It all started in 1998 in Beirut, by meeting Wadad Halwani, president of the Committee of families of missing persons in Lebanon. Meeting a person, beautiful, strong, dignified. Meeting also with the reality of enforced disappearance that was almost reduced for us to Latin American dictatorial contexts of 70s and 80s, and the image of the white scarf of the Plaza of May Mothers This realization has led us to do more work on enforced disappearance as a weapon of oppression and terror, to discover that, from Argentina to Chechnya, it was used throughout the world and that everywhere, people close to the missing, mostly women, got up and organized to claim their loved ones and refuse barbarism.
For many years, during the Festival, the artists come from different cultural, social and political contexts were invited to share their experiences for a “Resisting Cultures” day when the questions about the relationship between art and politics, and creative projects led by women were central. Registration of enforced disappearance and forms of struggle invented by women close to victims in the heart of the Festival was obvious..
At the 5thVoix De Femmes Festival in April 2000, fourteen Lebanese, Moroccan, Argentinean, Chilean, Mexican, Sahrawi, Kurdish, Turkish, Yugoslav, Senegalese and Belgian Rwanda women created the “Global Network of mothers solidarity, wives, sisters, daughters, close to abducted and missing persons. ”
In 2002, at the 6th Festival, other women from Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iran, Casamance, Burkina Faso and Algeria joined the founders of this network. It became the place of questioning Festival, one of the essential search for a just and dignified life, particularly through the possibilities of artistic creation linked to action and political reflection.
Nine years of work and six meetings have resulted in actions of solidarity with members of the network, in theatrical and pictorial creations based on Forced Disappearance, and the inauguration in Liege, at the 8th Festival in December 2007, of a place with trees in tribute to victims of enforced disappearance, called “The Memory of Trees”.