12th International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women
2nd–10th October 2006
City of Women 2006 - Desha Podgorsek
Memory / History
City of Women 2006 shall investigate the various meanings of history and memory. Situated on the intersection between our personal lives and collective culture, experience and memory involve both the individual and the social body. As a shared artistic and social practice, cultural memory links the present to the past. In doing so, cultural memory has strong ethical and political aspects. The arts are continuously engaged in non-linear processes of remembering and forgetting, characterised by repetition, rearrangement, revision, and rejection.Recent cultural theories have emphasised how experience and memory are culturally constructed rather than being basic or unmediated levels of human existence, while a wide range of contemporary practices in art have recently attempted to create a place for individual voices and histories.
In Memoriam
In Memoriam
This October we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German political theorist of Jewish origin whose works – The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition or Vita activa (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), On Violence (1970) and The Life of the Mind (1978) – created one of the most influential works of reference on political thinking of the 20th century. Her work was marked and motivated by the terror of the holocaust, which she escaped by migrating first to France and then to the United States, where she was engaged in writing and lecturing (also at Princeton University and finally at the New School of Social Research) until her death in 1975. In 1961, Hannah Arendt covered the trial against Adolf Eichmann as the New Yorker reporter in Israel, and later wrote a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
This year's City of Women Festival will be opened by short quote from Hannah Arendt's work. During the festival all Slovene translations of her works will be available in Lili Novy Club, Cankarjev dom. The festival will be closed by reading performance of the text from the conference Work of Hannah Arendt together with a debate in Gromka Club at Metelkova.
