Dear Bubbledays team!

Clever and apt words have already been written by users about Female Friday at the LINZ AG Bubbledays 2018 on Facebook. What is clear from the comments is that people came to Female Friday with an expectation. This expectation was apparently not only to see lots of female musicians, but also to be offered a female main act.

A Female Friday where the main act is a male band that apparently shone with sexist lyrics "The earth is a vagina sometimes beautiful sometimes dirty but it fulfills its purpose" is not something that should be accepted without comment. It doesn't help that it was planned differently beforehand anyway. What happens at the end and what remains is what we should be talking about. And that could have been communicated to the audience. With a statement that Female Friday unfortunately cannot stand up to the wording it has chosen for this or that reason

This is a recurring problem that Fiftitu%, the networking center for women* in art and culture, has been dealing with for 20 years. It's about "an offensive stage presence for musicians - and not just a renewed restriction to gender."[1] The line-ups don't have to exclusively represent women*, but must be programmed in such a way that women* are also visible at peak time. Because although women* outnumber men* in the music industry, they are booked less. It is important to strengthen networks, create space for collaborations and raise awareness.

FIFTITU% has been working on queer-feminist booking strategies in the music industry for a long time and also offers workshops and collaborations on the topic. We can also put you in touch with promoters who have experience in this area. There are also local concepts that work, such as "The Empress Club". Invite a track and organize the booking together, ... It's certainly not unwise not to try to solve everything on your own, but to seek to work together with experts

An open-air event in the middle of Linz, such as Bubbledays, also has the opportunity to contribute to the representation of diverse gender identities in the music industry due to the enormous number of visitors. We hope that in 2019 we will experience a festival where the quota no longer needs to be discussed and we can finally talk about music. To conclude with Yasmo & die Klangkantine's words: "We are here, we are in solidarity and we are many!"

With feminist greetings
Team FIFTITU%

[1] Brandmayr, Tanja: Feral is the empress, in: Versorgerin (2013), #100
Image: Screenshot from http://www.bubbledays.at/de/95/IDobj=92