Maska - Volume 40, Issue 229-230, 2025
Volume 40, Issue 229-230, 2025
- Editorial
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Editorial
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Editorial show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: EditorialAuthors: Pia Brezavšček and Saša AsentićThe first outlines of this issue of Maska were drawn some time ago, when thinking about the (in)accessibility of our field of endeavour, which was also closely connected to considerations about the limited outreach of the printed journal in question. With a slight but noticeable and important increase in the presence of artists with disabilities1 in artistic lead positions and performers, which is a result of continuous activism, knowledge that is important to share in the field of performing arts and beyond has been accumulated. For one, it is a way of sensitising what has become a fast-paced routine of art production practice in the ableist framework, which hardly ever has the time to slow down and notice the different needs and wellbeing of everyone included. But foremost, it is valuable on its own, as it develops the tools to build an open and more accessible society, and Maska is dedicated to sharing the knowledge with its readers.
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- Article
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Cripping curating and dramaturgy
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Cripping curating and dramaturgy show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Cripping curating and dramaturgyBy Aidan MoesbyAccess, like many cultural spaces, has become contested. Terms such as equality, diversity and inclusion have become clichéd and often meaningless. They are generously broadcast, like bountiful seeds, only to fall on barren soil. Institutions are keen to use the language, be seen doing and saying the right things, whilst keeping their contribution to a minimum. These hollow actions create silent echoes in the vacuum of liberalised virtue signalling. Oh, the irony of performative access.
Language is potent and more so when it is nuanced, distilled, and considered. So what do we mean when we say access and roll words like equality, diversity and inclusion off the tongue? Are these words still fit for purpose? Do we need a new lexicon of access? Then once we have a language, who does it apply to, and how?
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Everything starts with language: A contribution to (regional) disability studies
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Everything starts with language: A contribution to (regional) disability studies show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Everything starts with language: A contribution to (regional) disability studiesBy Siniša TucićPolitical correctness has permeated many spheres of social life in the first decades of the 21st century. We have been witnesses to numerous disputes, misunderstandings, and discussions on the topic of its role, and where the boundaries for something to be non-discriminatory and acceptable for a certain group of people are. Discussions about political correctness are present in the media, on the internet, on social networks, in the sphere of culture, art, politics, public life, in the discourse of academic research, at the University, in schools.... To enter into any consideration of political correctness in the context of disability studies, which by its very nature refers to the language of disability, it is necessary to start from the definition of the term itself.
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- In Conversation
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Accessibility is not an additional duty – it is an attitude that grows a community: Theatre communities outside of standard linguistic practices
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Accessibility is not an additional duty – it is an attitude that grows a community: Theatre communities outside of standard linguistic practices show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Accessibility is not an additional duty – it is an attitude that grows a community: Theatre communities outside of standard linguistic practicesAuthors: Saša Lesjak and Andrej TomažinAccessibility in culture is often understood as a technical demand, as something that comes after the fact, in a project note, as an appendix to an application for subsidies. But if culture is a place for community and art is a place for reflection on society, then accessibility should not be an additional task, but rather its foundation upon which a just society is built. In this discussion, we raise questions about language, art, theatre and inclusion. What does accessibility mean in practice? Who has the right to understand art? And who has the right to co-create its territory?
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Art, Culture and Mobility
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Art, Culture and Mobility show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Art, Culture and MobilitySince 2022, I have been part of a four-year research project about disability, the performing arts and mobility titled ‘Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile’, which is financed by SFN at the University of the Arts Bern. The project aims to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of travel in the performing arts, and the different ways artists and productions travel – or don’t travel. My colleagues interviewed theatres and festivals – most of them in Switzerland, with a few exceptions, but all of them in the German-speaking part of Europe. In their interviews, as well as looking through materials such as websites and programmes, they researched how theatres and festivals reacted when the Covid-19 pandemic made the usual traveling of productions no longer possible, and whether this created more permanent structural changes to the ways institutions work.
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My rest, my time
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:My rest, my time show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: My rest, my timeBy Angela AlvesWelcome! I’m excited you’ve made it to this article about the practice of resting from a chronically ill perspective and thank you for considering reading it. What can you expect? We will rest together, and explore a political dimension of rest that unfolds between crip time and attentiveness – this is a guide to resistant resting.
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Je vous aime – pas moi: Anti-history of a sentence that has been spoken, and one that has only been signed.
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Je vous aime – pas moi: Anti-history of a sentence that has been spoken, and one that has only been signed. show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Je vous aime – pas moi: Anti-history of a sentence that has been spoken, and one that has only been signed.The act of speaking has always been so viscerally united with the very essence of being human that its absence is more perturbing than anything else. Before being called deaf, we are called mute.
I remember a summer in Sicily where, after playing all day with a kid from the buildings further away, at the moment of saying goodbye he told me ‘Don’t go there, there live the mutes’. He was referring to my home.
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- Misc
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Globalization: An overview analysis of cultural lenses and class hierarchies throughout the eras of colonization
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Globalization: An overview analysis of cultural lenses and class hierarchies throughout the eras of colonization show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Globalization: An overview analysis of cultural lenses and class hierarchies throughout the eras of colonizationBy Artie MackIn the fall of 2021, I compiled a video series about globalization using hand drawn and colored illustrations to explore the workings of monoculture in our globalized society – focusing through the lens of disability. The six-part video series is a mixed media, virtual intertwinement with capital-focused societies and its coexisting ableism. I consecutively explore: globalization, how ableism moves through capitalist ideologies and creates body-mind hierarchies, the rise and dominance of monoculture as nation-states and societies are formed, the removal of undesired bodies in said societies, and the liabilities placed on them to justify processes of removal and erasure.
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