In its twenty years of existence, the City of Women Festival was curated by seven program directors (6 women and a man) and was created together with many other staff members. In the dossier, we publish interviews with directors who curated festival in socially and politically different periods and inside different cultural politics. Szczerski (2012) says that curating can be made in at least two different directions. The first is the socially and politically engaged direction, which uses or presents art to provoke social and political debates. The second insists on curating as an expertise in art— a curator does not preach but judge on taste. The interviews show that curating the City of Women festival mostly adopts the first direction, but does not avoid the second. None of the festivals were exclusively a personal project of a curator, but the program always expressed personal preferences and views. This is what differentiates festivals between themselves, even though they are based on the same program guidelines. We conceptualized questions for the interviews to explicate the impact curators had on the program through their choices of participating artists. We were particularly interested in how annual festivals integrated or responded to social realities; how these realities were politicized through the program and art practices; and especially what was the attitude towards gender and feminism because the fact that the festival aims to promote women in art is political by itself.
