained the process of the project in Barcelona, in which almost 40 migrant women from different countries participated. Valentina Lambach, workshop leader together with Florencia Reolon and Consuelo Montecinos, but also producer and curator of the exhibition, explained the process of the photography workshop, which was carried out with the participants’ cell phones. With the desire to create community and also to tell their own story, the women took portraits of each other in groups of two or three people.

It is a multimedia exhibition, she added, since in addition to the images there are QR codes with which you can access the audios of the participants’ interviews. “In Arabic they tell something and in Spanish they tell different things, it is not strictly a translation,” Lambach specified. So, if someone knows both languages, they will know different parts of each story.

“We call these photos ‘The Story’ because they are personal images that each one chose to share”
Workshop leader, producer and curator of the exhibition ‘Our Story’, Valentina Lambach

In addition to the portraits of each other, the photographic composition features embroidery and photographs next to the main image. “We call these photos ‘The Story,’ because they are personal images that each one chose to share,” Lambach said. Toward the end of the exhibition there are also some portraits that the workshop participants took. Right next to it, you can see a collective embroidery that, as Belén Masi explained, was made over several days in the framework of March 8, with the advice of Consuelo Montecinos. “They chose meaningful words regarding what March 8 means in the world and on a personal level,” Masi detailed. The result has become a mural full of inspiring words: wisdom, rights, power…

To end the event, one of the participants, Guadalupe, explained that Mums@Work had become a space “with many lived experiences.” “We learned from each other: it was very important, it taught us how to manage our personal lives,” she concluded.

“We learned from each other: it was very important, it taught us how to manage ourselves personally”
Guadalupe, one of the participants of the photography workshop ‘Our Story’

Meeting of partner organizations in Barcelona

The exhibition was inaugurated in the framework of the visit of the project partners to Barcelona to celebrate the ‘transnational partners meeting’. The meeting served to share the progress of the different entities in the implementation of the project in their respective territories: from diagnosis, support and labor orientation to migrant mothers, relations with companies and work experience and next steps.

On the second day of the meeting, representatives of partner organizations were able to participate in a workshop on female genital mutilation (FGM) given by the Wassu Foundation. The workshop leader, Beatriz Escaño, explained the situation of FGM in the world, as well as the different types of FGM identified and the reasons that push some people to continue with this practice. The session generated debate on the use of language or the vision on some practices that have also been identified in some countries of the global north and ended with some recommendations for administrations, social agents, migrant communities or civil society.