Communication language

I mentioned in recent tweets that the image used in the previous blog post was taken in Barcelona.
Have you been? How would you describe it?

For me Barcelona, Catalonia is a city full of cultural human vibration, busy, steeped in history and tourism, food, graffiti, the arts and social extremes. More like NY then Paris. Its has a vibe...
Last May I went to study there with thanks to a Grundivig Leargas EU award. The course ART, PUBLIC and INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE -- Building bridges between cultures and communities with and through art... looked at the cultural diversity of the city and questioned cultural managers, artists and curators about how we were communicating and engaging new audiences. Or were we?
As part of the course we did field trips, others took notes I used my camera. As a visual artist and communicator I notice things in different ways seeing, thinking, listening, image making and reflecting back visually to society what I see. It is a way of working that I harness when working in groups and teams which allows me to get great depth of understanding. It is where my communication with others starts, listening and noticing.
I had never been to Barcelona before so I negotiated an extra two days with my family before my return home and got to explore the city on my own terms. Bizarrely it was not the bastions of culture that I gravitated towards but the city and the everyday life on the footpath.

Perhaps I had had enough arts speak during the course... After a swim in the sea I was walking back up the La Rambla, the main through fare in the city. It was thronged with people. Lots of street vendors and artists selling their wares and trying to draw money out of tourists pockets. I looked around for a while and then I just stood at the side of the path to watch. My attention shifted from people to the large columns on the footpath that are used to advertise what is happening around the city. They are very typical street furniture on the European continent.

Different colours, sizes, print quality varying abilities and professionalism of the designer and event. The communication trying to grab the passing tourist was diverse and extreme and that is what caught my attention. I was drawn into observing how posters communicated and marketed a cultural message. I was struck by how they portrayed women.
I don't speak Catalonian or Spanish but pictures speak a thousand words.
I've been prompted to think about this again for a number of reasons partly working with two groups of women and partly social/print media. Prompting more thought on the human rights around women - I don't see it as a women's issue thing I see it as a human thing. 
Recently I have started to follow @everydaysexism on twitter an amazing project documenting everyday experiences of sexism to prove how widespread & common the problem is http://www.everydaysexism.com/. Their twitter stream is a constant reminder there is a lot of work still to do in our society.
Anna Carey, @urchinette and I exchanged some tweets about Susan Faludi's Backlash which we both read in the mid nineties. She wrote an interesting piece for the Irish Times at the beginning of September From the X case to Pussy Riot: why I'm still a feminist, 20 years on.
I've also been noticing a lot more online activity around getting women into politics and re-balancing the gender divide at national and local levels, groups like 5050 Group and Womens Manifesto group in Longford reconnecting women with the democratic process at community level in Ireland. Initiatives like Women on the air tackling statistics like "Fewer than 1 in 4 ‘on-air’ voices are women". Then there is Catherine Cronin's open sourced #ITwomen Women in IT - Speakers and Conference Presenters a brilliant
lets make women in IT more visible and represented in the professional arena.
This all connects back to the community work I am doing firstly in Bray and then the Women of the World group in Arklow.
The Bray Community Education Early school leavers group started with an introduction to social science, Self in the big picture. It has progressed into the group being interested to learn more about Women in Bray the visible and the invisible. I've supported the group to allow them to own their own learning they have picked local politics, historic figures and retail enterprise and already they are pushing their curiosity further.
In Arklow with the WOW group we often have nine different cultures in the room and a great mix of ages - there I am teaching/facilitating the group through the arts to develop skills, to build resilience, community leadership and committee development. So it all ties in.
For me there is a balance I saw women in other ways in Barcelona

but the question is what shapes and forms our cultural construct around women? which has the greater impact on children, passers by tourists, locals, new locals?