TENTH BIRTHDAY PRESENTS
Anthropologists say that gifts are part of some sort of exchange, as one gift always calls for a gift in return. You lose something, but you get it back in some form or another anyway. You give a bracelet, you get a necklace; you offer fish, you get potatoes in return. All traditional societies ensured that these exchange rituals were more or less balanced and losses paid for. This includes holidays and birthdays. You lose one year from your life and the presents help you forget that you are one year 'shorter'. Blowing out birthday candles is not just about extinguishing candles, it has other functions as well.
Festivals have their own method of celebrating. With festivals, 'one more year' does not mean 'one year less', as it does with people. When we celebrate City of Women's seventieth birthday, we will not be silently calculating whether it has ten or twenty years left. On the contrary, we will say: this is one festival that survived, because it is critical, interesting, up-to-date, entertaining - in one word, good. A festival with both tradition and a future.
Let's linger on the birthday metaphor a little longer: aren't 'balance sheets' a part of every birthday? Aren't we thinking about what has happened to us in the last year and, in the broader sense, what we have accomplished - and what we have not - in our lives? Aren't we all putting together all the pros and cons?
To summarise: ten years of the City of Women festival have offered 36 theatre plays and performances, 43 concerts, 49 film and video performances, 24 dance performances, 17 fine arts and photograph exhibitions, 16 discussion panels and symposia, 32 debates, readings, presentations and lectures, 10 workshops and - some of the elusive categories which slipped through the statistics - 1 visual-sound presentation, 1 digital dialogue, 1 communication project, and 1 street march. All in all, 231 'main' events and a large number of 'side bar' + events. A pretty number if they had been presents, given to us by artists with fresh, a little less fresh, famous or a little less famous names; yet always critical, interesting, entertaining women who have held a mirror up to the societies of this world.
But as Isaid at the beginning, each gift calls for a gift in return. What did those women receive in Slovenia during the ten years when City of Women featured 231 'critical, interesting, entertaining, etc.' events? Let's take a look at three different levels. First, politics: there are fewer women in politics than there were ten years ago. Nothing to worry about, I hear you say, women have nothing to look for in politics as they are today anyway. True. But: will politics change by itself, or is it waiting to be changed by people who feel comfortable within its surroundings? Second, health care: the health of women is deteriorating and with it - surprisingly? - the health care provided for women. Just think of the examinations, ordered once a year by experts, when politics paid for them. Both experts and politicians recently began singing an entirely different tune, even though the incidence of
cancer among women is increasing. And last, civil rights: all ways of weakening the welfare state affect women more than men: there is a greater percentage of women among the unemployed, which has been a novelty in the last years; more women have so-called insecure working relationships than men; and especially young women find it much more difficult to enter the job market than men; it is true, though, that both genders now have to work (equally) longer before retirement.
Let's also see what is happening to women who work in the arts: they are paid less than they used to be, they have less power and influence on the decision making process, among other things because they normally 'occupy the lowest positions in the hierarchy of the work force'. There are many artists, but how many of them are at the head of theatres, opera houses, philharmonics, domes of culture, galleries, publishing houses, the film museum, etc? A recent comparative study has shown that in Western and Southern Europe women represent an average of 23% of theatre directors, 20% of film directors, 25% of art museum directors, 15% of senior broadcasting production executives and 1% of conductors (www.culturegates.info). We have little data about Slovenia: There is an approximately equal share between actors and actresses (50:50), but how many of them are directors? Among self-employed cultural workers - one of the riskier forms of employment, which has already become dominant among the women of the developed world - the ratio between genders is much more even than the same ratio among the leading workers in leading cultural institutions.
And what about Prešeren Prizes, those cultural recognitions which are not only considered prestigious, but also connected with solid social benefits? Let's again take the last ten years under consideration: during this time the grand prize was awarded to 15 male and 2 female artists, the Prešeren Fund Awards were dealt out in a ratio of 45:13 in favour of male artists (in 2004 it was 5 male and 1 female artist). These prizes are a symptom: a symptom of a woman's cultural work, which becomes a symbol of the paid workforce in full.
Are we going to continue accepting gifts like these?
Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You...
Zoja Skušek
President of the Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture - City of Women
PAST TRANSITION - WELCOME TO THE FUTURE?
"The term 'transition' is used...for the stretch of time it takes a person to change into the other gender. Now, I'm not going from A to B, but rather zigzagging my way through a large, open space of possibilities. This space of appropriation, play and experimentation would be virtually non-existent were it not for art and the dynamic between art and the artfulness of living a different life." (Hans Scheirl)
The choice of the theme Past Transition - Welcome to the Future? was triggered by the specific context of preparing and producing the tenth anniversary of the City of Women.
In 2004 Slovenia joined the European Union; for some, this meant a long promoted 'better' future; for others, it was the final manifestation of a 'lost' past; while there were those (including the City of Women) for whom it was an inescapable reality, which continuously urges us to think, envision, struggle, contest, and eventually inscribe alternative social and artistic codes and visions.
In 2004, the City of Women festival celebrates its first ten years, a moment to reflect on past performance, envision future strategies and concepts, and (once again) struggle for the present/presence: following the logic of national cultural policies in Slovenia, it seems that at the end of the 'transitional' period the options for a critical cultural project are either to become an institution, claiming territory, space, identity; or to disappear in marginality. The City of Women aims at neither.
Having this in mind, our programme represents a search for the 'transitional', the 'not yet' defined moment in the here and now, the 'large open space of possibilities', which escapes the prefabricated mind set, the (violent) need for identification, the capitalist, western-rational idea of progress from 'A to B', but which instead allows us to open our minds towards different futures. The City of Women invites you on a spaceship, time- travelling, re-visiting ghosts of the past, global economies of the near future, as well as parallel universes, in which events unfold unpredictably (Kath Weston, Gender in Real Time). In the words of the Otolith Group, (presenting their film as one of the opening events), time-travel becomes a metaphor for "revisiting forgotten histories and designing future scenarios that converge into .. science fictions of the present".
The (science) fictions of the present, or transitional moments of possibility, are presented by more than 40 artists, many of whom depart from any clearly defined genre, and/or are innovators in the use of digital technologies, e.g. composer, performer and sound artist Pamela Z (USA); dancer, singer, performer Eddie Ladd (Wales / UK); designer, video artist, director Hiroko Tanahashi (Japan / Berlin); visual artist and 'pop star' Anat Ben- David (Israel / UK); famous electro punk band and video artists Le Tigre (USA); theatre and video artists Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué (Lebanon).
Others invest in a re-articulation of traditional artistic genres (like the electro, neo-folk duo CocoRosie (USA), or one of the world's finest Roma singers, Mitsou (Hungary), explore the vast terrain of trans-gendered articulations (trans-gender performer Dred (USA); visual artist Alicija Zebrovska (Poland), or echo our closest histories and futures (Austrian Film Cycle; actress and cabaret artist Hasija Boric; Belgrade's underground hip-hop duo Bicarke na travi).
To reflect further on the future of City of Women, we have invited producers, artists and curators engaged in kindred artistic projects to create or curate parts of the festival program, and to debate future strategies for cultural production. The collaboration has resulted in two guest exhibitions (Dreams of the Future, curated by Katy Deepwell (UK), editor of n.paradoxa feminist art journal, and + Behind The Firewall > Situations, curated by Karen Wong, HTMlles new media festival, Montreal, Canada), an one-week mobile investigation of the conditions of cultural work (Cuisine Interne Keuken, curated by the organisers of Digitales art and training program on women and new technologies, Brussels) and a Science Fiction Film Cycle (Selves and Territories in Science Fiction, proposed by Laurence Rassel, director of the artist run organisation Constant vzw and one of the coordinators of Digitales).
From another perspective, we may have found ourselves on a doorstep, a transition, surveying the whole, preserving the best of the past, and working towards a good future.
Bettina Knaup, Sabina Potočki;
programme selectors