Collectiva Inanna was born in the hot summer of 2020 out of a collaboration between four women from the Eastern Mediterranean. We came together to explore our experiences of womanhood, displacement and identity having been invited by Home4Cooperation – an NGO located in the buffer zone of Nicosia – to produce a performance that we staged on both sides of the divide during their Buffer Fringe Festival in December 2020. The performance is called ‘Taking Back the Booty.’
We found the process of working together, and with the festival team, so enriching, enlightening and enlivening that we decided to continue our collective exploration of the roles, responsibilities and being of women beyond this initiative and year. This is the impetus behind the formation of Collectiva Inanna, a community of curious creatives who seek to collaboratively explore the world through a feminine lens.
We take our name from the Sumerian goddess who was the foundation and inspiration behind future female deities Ishtar, Astarte, Venus and Aphrodite.
The goddess Inanna is associated with beauty, sex, war, justice and political power. Her legacy ran for centuries and expanded to regions far beyond her origins in Mesopotamia. She wasn’t relegated to the sidelines, as women have since been, but was admired, feared and worshipped for her strength and power. Through collective action with women globally, we want to celebrate and bring back that power to women and societies across the Eastern Mediterranean, where patriarchy and other destructive ideologies continue to loom unashamedly like low clouds. Hence the title of our first production: Taking Back the Booty. Through it we sought to decolonize our psyches and reclaim that which has been looted from us as women.
