Women on the Move
Mural inaugurated November 14, 2025
Location: KU Leuven, Antwerp campus
Women on the Move is a socially engaged mural art project that explores the intersections of gender, migration, identity, and belonging. Conceived as both a visual and participatory work, the project challenges dominant narratives and stereotypes around women and migration — particularly the way migrant women are often reduced to numbers, statistics, or victimhood, with little room for their voices, agency, or cultural contribution. The theme is vast and complex — how can one depict a multifaceted experience like migration in a single image?
Mural artist Mariana Duarte Santos began with a deceptively simple question: What do we carry when we move across borders, and what do we leave behind? This question became the foundation for the mural project. While working on this project, she became increasingly interested in the emotional weight of belongings — the small things that often don’t make it into news headlines, but that tell powerful personal stories. This led to the idea of creating a kind of cabinet of curiosities — a painted archive filled with objects from different cultures, family histories, wand geographies.
Unlike traditional cabinets of curiosities which often embodied a masculine gaze that framed difference as exotic or “other,” this reimagined cabinet is curated from within — by women whose stories have too often been marginalized. At the same time she didn’t want the composition to feel like a museum. She wanted it to feel alive, intimate, and recognizably human. So, she imagined a domestic setting: a living room. A space where someone might feel a sense of “coming home.” This home, however, would not be rooted in one single place or culture. Instead, it would be shaped by movement — by displacement, adaptation, remembrance, and resilience.
Mural Women on the Move by Mariana Duarte Santos. KU Leuven, Antwerp Campus, 2025.
To shape the visual language of the mural, Mariana engaged directly with women whose lives had been touched by migration. During her time in Antwerp, she facilitated three workshops with students and staff from the linguistics department. These sessions opened up spaces for conversation around migration, identity, representation, and media portrayals. She asked participants to bring an object that told part of their migration story — something meaningful, symbolic, or simply something they missed. These objects, and the stories they held, became integral elements of the final image. They were layered into the mural alongside others drawn from conversations she had with women in my own personal and professional life — friends, artists, researchers, and mothers whose families had also crossed borders. She was also drawn to the often-overlooked stories of women migrants who have made lasting contributions to society — in the arts, sciences, sports, and other fields. To acknowledge these legacies, she included books and photographs referencing their lives and work. Since the mural was created on a university campus housing the linguistics department, it felt fitting to weave language and literature into the heart of the piece. Mariana painted the spines of 170 books across the bookshelf of this imagined room. These included titles in every language taught in the department — Dutch, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Arabic, and Flemish Sign Language.
At its core, this project is about storytelling. It’s about finding ways to hold complexity without flattening it, to celebrate diversity without exoticizing it, and to represent migration not only as loss or upheaval, but as a process of re-rooting, redefining, and reconnecting. Through workshops, visual and archival research, and direct community engagement, the mural became more than just a painting — it became a collective portrait, built from the ground up by many hands and voices.
Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary (2018) is a novel told through diary entries of a young girl during the Partition of India, when millions were forced to migrate across newly drawn borders.
“I have this keychain and my father’s mine worker identification tag. My grandfather gave it to my father when he started working in the charcoal mines in Belgium in 1971. The tag carries a history of work, migration, and family … I keep these objects at home — they are heavy, both physically and in memory — but they connect me to my family, their stories, and the paths that brought us here.”
Map (2016) is a collection of poems by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, reflecting on time, memory, loss, and displacement. Szymborska lived through war, occupation, and political shifts in Poland — her work often touches on internal exile and historical migration.
The project Women on the Move is an invitation for continued reflection on the systemic injustices faced by migrant women worldwide, whether moving by choice or necessity, in pursuit of better opportunities to (re)build their lives. It is also a rallying call for women to keep moving within the symbolic realm — to challenge and transcend harmful gender stereotypes and norms that fuel inequality and violence, while reshaping cultural imaginaries to create more inclusive and equitable spaces of belonging.
Colophon
Mural: Mariana Duarte Santos
Publication editors: Deirdre M. Donoghue, Inge Lanslots, An Van Hecke
Publication contributors: Rocío Forero B., Lígia Fernandes, An Van Hecke, Deirdre M. Donoghue, Inge Lanslots, Marina Tziara, Paul Sambre, Rosemarie Buikema, Lieve Behiels, Lwando Scott, Mariana Duarte Santos, Peter Flynn
Book design: Constança Saraiva
Workshops documentation: Deirdre M. Donoghue, Constança Saraiva, Mariana Duarte Santos
Mural photography: Shana Michiels, Katrien Vanderheyden, Karen Foelen, An Van Hecke, Inge Lanslots, Clarissa Mees, Mariana Duarte Santos
The exhibition is one of the five exhibitions of Horizon Europe Project RE-WIRING. RE-WIRING has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under Grant Agreement n° 101094497.
