WONDER WOMEN is a contemporary art festival conceived by the Domus Artist Residency association, patronaged by the Municipality of Galatina, which has supported the Domus Artist Residency in all its cultural and social activities in the area for four years. The festival is also carried out with the support of FRAC Corsica, Kora - Contemporary Arts Center and the non profit French association Atelier Essenza.

The WONDER WOMEN festival, which will take place from July 24 to 26, 2025 in Galatina, carries a renewed ambition: to deconstruct patriarchal power dynamics through an eco-feminist approach. The project invites us to rethink the structures of oppression that exploit both natural resources and people assigned female, promoting governance models based on resource preservation, gender equality, and cooperation.

Power, from an ecofeminist perspective, must be reimagined not as domination, but as relationship. It is no longer about exercising control over others or the environment, but about cultivating forms of horizontal, distributed power, rooted in care, solidarity, cooperation, and interdependence. Women, in all their plurality, play a central role in this reinvention.

In this sense, ecofeminism doesn't merely critique: it proposes concrete alternatives. Community practices for managing common goods, networks of female solidarity, ecological agricultural cooperatives led by women, are all examples where another relationship to power is woven — a power that creates, connects and cares, rather than conquers, fragments and exploits.

We want to work on the question of power and potency.

"Power to" is a deeply political notion: it's not about imposing, but about making possible. It's an emancipatory power that allows everyone to reclaim their capacity for action, speech, and transformation. In ecofeminism, this power is inseparable from a relational vision of the world: it emerges from bonds, networks, cooperation — not from competition or domination.

At the same time, the notion of potency deserves particular attention. Where power is often situated in structures (legal, political, economic), potency resides in bodies, knowledge, affects, daily practices. It is lived, embodied. From this perspective, women — especially those marginalized by patriarchal and colonial structures — hold transformative potency, often underestimated, even repressed.

Thinking about "power to" and potency from an ecofeminist perspective also means taking into account experiences of vulnerability, marginalization, or trauma — particularly in situations of disability or violence suffered. Far from denying or erasing these realities, such an approach seeks to fully recognize them as political experiences, while refusing to reduce them to passivity or powerlessness. We want to give voice to these women who live with disability, who suffer from an ableist gaze and who, on the contrary, show through a crip-feminist approach that vulnerability is not the opposite of potency, but can be a condition for it.

We want to give voice to "peripheral voices," to analyze feminisms from the Global South and starting from Southern Italy. Voices coming from a western finis terrae, while they are at the center of contemporary challenges: climate crisis, resource depletion, rise of systemic violence. Our festival invites us to see in the potency of Southern women not an exception or heroic figure, but a model of radical transformation, where care, land, and connection become the new forms of the political.

Finally, it is essential, to think about feminist politics lucidly and radically, not to evade the question of the instrumentalization of feminism, nor that of women in power who do not challenge structures of domination, or even reinforce them. This forces us to interrogate the plurality (sometimes conflictual) of feminisms, and to question who speaks, on behalf of whom, and in whose interests.

The rise to power of female politicians from the right or far right (like Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, or certain conservative figures in Latin America or India) shows that being a woman is not enough to embody feminist politics. The power they exercise is therefore "power over," not "power to": vertical, exclusionary power that doesn't transform structures but reaffirms their hierarchies.

These dynamics also provoke conflicts between women themselves: between those who claim radical, critical, inclusive feminism, and those who distrust or oppose it in the name of tradition, faith, family, or nationalism. We see fracture lines appearing between feminists and non-feminists, but also between different feminist currents themselves — particularly around questions of class, origin, gender, work, sexuality, or political strategy.

These oppositions must not be denied or simplified. They reflect real power relations — economic, cultural, geographical — between women themselves. But they call for vigilance: when division between women is orchestrated by patriarchal or neoliberal systems, it serves to defuse potential solidarities and prevent cross-cutting coalitions.

Disagreements between women are not inherently a problem; it's their instrumentalization by patriarchal dynamics that makes them toxic. When feminism divides to the point of self-destruction, it offers patriarchy its greatest victory.

The Wonder Women festival – women in the plural aspires to unite women and feminisms around a complex reflection: not to smooth over differences, but to recognize them, understand them, and integrate them into a common, supportive, and political voice.