This two-day festival unfolds within the collective exhibition Spaces for the 99%: Contemporary Slovak and Czech Spatial Practices, which presents artistic and interdisciplinary practices that expand how architecture engages with care, environment, and local context. Within this setting, the festival brings together practitioners, collectives, and organisers working with space as a shared, relational, and lived process.

Feminist spatial practices are not only about gender. As bell hooks writes, it is a movement to challenge interconnected forms of inequality and exclusion. Here, space becomes a way to think through these relations across bodies, species, and infrastructures. In Slovakia and across Central and Eastern Europe, where such approaches remain marginal, the festival creates a space for mutual learning, exchange, and interdisciplinary dialogue around care, inclusion, climate responsibility, inequalities, and the right to the city, to slowly build a shared language across different struggles.

The programme combines discursive, embodied, and material formats, chosen to enact rather than simply describe feminist spatial practice. It opens with a hybrid lecture, open to both on-site and online participants, and continues the next day with a critical walk that engages the city through attentive, situated observation. A discursive lunch conversation then takes feminist spatial practices as its central theme. The festival programme closes with a collaborative tapestry-making workshop, exploring textile as a carrier of experience, memory, and labour, followed by an accompanying programme featuring a lecture-performance by Norbert Kuki and the launch of the tranzit 20+ book.

The event welcomes students of architecture and fine arts, professionals across architecture, urbanism, and art, and the wider public interested in space, the city, and the quality of the living environment.

To attend the festival, please register in advance at lydia@spolka.cc by 5 October 2026, as capacity is limited. Let us know of any accessibility or inclusion needs when registering.

Registration is not needed for the evening programme on both days. Zoom link for the lecture will be added next week. Please only register for the Friday in-person programme happening during the day

Admission is free, and the festival will be held in English.

Program

Thursday 15 October 2026
18:00 Welcome. Lectures in hybrid format, open for online participation.

Friday 16 October 2026
10:00 Walk through the city with the lens of feminist spatial practices
12:30–14:00 Discursive lunch
14:00–16:30 Sowing Solidarity workshop
18:00 More than 20 years of tranzit.org: lecture-performance and “tranzit 20+” book presentation (accompanying programme)

Thursday, 15 October 2026
18:00 – 19:30 From the global to the local: Feminist Spatial Practices
➰hybrid lecture
The festival opens with a hybrid lecture, open to both on-site and online participation. It sets the frame for the whole festival, moving from the global feminist spatial practices community to the local, Bratislava-based conversation that follows over the next day. The lecture is given by members of the Feminist Spatial Practices (FSP) International Solidarity community, a global network of architects, artists, designers, and scholars working towards intersectional gender equity in the built environment, who connect practitioners across geographies and time through workshops, lecture series, and an interactive online archive.

Friday, 16 October 2026
10:00 – 12:00 Walking the city through a Feminist Spatial Practices lens

➰walk
The walk reads the city through situated observation. It traces how care, informality, and everyday use shape urban space, often outside the frame of formal planning. The walk is co-led by Defne Saysel, architect and member of the Feminist Spatial Practicesnetwork who has been mapping feminist and community-based spatial initiatives, together with Spolka, a local non-profit studio of architecture and sociology.

12:30 – 14:00 Discursive lunch
➰lunch with discussion
Around one table, eating and talking becomes a feminist method. The session draws on a lineage of feminist practice that treats shared meals as a way to open discursive space, from Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party to the collective taking place's Interstitial Breakfasts, turning lunch into a form of collective reflection where conversation, food, and presence carry equal weight. The lunch is hosted by Zuzana Tabačková, architect from Spolka and researcher at TU Berlin, and Lýdia Grešáková, sociologist from Spolka and PhD researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

14:00 – 16:30 Sowing Solidarity workshop
➰workshop
This closing session brings the two days together through tapestry and totem-making. Textile becomes a carrier of memory, care, and labour, as participants weave the festival's threads into one shared piece. The workshop is led by Katarína Onderková from the Very Slow Fashion practice, as part of a format shared across FSP festivals worldwide and credited to Feminist Spatial Practices.

18:00 – 19:00 More than 20 Years of tranzit.org
➰lecture-performance and tranzit 20+ book launch (accompanying programme)
The programme opens with a lecture-performance by artist Norbert Kuki, developed through his engagement with the tranzit.sk archive and exploring how Roma experience can be communicated through storytelling and micro-histories. It continues with the launch of the tranzit 20+ book. Editors Flóra Gadó and Borbála Soós present the publication through the lens of spatial practice, exploring how it creates spaces of dialogue, resistance, vulnerability, and transformation with performative readings of thematic excerpts with invited contributors together with the audience.

This project is part of the tranzit.org network, of which tranzit.sk is a member.
ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit.org.
This project is supported by the Bratislava City Foundation.
The project has been kindly supported by Goethe-Institut Slovakia.
The project was created with the support of TU Berlin, FG Städtebau und Siedlungswesenand the Občina collective.
Media partners: Artalk.info, Flash Art CZ & SK, Kapitál, GoOut.net