Maska - Volume 28, Issue 157-158, 2013

Maska, which today as an institute for publishing, cultural and production activities commemorates along with many other non-governmental organizations the twentieth anniversary of its establishment, no longer finds its key importance in the affirmation of recent art practices through their recording and global and historical contextualization, but focuses on the problematization of structural and political issues posed by and in contemporary art and theory. The questioning of one's own position has become an ethical imperative of the art of the twenty-first century.

The text deals with the changes in the mode of production in the field of culture in post-socialist Slovenia. Using the theory of historical materialism, it tries to consider the changes within cultural production over the past two decades. Utilizing Marx's conceptualization of the formal and the real subsumption of labour under capital, it sheds light on the introduction of capitalist relations of production in this field. In particular, the text focuses on the institutional changes through which capital subsumes cultural production, and it describes the structural changes that occur when culture is thought of in terms of cultural industries.

This article tries to demonstrate how far in contemporary capitalism, if not to say in capitalist realism, the difference between potentia and potestas has become deeply prone to its own inversion. We are living under circumstances which utilize our potential itself, subsuming it under a world-wide biopolitical calculus, rendering it into finance, and thereby integrating it in a continuously expanding territory that is all the same smooth and striated. Ultimately, there is no clear boundary between potentia and potestas. Our problem is that any clear distinction between constituent acts and already constituted agencies - naturing nature (natura naturans) and natured nature (natura naturata) in Spinoza - respectively, the difference between Multitude and Empire, has almost vanished and cannot be defined that easily.

A series of discussions about Slovenian cultural politics from the viewpoint of managers and creators of the performing arts. We interview three practitioners, producers and artists who question and contextualize their own actions. Simon Kardum has transitioned from activist to practitioner, from dreamer to politician. He is the manager of the public institution CUK Kino Šiška. Janez Janša considers the relationship between the public and private cultural sectors. He describes what the differences between the two are and were, and what they could be, and the consequences of erasing these differences. He is the longtime manager of Maska Institute, one of the biggest NGOs in the field of the performing arts in Slovenia. Iztok Kovac is a pragmatist, thinks in the long-term and focuses on the institution in the context of the individual and the contemporary dance genre. He is a pioneer in institutionalizing Slovenian contemporary dance and the manager of the Španski Borci Culture Centre. The interviewees see more errors and possibilities for development in the areas that they are perhaps less familiar with. Between the lines, we find space for possible dialogue, common work for a common cause.

Metka Zobec (1956-2013) created the Theatre and Puppet School - Cosmopolitan Workshop of Art (1991-1999) under the former Association of Cultural Organisations of Slovenia (ZKOS) in the beginning of the 1990s. The school pioneered new educational models in the field of performance art in Slovenia and played an important role in making up for the lack of institutional programmes in this field. By choosing original ways of teaching that could today be placed alongside Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, it left a decisive mark on the generations of students and mentors attending and co-creating it.

The text offers a philosophical reflection on the cycle of five performances that form the Elizabethan Trilogy project (2008-2013) by director Dragan Živadinov. By introducing four conceptual pairs - theatre and sovereignty, words and things, the subject and the mask, and difference and repetition - it also attempts to reflect on Živadinov's entire opus and on the meaning of his theatre. At the centre of attention in the theatre of repetition, which is opposed to the theatre of representation, there is the relation between theatre, sovereignty and the subject; the author of this text tries to shed light on this relation by drawing on Antonin Artaud's concept of the theatre of cruelty and possible connections between theatre and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

With their interventions, the art projects 'Walk the City' and 'The Unnoticed' penetrated the core of urban environment and selected the centre of Ljubljana as the stage for their performances. Both projects bring art into a public space, where anonymous, coincidental and 'undirected' passers-by, knowingly or not, become viewers and at times even participants within the performance. Regardless of the numerous possibilities, the two art interventions will be primarily looked at in terms of the conceptualization of space and the diverse definitions of walking, while we will lean upon the theories of Michel de Certeau. We will also look at the interventions through the perspective of the ground plan, which will lead to a new understanding and meaning.

This article is an attempt at an introduction of the Latvian show Legionnaires on several levels: as an extraordinary theatre production in its own right, as part of the Baltic theatre phenomenon, and as part of the New Wave of political theatre aimed at looking inwards in search of a change in the bigger world and using love not only as a springboard but as the 'thing' imbuing its main means of expression as well - in brief, a theatre that prefers 'punching with tenderness' (according to a phrase by Alvis Hermanis). A daring claim is made that this type of theatre may, to a great extent, have Latvian roots, with Hermanis's Long Life as its first excellent sample of world-wide fame.

This article deals with the problem of artistic representation in theatre. It explores the practice of the Italian actor and director Carmelo Bene, which virtually coincides with the theoretical (or philosophical) thought of Gilles Deleuze and his philosophy of difference. The author tries to show the move from classical theatre representation towards the critical staging that overturns the theatre practice, actualizing at once the 'philosophy of difference" in art. In the author's theoretical view, this shift represents the essence of artistic activity - the so-called "de-equalisation" or denunciation of common sense'.