The year 2022 marks the fifth edition of Black History Month in Belgium. After four successful editions, this year’s focus will be on ‘the power of assembly.’ Building on the mapping research work of Graciela Dutrieue, Black History Month Belgium will be holding an Open Forum to discuss and reflect on the past, present and future of Black feminist thought.

During this evening, we will explore how human personhood has been constructed, and how it can be decentered and made to expand into different ways of seeing and being. The rational, universal individual has violently suppressed mutable persons existing at the intersection of multiple beings, as well as collective and interspecies ways of building knowledge that persist in the sciences, though often unrecognized. Underneath the steamroller of modernity, we will discover many possibilities for a more convivial future.

In the film industry gender equality is far from achieved. For this evening, three women delve into their work. With their North African and Middle Eastern film excerpts, they will discuss gender stereotyping, cultural taboos and their own experience as a director or film programmer.

During this evening programme, several Belgian persons and collectives with an intersectional and feminist vision will take the floor. They will talk about their discourse, about the new terminology that makes it possible to focus on marginalised living conditions and about the resistance they experience from other feminist movements – mainly from white feminists.

Gender quota have been introduced in politics in many European countries. But are quota sufficient to create gender equality? The political agenda, communication and staff are not aligned with a broad swathe of women and their ideological and intersectional diversity. This leads to a lack of trust and legitimacy, and unstable relationships between groups of women and their political institutions and politicians. In times of crisis, the informal social relationships of white men continue to have the upper hand.