Geographies of a Soft Future…

There are places that feel designed for retreat, and then there are places that become laboratories for co-sustaining. The Feminist Academy unfolded somewhere between the two. A spa tucked into the biting cold of Polish April, bicycles resting against a wooden shed, steaming saunas, and endless plates of food and arriving as if nourishment itself was a radical political act.

Thirty of us gathered there from across Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, carrying different languages for grief, different passports, and different levels of exhaustion. We were women, trans, and queer defenders, feminist activists, and women’s funds workers—people who have spent years holding communities together while states, wars, borders, and movements kept shifting like tectonic plates underneath our feet.

Active Hope: The framework of our gathering

None of this would have been possible without Agnieszka Bua Bułacik and Liene, the two lead facilitators who held the space for us. They didn’t just manage a schedule, they built the entire container from the ground up, basing the concept on Joanna Macy’s ideas of Active Hope and weaving in elements from Black justice movements. They understood that hope isn’t just a warm feeling—it is a practice.

All through the days, they kept pausing the program to let us breathe and reflect, constantly inviting us to speak our raw needs out loud and find places where we could collaborate. They made sure the space felt alive and responsive to the room, celebrating our capacity to connect rather than just our ability to endure. Through their care, Bua and Liene managed to turn a gathering of exhausted activists into a space where we could actually begin to repair.

On the first day, Hanna smiled and said, “I love bringing favourite people together.”

The simplicity of the sentence landed heavily in the room. Favourite people. Not beneficiaries, not activists, not stakeholders, not grantees. Favourite people. The air inside the yurt suddenly smelled of pine, damp wool, and the sharp, clean scent of spring waiting just outside the canvas. But bringing people together in these turbulent political times means bringing their ghosts, too.

Allowing grief: Building resilience doesn’t start with solutions

The gathering did not waste time pretending resilience was beautiful. The first sessions opened directly into grief. Not polished, performative grief, but the awkward social discomfort of people suddenly standing too close to their own feelings.

“Grieving on the first day is hard,” Sona whispered ahead of the session, her shoulders tense with the anticipation of rain. “I hope I won’t cry.”

But for some the tears came anyway, because how could they not? When the session ended, the room hung in that strange, suspended vacuum that follows shared sorrow. Gosia looked around, unsettled by the sudden absence of a script, admitting nervously: “I feel anxious now… It seems like we need to move somewhere after this, but we just finished the session.”

And maybe that was exactly the point. There was nowhere to move. No productivity hack waiting at the end of sorrow. No transition slide. Just thirty people sitting inside discomfort together long enough for it to become breathable.

Magdo was initially invited to deliver a single performance, but the boundary between ‘artistic service provider’ and ‘participant’ dissolved instantly. “I will be staying for the whole program,” they decided, refusing to be isolated from the very room they were healing.

Their words quietly revealed how deeply extraction shapes even feminist spaces—how often people are invited to offer pieces of themselves while remaining outside the emotional architecture of the room. This time, something softer happened. The lines dissolved. The performer stayed. The audience became participants. The facilitators became vulnerable, too.

Perhaps that is why the physical ease of the space mattered so much. The abundance of amazing food and the fleet of bicycles weren’t luxuries, they were counter-weights to the gravity of our daily resistance.

Body, Movement, Exile: What Cycling Teaches Us About Healing

It was on one of those bicycles that my own exile caught up with me. I kept thinking about movement, about the body learning what safety feels like after years of running. Learning to ride a bicycle with Mzeo, I wrote in the margins of my notebook. Might be useful if I am tired of running.

Somewhere in one of the many homes I no longer have, there is probably still a child version of me who never learned because nobody held the back of the seat long enough. I remember Mzeo holding me gently, almost exactly the way one holds a frightened four-year-old. No shame. No impatience. Just steady hands and trust. And suddenly the impossible thing became embarrassingly possible. A few uncertain turns, then movement. Slow but steady. Wobbling toward confidence.

At one point, a thought crossed my mind with almost comedic clarity: if I ever get tired of running, maybe now I can leave on a bicycle instead. The metaphor arrived before I could stop it. Love does make miracles happen—not the loud, cinematic kind, but the quiet kind where your body simply stops expecting abandonment.

Between Ancestors and the Future

By the second day, time itself started behaving differently. Exercises moved us through present selves, ancestral selves, and imagined selves. We sat face-to-face in fishbowls speaking to versions of ourselves that had survived wars, displacements, revolutions, crackdowns, betrayals. We spoke from exhaustion and toward futures we are almost too afraid to desire out loud. Hope became less of a concept and more of a muscle we were collectively trying to rehabilitate.

“I appreciated the session about hope so much because it felt like a real people-to-people conversation,” Sto reflected later. For the first time, we weren’t just acronyms or organizational profiles. “We didn’t have a chance to get to know each other and what our organisations do in detail, so this session felt very authentic. I’d like to talk more about the Second World War and how we relate to it. How our ancestors relate to it, what we have been through.”

What Humor Teaches Us About Resilience

Authenticity arrived unexpectedly there, through fragments. Through ancestry. Through inherited silences, jokes told during coffee breaks, and tears appearing at strange moments.

The lightness we found wasn’t an accident. Kate, a brilliant comedian, ran a workshop that taught us how to untangle our heaviest narratives through humor, finding a strange, defiant ease in laughing at things that usually break us. Later, when the two of us were just talking, she told me how crucial these spaces are for activists who are constantly on the move, constantly doing. “There is just no space for them to simply rest,” she said, “to just exist without the pressure of having to do anything at all.” Her words stayed with me, reframing our laughter and our quiet moments not as a distraction, but as the actual point of being there.

© All Photos by Agata Kubis

Drag, Sauna, Forest Birds: When the Body Becomes Political

That evening, the yurt transformed completely. Neon lights sliced through the darkness inside the vast structure. The flue stove cracked and breathed fire into the room, its hissing wood pulling our reality into a futuristic mindspace.

It felt almost post-apocalyptic in the gentlest possible way. As if we were survivors rebuilding culture after the end of the world. And maybe we were.

Bodies gathered closer together while outside the cold pressed against the walls. Inside, warmth expanded like a second atmosphere. The yurt became womb-like, nurturing the very souls whose daily lives require carrying impossible amounts of political weight.

Before the drag show began, everything already felt cinematic—everyone and everything blending together: exhaustion, queerness, laughter, trauma, glitter, theory, survival, aliveness. Then, the music dropped.

To watch a human body move in total synergy with sound is to watch transformation, refusal, prophecy. This drag royalty was an artist moving in mysterious, liberating ways, and the entire room loosened around them. Echoes of laughter radiated across the circle, bouncing off the wooden beams.

And then her voice. A Black woman speaking her truth while carrying life inside her womb. She dissected womanhood, class, racism, and anti-colonialism with the timing of a comedian and the precision of someone who has spent years translating pain into survivable language. She moved through difficult truths as if humor itself was a political technology. I smiled into the dark, thinking: indeed, she is the last funny woman on Earth.

Outside, the forest cold remained merciless. Inside, people sweated grief out of their bodies in the sauna. The thick steam filled our lungs, loosening sorrows from our shoulders. Heat returned us briefly to ourselves; it felt almost ceremonial, as if the body needed to physically release what language could not, leaving it behind to Mother Earth.

At some point, we listened to birds. Not metaphorical birds—actual birds. Their sounds were analyzed through technology that identified each species singing around us, giving us a digital line-up curated entirely by nature. There was something profoundly comforting in that unique, one-time concert. A reminder that life continues composing itself beyond catastrophe.

Feminist Strategies Across Borders

By the third day, the gathering had turned into a living organism. Open Space sessions turned the yurt into a beehive, a low, constant hum of voices scattering people across conversations about land, displacement, healing, and the radical concept of a feminist retirement plan.

We were thinking together, planning together, rehearsing futures across fragmented geographies. Bees moving between flowers, exchanging strategies, dreams, contacts, and confessions. No conversation ever really ended, it simply continued somewhere else—at the dinner table, in the sauna, on bicycles, outside in the forest during breaks.

In the background, sharp, guttural screams erupted. Not screams of danger, but of release. Bodies practicing how to say no together, learning refusal collectively. Voices grew louder with each attempt, protecting themselves and each other through sound. Dreams flowed, tears flowed, and our bodies drifted between the offerings of the marketplace like vessels being slowly filled.

Why Resilience Isn’t a Strength—It’s to remain reachable

The next day departure arrived the way it always does. Abruptly.

Suitcases rolling across the ground. Last cinnamon coffees. Long, heavy hugs performed with the quiet knowledge that many of us come from places where separation has become a recurring condition of intimacy. People returning to wars, authoritarianism, burnout, funding crises, exile, and uncertainty.

But a bunch of us left walking out into the sunny day clutching jars of freshly pickled cucumbers—a crisp, salty token, a tangible reminder of the taste of the place.

Something had shifted. Perhaps resilience is not strength at all. Perhaps resilience is simply the ability to remain reachable despite everything. To still allow yourself to be held long enough to learn balance. To trust, briefly, that somebody will keep their hand on the back of the bicycle seat while you begin moving forward again.

The author Hamida Giyasbayli