Who we were told to be
EIGE Gender Equality Forum 2026
‘Driving Europe’s growth through gender equality’
For the EIGE Gender Equality Forum 2026, Via Berlin develops and hosts a series of tailor-made artistic interventions that invite participants to enter the theme of gender equality from a different perspective.
Throughout the opening evening on 16 November and the Forum on 17 November in Brussels, artistic encounters, performances and participatory experiences will appear at different moments in the program. Rather than explaining or illustrating the issues being discussed, they invite participants to experience them — to encounter familiar questions in unexpected ways, shift perspective and make space for reflection and conversation.
At the heart of Via Berlin’s contribution is the two-part spoken-word performance Who We Were Told to Be.
WHO WE WERE TOLD TO BE
Part I — SHE / Part II — HE
Before we knew who we were, someone told us.
Be careful. Be nice. Be strong. Don’t cry.
Take care. Take charge…
Who We Were Told to Be explores the expectations that shape women and men from the moment they enter the world.
Performed at two different moments during the Forum, SHE and HE enter the Female Box and the Man Box from within. Each follows a life shaped by seemingly small messages about care, work, strength, vulnerability, ambition, leadership and love, tracing how these messages accumulate into the roles we inherit and the choices we believe are our own.
In SHE, a woman looks at the world she was taught to navigate and begins to wonder about the world men were taught to inhabit.
Later, HE takes up that question. His perspective reveals a different box, with different expectations, freedoms and limitations. Slowly, the two stories begin to meet.
Because gender equality is not about making women more like men, or men more like women.
It is about creating a world in which who we become is no longer determined by who we were told to be.
ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS
Alongside Who We Were Told to Be, Via Berlin creates and hosts artistic interventions woven throughout the Forum.
While policymakers, researchers, business leaders and civil society come together to examine how gender equality can contribute to Europe’s growth, Via Berlin approaches these questions through lived experience:
What do inequalities feel like?
Where do they begin?
How do gender expectations shape the choices we make, the opportunities we receive and the potential we are able to fulfill?
And how do we continue to reproduce them, often without even realising it?
Through unexpected encounters and participatory experiences, complex societal questions become tangible and personal. Participants are invited not only to think about gender equality, but to briefly step inside it, encounter another perspective and reconsider their own.
Because unlocking everyone’s potential also means questioning who we were told to be.
16–17 November 2026 — Brussels
EIGE Gender Equality Forum 2026
Driving Europe’s growth through gender equality