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.

Home » City of Women Association

City of Women Association

City of Women aims to raise the visibility of high-quality innovative creations by women artists, theoreticians and activists from all over the world. Since 1995, it has presented the artistic and cultural production of women in the performing arts, music, visual arts, film and video, literature and theory, and thereby aimed to provoke a debate and raise awareness as to the currently disproportionate participation and representation of women in arts and culture, as well as in society as a whole. City of Women simultaneously provides a platform that focuses upon and considers pertinent critical contemporary issues.

The Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture - City of Women was founded in 1996 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was established with the aim of lobbying on gender issues and promoting equality. The project itself was initiated a year earlier by the Slovenian government's former Office for Women's Policy (now The Equal Opportunities Office).

The Association's primary objective is to produce and organise affirmative action projects in order to draw attention to the disproportionately low participation and representation of women in the field of arts and culture, and its largest endeavour is the organisation of the annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts - City of Women.

The Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture - City of Women has the status of a non-governmental association, administered by an independent board of outstanding individuals drawn from various spheres of Slovenian culture, the arts and politics. Headed by its current president, Mirjam Hladnik-Milharcic, the Association has a team of executive producers responsible for the selection, co-ordination and organisation of its program.

The City of Women program and activities have been facilitated through a network of partners, who have ensured both financial support as well as conceptual input and feedback. The Association is engaged in ongoing collaborative projects with a variety of cultural and women's organisations, and works with external experts, international curators and selectors, for specific elements of its program.

 

City of Women is a member of ASOCIACIJA, association of NGOs and free-lance artists in the fields of Culture and the Arts and Faq mailing list of Women's, Feminist and Queer Festivals in the Balkans.   

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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.