ARWUM
ARWUM - Artistic Research on Women's Urban Mobilities explores women’s everyday experiences of sustainable mobility in three European cities—Tallinn, Porto, and Dublin—through artistic research.
By bringing together urban scholars, media and communication experts, artists, and filmmakers, it seeks to foreground the often-invisible realities of women’s urban travel. These include navigating care responsibilities, managing menstrual health, and balancing personal commitments with professional aspirations—factors that deeply shape how and why women move through cities.
Despite women globally demonstrating more sustainable mobility patterns—such as greater reliance on walking and public transportation over car use—their specific needs and challenges remain largely ignored in urban planning. This invisibility contributes to ill-fitting timetables, insufficient care-related infrastructure, and diminished perceptions of well-being.
Adopting an interdisciplinary and gendered lens, this project offers an intimate view of what the shift toward climate-neutral and smart cities entails in everyday life. It centers on the lived realities of women who prioritize collective sustainability, even at personal cost, within urban environments increasingly impacted by extreme weather, energy instability, and geopolitical tension. Through this focus, the project will help found an international and interdisciplinary collaboration that fosters the creation of narratives and representations that illuminate the gendered dimensions of everyday commuting, as well as the challenges posed by the transition to carbon-neutral cities. The project’s centerpiece is an inaugural exhibition in Tallinn that will feature different artworks that translate these stories into accessible and evocative forms. Through intimate narratives—such as women's experiences of cycling, female tram drivers' perspectives in Tallinn and Porto, and corresponding stories from Dublin—the exhibition invites audiences to reimagine urban futures that are not only smart and sustainable, but also contribute to gender equality.
The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners, including cultural and social geographer Maria Lindmäe (Tallinn University), filmmaker and media scholar Vanessa Ribeiro-Rodrigues (Lusófona University), artist-researcher Aleksandra Ianchenko (Tallinn University), visual artist Martina Mullaney (IADT), and film director Carlos Lesmes (BFM). ARWUM will also involve final-year students from the Degree in Communication Sciences at Lusófona University through the creation of a web documentary.