Street art fiesta returns to eastern DR Congo city, with women under spotlight
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Loading... - Fabrice Bekono
- 26 Aug 2022
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After a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hadisi Urban Festival, the annual fiesta celebrating street art, returned to Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with female artists and women's empowerment under the spotlight ahead of the International Women's Day this year.
From March 4 to 6, dancers, musicians, graffiti artists across the central African country gathered in Goma, turning the city's sidewalks, backstreets and alleys into stages, in hopes of breaking down the fourth wall separating them from the audience.
Under the theme of "Rev'elles" (a wordplay literally meaning "women's awakening"), organizers of this year's festival decided to go further by putting gender equality under the spotlight and thus breaking the glass ceiling for African women as a whole.
According to Amina Murhebwa, one of the festival's organizers, this year's event should be featured with young talented women, who tend to be under-appreciated across the country and the world, as a manifesto that women are equally capable as men in any discipline.
"We have decided for this third edition of this festival to place women at the center of the attention because we want to prove a point that women are as capable as men," she said. The Hadisi Urban Festival started in March 2019.
For Aline Karhonde, a Congolese dancer, the world is her stage, even if that means swinging her body to the music in front of passing motorists and passersby on a sidewalk, without acoustics or stage lighting. Read More...
