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RAW SYMBIOSIS
Animals_Nature_Culture
14th
International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women
October 9 – 17, 2008
It is not in giving life but
in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is
why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex
that brings forth but to that which kills.
Simone de Beauvoir
In this year’s festival
programme, entitled Raw Symbiosis we wish that while
observing and participating, you, our faithful and new
audience, think of “animals and nature” as our co-beings and
not as “something” that must be changed, tamed, domesticated,
and subdued. If we – superior as we are – continue to rush
around heedlessly as flies into a spider’s web, we might
indeed enjoy our pleasant meals in a wonderful ambience, but
we will be too late to realize that we are caught in a place
we never wanted to end up in. And since we neither want to
nor can end up in the here and now, it is best we look back
toward the beginning.
To examine the biologistic
categorization and the logic of corporate commodification,
we have decided - for the first time in the City of Women
history – to classify festival events according to
discipline. By doing so we not only wish to introduce some
clarity into our rich trans-disciplinary selection, but also
to shed light on the interdependence and collaboration which
do not need excessive communication and linkage. In Sanne
Van Rijn’s opening performance Morphotope, as in a biotope,
dependence is perceived as the state of things in which
condensed excess can lead to destruction. Although we come
from different worlds, genders, backgrounds, or roots, the
fact that we coexist side by side must trigger an
affirmative policy in which an actor, a queer, a donkey, pig,
or monkey are not threatened. The artists, theoreticians,
and activists of the 14th City of Women festival propose
less communication and more participation, empathy, and
tolerance; less property and more modesty, grounded in the “now”.
Despite all the information available to modern
technologically determined human beings, we are still unable
to contemplate with full responsibility a) ourselves as part
of nature or technology as the new nature and b) our lives
as part of the “now” in which a person needs so little that
it need not make the transitory existence of self and other
so difficult. In her keynote lecture, concluding the week-long
free educational programme at Škuc Gallery, the Zagreb-based
researcher Karmen Ratković will tell us more about the now
and our relationship towards nature. In addition to an
abundant educational programme on active environmental
citizenship, the agroindustry, the right of resistance,
death and dying, and animal enrichment, we have prepared a
rich selection for the so called generation Y with a
specially designed youth workshop on permaculture.
As always, the festival Sunday
will be cheerful and appropriate for children, with a dog
massage workshop, a puppet workshop, and Vera Neubauer’s
animated shorts on top. We look forward to spending more
time in Kinodvor once again, where apart from documentary
screenings, we will enjoy two breathtaking films by Isild Le
Besco, which are as simple as the seemingly carefree lives
of children and teenagers growing up without parents.
This year’s somewhat
“macrobiotic” musical programme will introduce mainly Slavic
musicians of diverse musical provenance: the Croatian punk
electro trio Klaus, the Belgrade-based hip-hopper Sajsi MC,
the Czech dance electronic My Name Is Ann, the Russian folk-rock
band Iva Nova, and Subshrubs with the Slovenian academic
musician and experimentalist Maja Osojnik. If the situation
on Earth keeps you awake at night, treat yourselves to our
colourful DJane programme with DJanes T-Ino Darling,
Irradiation, Timiko or e.llem after the daytime events.
At the 14th City of Women we
are also starting a multiannual European partnership project
“A Space For Live Art”, with which we pledge to encourage
and promote live art, in other words performance art as that
direct artistic expression which creates maximal effects
through minimal means. This holds true especially for
Violeta Luna, Julia Bardsley, Conservas, subRosa and A2
collectives, as well as Slovenian artists Pila Rusjan and
Jana Prepeluh.
We will also introduce two
public art projects: the bizarre “animalistic” work of
Isabelle Krieg and Marianne Engel, and animal life
enrichment mechanisms from scientist and intermedia artist
Natalie Jeremijenko.
We also proudly present the
premieres of three new works by Slovenian performance
artists Tina Valentan, Bara Kolenc, and Leja Jurišić
together with Hanna Sybille Müller, which explore the
paradigms of freedom. While the protagonists of Kinda Hassan’s
and Selda Asal’s documentary videos are also confronted with
the reality of non-freedom and determinism.
It is easy to talk of the
absolute of (human) freedom, but if not sooner, it becomes
clear within the discourse on animals, nature, and
technology that no such thing exists. That freedom is a path,
a manner, a process, or a way of becoming. In the belief
that ultimately we are free, we allow ourselves to impose
endless prohibitions, commands, and restrictions – mostly on
others, yet also upon ourselves. If we would stop for a
moment, either in an empty space or in a green meadow
surrounded by bears, we would realize that we have no right
to be free, unless we recognize the freedom of others as a
need for self-limitation. In the past, those weaker usually
faced these issues: women, the poor, animals, and others who
are times still subject to repression. What is essential,
therefore, is uprooting the idea that self-limitation is
inherent to ‘the weak’. On the contrary: self-limitation is
(becoming) the option, or rather the responsibility, of the
position of power.
Thus the raw symbiosis speaks
not only of nature, but of (our) relationships and limits –
the beginnings and the ends. One of our crew members today
lost a person so very dear to her. Let us therefore dedicate
this introduction to all of us who have, in one way or
another, encounter death.
Ljubljana, August 27th, 2008
Catalogue
(pdf)
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