World Wide Women – Female Musicians Crossing Borders and Building Futures

Our project focuses on female musicians around the world, in Bolivia, Japan, Mali, Senegal and Finland. The project combines research and artistic work; we study and support the agency of women in their own communities and in the globally connected music world. We are particularly interested in transcultural music-making and collaborations that cross cultural and musical borders. We investigate how female musicians combine femininity and musicianship, how they balance between expectations of their own communities and the possibilities offered by international musical networks, and what kinds of futures do they aim to build with their own activities.

The project builds on an ethnomusicological mode of research, where the close collaboration and building of mutual trust between researchers and musicians is central. It is therefore important that the researchers and musicians working in the project are women and mothers, and also the researchers have practical experiences of musicianship. The shared experiences of womanhood and musicianship is a common base that we use to build open interactions and deal with the power structures that define and separate women with different backgrounds. The theoretical approach of the project is based on viewpoints from intersectional feminism and the concepts of transculturation, decolonization and Afrofuturism. The working methods of the project participants combine practical music-making with methods of participatory ethnography: the research perspectives are used also as starting points for artistic work and the artistic work produces research materials.