A brief intro to The Women Council
Oh, the joy of thinking! It’s a wild thing, the human brain. The depths, the challenges, the freedom, the delight and the pain. Our brains and thoughts exist within a personal abyss of possibilities. From the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep, thoughts pilot our lives. And it’s at night that they run free without constraints, fully liberated by our consciousness or constructed beliefs of rationality.
I like to hang around in the midst of the potential of my thoughts. And even better, when they cross paths with others. When my thoughts are intertwined and engaged by other human beings and their very own view of the world, so that we create a mesh of combined possibilities. Suddenly, what I see within me is merged with what you see within you. These free thoughts are shaped in any form we wish for them to take, and they suddenly move from our brains to be embodied in the outside reality. The Women Council is a small world of its own, born in one of those moments.
For years, I’ve been examining the societal systems that we have constructed and by which we live our lives. I have tried to understand how these systems have been organised, why they were created and for whom they have been built. Many of my projects are results, or maybe just chains of thoughts, coming from these studies and they deal with the deep core of what it means to be human, together with others. The Women Council explores global governance systems and deconstructs current ideas of leadership and purpose. What would a new global council that gave voice to equality look like if we aimed at creating one at the same scale as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union (EU), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Group of Twenty (G20), and the International Criminal Court (ICC)?
As I write this early 2025, only 29 women are country leaders. Many of us are wondering what a world would look like if there was a more equal gender balance. But the wonder is possibly wrong and not about gender at all? What would a world look like that was led differently, might be a more sensible question. Last year the world spent 2.46 trillion USD on military investments while expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping was less than 0.6 per cent of that sum.
Within the freedom of my thoughts I’ve wondered, what would a world look like if there was a council at global level created and run by women with an agenda of care and generosity, of peace and equality? It is for sure a thought that holds a lot of power and hope. By sharing the artwork The Women Council, I wish to spark dialogues on what leadership means. And possibly it is within these dialogues, collective imaginations and collaborative actions, that new worlds are created.
