The Forum opened with an invitation for us all to collectively celebrate our victories, acknowledge our wounds, and co-create the futures we aspire to.

The 13th AWID International Forum began on Thursday with an opening plenary to the tune of Bahian music, song and dance to honor Oxum, orisha of Brazilian hospitality, followed by inspiring presentations and questions posed by guest panelists on the topic of “our current realities.”

This is a story about the present, told as the past, from the gaze of the future. Imagine you have in your hands a knot, and the knot carries one story, about a person named Zaitun, who is trying to understand her world, and who wants to change it into something that is a little less ugly, a little less distorted, a little less painful.

The opening plenary of day three of the 13th International AWID Forum began with a shift in tone. Where the first two days of the Forum had focused on analyzing our current realities and radically disrupting and expanding our current movement frameworks, facilitators of the third opening plenary asked participants to do something different.

Feminist movements, like all social movements, are constantly evolving and shifting. The 13th AWID international Forum, which happens every three to four years and gathered the largest association of feminist organizations as well as non-member movements and collectives, was an opportunity to once again re-examine a living, breathing political, cultural and social phenomenon that has significantly evolved in a rapidly changing world.

After the last AWID Forum in 2012 and the four years of action, activism, and anticipation that followed, we are back together to forge our feminist futures. Here are some of the memorable moments that bring magic to this journey and meaning to our movements.

The AWID Forum was a time for celebration, reflection and creativity. That’s what you get when some 1800 feminists get together. But amidst the energy, the inspiration and the sleep deprivation, a serious process also took place.

From the moment we (#YAFDialogues) started structuring our session “Our Lived Realities: Voice of Young African Feminists”, my excitement for both the 13th AWID International Forum and the Black Feminisms Forum (BFF) started to grow. It kept growing taller with the funding I received from the AWID Access Fund, and it grew even bigger on the day I landed in Bahia, Brazil at Costa do Sauípe!

Reflections on the 13th International AWID Forum and its intersections with shrinking Spaces for Feminists, Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) and Solidarity.