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.
touring
City of Women presents
Previously announced concert of Carla Bozulich and Hrsta is cancelled due to the injury.
But the DJ set by the City of Women stays!!!
Tuesday, 28th of November 2006 at 10pm
Klub Gromka, AKC Metelkova mesto
Organisation: City of Women Association
In collaboration: Klub Gromka AKC Metelkova & Festival Animateka
Ticket price: 300 SIT / 1,25 EUR at the club entrance
Concert and DJ set:
LESBIANS ON ECSTASY (Canada) followed by
DJane Sladka (Slovenia)
1st of June 2006 at 11 pm
Menza pri Koritu, AKC Metelkova mesto
Photo: Joseph Jarmush
Organised by:
City of Women Asociation
in collaboration with:
Menza pri koritu, AKC
Metelkova mesto
Price: 1000 SIT,
one hour before the
beginning of the concert at
the entrance.
Lesbians on Ecstasy do it
for the lezzies and queers
like The Soft Pink Truth did it
for gays: they took the hits of
our coming-out youth
stripped them off trauma and
put them on the dance floor
in leather gear.
Lesbians on Ecstasy steal from the lesbian back catalogue referencing artists like kd lang, Tracy Chapman, Melisse Etheridge, the Indigo Girls; and the riot grrrl and dyke punk crew (Team Dresch, Tribe 8). They don’t sample these artists, but reference their themes and lyrics, creating booty shaking dance hits that maintain the politically infused edge of these Sapphic songstresses. Between Amon Tobin and Slayer, Daft Punk and Fleetwood Mac, between kitchy glam rock and dry rave; definitely and comfortably in between.
Lesbians on Ecstasy, the dance outfit from Montreal, has united the forces of house inspired party music, breakbeat, seductive singing and edgy punk and metal guitar riffs. Their language transgresses several borders: the anachronistic separation of electronic music and rock, the conviction that independent music cannot reach wider audiences, and the vast abyss between politics and fun that depressed independent scenes until the day Le Tigre screamed “Keep on livin’!”
After releasing a remix album “Giggles in the Dark” for Alien8 Recording in February and expecting the new Chicks on Speed Records compilation with one of their songs included, Lesbians on Ecstasy are ready for another round of European hot hot summer dates.
Lesbians on Ecstasy are:
Fruity Frankie: voice
Veronique Mystique: bass
Jackie »The Jackhammer«: drums
Bernie Bankrupt: laptop
Discography:
»Giggles in the Dark« (Alien8 Recordings, 2006)
»Lesbians on Ecstasy« (Alien8 Recordings, 2004)
»Tell Me Does She Love the Bass« (12'', Total Zero Records, 2003)
»U Feel Love« (12'', Total Zero Records, 2003)
Compilations (selection):
The AIDS Uncanny: A Silence Broken (Public Records, 2006)
Mind the Gap (Gonzo Circus, 2005)
Trax Hors Série #8: Spécial Filles (Trax, 2005)
Nuvo Compilation: Montreal's Radical Pop Underground (Robosapiens, 2004)
Listen Translate (Translate Record, 2003)
Fabulous Gay Tunes 3 (Lick, 2004)
Links:
http://lezziesonx.com/
http://www.myspace.com/lezziesonx
http://www.alien8recordings.com/
DJane Sladka (Slovenia)
The cosmopolitan hyperenergetic performance of DJane Sladka whose bold musical interventions often drive the audience into the massive dance psychosis, is definitely an extra to join Thursday’s show of Lesbians on Ecstasy. Her curriculum encompasses indispensable reviews on Ljubljana’s Radio Študent (under the name of Katarina V.), newly established co-operation with the experimental-ambience ethno group Uluru with a distinct female traits, and of course her traditionally exciting DJ(ane) performances. The anticipated extravagant waving anchored on the frequencies of electroclash and spiced with excurses into exotica is going to present the magic of dance rhythms and eloquent lyrics that the music gourmets can’t possibly resist. DJane Sladka will take you to an unforgettable music journey to the very end of the world and even beyond! (Ksenija Jus)
City of Women in March 2006:
Sigmund Freud's Day in Ljubljana
Constanze Ruhm (Austria)
Ljubljana, 20th of March. 2006
Galerija Škuc, Stari trg 21, Ljubljana
Organisation:
City of Women Association
In collaboration with:
Škuc Gallery
With the support of:
Austrian Cultural Forum
Programme:
14.00 - 18.00 – X Characters / RE(hers)AL Video installation (72', video loop); German, English subtitles
18.00 – X Characters: Shifting Identities
llustrated lecture and discussion (with Marina Gržinić)
The work of Constanze Ruhm focuses on contemporary forms of an art practice established around the relation of cinema and new media with an emphasis on notions of identity, representation and (feminist) film theory. Productions including and intersecting the fields of installation, film/ video, text/publications, curatorial projects and websites. Furthermore, the projects include works in public spaces (the most recent one an invitation for the competition in the framework of a redesign of a section of Vienna's Karlsplatz subway passage).
The video X Characters / RE(hers)AL is part of the ongoing project framework X Characters that has been developed since 2001, and which was initiated with the video installationA Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight.X Characters / RE(hers)AL releases seven female characters from seven different movies - each an icon from the history of modernist cinema - and joins them together as a gang of fellow travellers stuck in the boarding area of an airport. Detoured and out of their historical routines, the seven characters begin to get their bearings in a situation - a crossroads disguised as a holding pattern. Routes intersect, and new patterns emerge as these sleepwalkers, androids, phantasms, prostitutes, and murder victims start to establish relations and new forms of behaviour to connect the gaps in their scripts along the lines of a speculative orientation towards an unknown future.
The seven female movie characters were chosen as signifiers to enable the shaping of new dialogues and voices, re-scripted along the lines of new media. What is omitted from the original movie scripts - that which is left unsaid - becomes the starting point forX Characters / RE(hers)AL to begin routing through new narratives.
Over the course of a year, invited participants met on a regular basis in a chat room where each embodied one character in the framework of an improvisational performance chat group. Discussions and dialogues were developed around moderated subjects and situations. The participants were meant to reconfigure and adapt the characters' original profiles, thus operating in the gap between their own identities and the characters' desires. The accent was placed on improvisation and live interaction, as well as on the characteristics of the specific situation provided by the chat room. The documents of these live "workshop" interactions developed a series of possible situations and materials by which new sets of dialogues and scripts could be established. The results obtained within this first performative movement were used as basic outline for a script, which was edited and transformed. This script charts the movement of both the character's passage and the rites of the story, and was finally realized as a staged performance with seven actresses to be recorded on video.
18.00 – X Characters: Shifting Identities
llustrated lecture and discussion (with Marina Gržinić)
X Characters is a long-term project framework which started out in 2001. The first work in that series was the video / installation A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (2001), which was then continued by the projects Coming Attraction: X Characters(in Search of an Author) (2002/3), X Characters / RE(hers)AL (2003/4) and X NaNa / Subroutine (2004). The upcoming video / installation work X Love Scenes is in pre-production and will be realised in 2006.
In regard of this events specific focus on Freud and psychoanalysis, the overall narrative of this ongoing project can be described to be linked to a fundamental psychoanalytic procedure: to the Freudian triad of "erinnern-wiederholen-durcharbeiten" (remembering-repeating- working through).
The narrative of X Characters recounts in a fractured and tenuous way, the unfinished stories of seven female character icons from modernist cinema and the emergence of new identities. By a process of remembering and repeating that is structurally anchored in the method and construction of the project itself, these characters are "released" and "reworked" to be continued as contemporary new versions. That which is repressed in the character's psyche (as a projection of the director's desire) is worked through to set the character free on her own terms, to let her speak with her own voice.
City of Women intervention at the Red Dawn Festival:
Heini Nukari (Finland / Germany)
Station Kautschuk
Solo dance performance (20’)
Production: TRAVA
Wednesday, the 8th of March, 2006 at 7.30 pm
Menza pri koritu, AKC Metelkova Mesto, Ljubljana
Organisation:
City of Women Association
In collaboration with:
The Red Dawn Festival
Station Kautschuk follows a voyage of a lonesome traveller, a nomad wandering from planet to planet. The traveller, a bare-skinned creature with rubber boots could be an extra-terrestrial being, a comic strip-figure or a captain of a space station. The means of expression and communication for the creature are movement and voice which originate from the skin, rubber, eyes, flesh and from all the cavities which can produce sound in its body.
Station Kautschuk is built up from pure images, mixing futuristic and archaic forms, artificial and natural elements independent from any set time scale. There is no storyline, no exact message. The spectator is simply invited to witness the existence of this creature which happens to land in front of their eyes and ears at that moment.
“The acts of TRAVA recall performances of the naked dancers in the twenties with its grotesque -and -abstract way of staging the own body, as attacking the norms of roles and tastes: what is masculine, what feminine, what is beautiful, what ugly.” (TAZ Berlin, Jana Sittnick)
Heini Nukari (b.1972 in Finland) started her artistic education in the area of music and theatre. Later she studied in the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) where she graduated in 1997. In Amsterdam she was also a member of the company Subtheater. Since 1998 she is based in Berlin as a free-lance dancer/choreographer. Together with Anna Jankowska (Poland) she founded TRAVA in 1998.
Station Kautschuk was premiered in 1998 at the Academia Theatre in Warsaw. It has been performed in Potsdam, Lisbon, Leipzig, Bilbao, Stuttgart, Copenhagen, Tallinn, Salzburg (won the 1.prize) / and Tampere.
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.
