Maska - Current Issue

This article explores the relationship between institutions and parasitic practices within the realm of artistic production, focusing on the organization INSISTER SPACE based in Stockholm, Sweden. Grounded in Michel Serres’ concept of the parasite, it examines parasitism as a dynamic catalyst for micro-political changes within institutions. Emphasising the potential of convivial, collective and critical counterstrategies, the text also addresses the impact of neoliberal and populist forces on the art field. Proposing parasitism as a strategic response, the article contributes to discourse on navigating and resisting socio-political dynamics in contemporary art.

This text is a collage of perspectives and considerations of how we work as a collective. It is an entry from wandering around, conversing and, ultimately, agreeing that we are in the process of figuring out what it is that we do and how we want to do it. It does not follow a linear narration but it is a polyphonic composition expressing our co-existence over the last two years. Our meeting was possible thanks to the fellowship programme which enabled our paths to cross, creating space for the intersection of different generations, socioeconomic circumstances, and geopolitical contexts. It then led us to form a collective as a way of building up on the work we had done together and expanding it beyond the timeframe and scope of Critical Practice (Made in Yugoslavia)*. Still, we held onto the idea of collectivity, horizontal knowledge sharing, decentralised group structure and reciprocity as guiding principles for that future evolution of our work which has been instilled in us through the CP experience.

This article is an attempt to theorise the Sisterhood * of the Proud Dolphin feminist book club as a method of feminist reparation and empowerment. The article is based on 6 years of continuous monitoring, attending and co-leading of the club, which is still ongoing at the time of writing. The club is voluntary, attended by participants of diverse age and socio-economic status, their number varying depending on individual meetings and reading seasons. Currently, the meetings take place once a month. The literature ranges from prose and poetry to theoretical works and is decided at each meeting according to the interest of the participants.

In recent years, certain topics, or rather the absence of certain topics on stage, became personally very important to me. As one of the few queer women of colour in Slovenia, not seeing a variety of body types, sexualities, and points of view, made me struggle with my body image, with accepting my sexuality. This became more apparent to me when we started rehearsals for Sex Education II, a project about female pleasure, directed by Tjaša Črnigoj.

The following text provides a glimpse into New York City’s experimental drag scene and late-night culture in the early 1990s. It introduces the work of Blacklips Performance Cult, a group founded by ANOHNI, Johanna Constantine, and Psychotic Eve in 1992, and presents their gory, monster camp plays as a form of worldmaking in response to the cosmic grief of mass queer death in the wake of the epidemic that decimated the East Village arts community in the preceding decade.

The text explores what I call the ‘anal body and politics’, that is the potentiality and the political implications of the body when mapped and morphologically rearticulated from another standpoint than the hegemonic ones of the Phallic body, the frontal body, the heteronormative body, the reproductive body, the (liberal) individual body and so on. Instead, the anal body proposes something more vital to the body itself, without reinforcing a hetero-racialcapitalistic logic of reproduction, self-possessiveness, verticality, and property/propriety. The body that could be, and continues, as always already, being a multitudinous body of differences, transversally configured in provisional, yet unstable, unity; the body which brings the politics of co-existing and transindividuality. I develop my argument by reparative reading, from behind, of feminist theories of sexual difference, followed by a critical excavation of the politics of refusal specific to the anti-social thesis in queer theory, and ‘rehabilitation’ of the forgotten liberationist theory of Guy Hocquenghem.

In the 2022/2023 season, my collaborators and others from The New Post Office prepared a series of five lecture performances entitled Sex Education II, which explored from different angles and using different performing practises the right to sexual pleasure as a fundamental part of sexual rights as a human rights issue. The lecture performances were based on conversations with women1 who shared their personal stories, experiences and difficulties, as well as interviews with experts from different fields. In October 2023, we combined the five lecture performances into one whole and performed them in one day.

Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti visited the second season of participatory reading performances of the text Work and the Girl I-V Drama of the Serfs by Nika Švab. In his essay, he reflects on the development of a specific dramatic text, while placing this reflection in a broader context. Thus, among other things, it deals with the ills of Slovenian drama production and questions the common expectations that dramatic texts should be written in isolation, rather than in a processual and collective development.

Reflecting upon Jasna Žmak’s performance this is my truth, tell me yours, Dragana Alfirević points to the questions that the performance raises about the limits and possibilities of art and about the unwillingness of our society to talk about things and to deal with these questions in a sensitive and responsible way. The opposite of toxic patriarchy, as the author puts it in the conclusion, is not matriarchy, but vulnerability.

In this essay, Samo Oleami discusses two performances, Anja Bezlova’s Feed My Ego 2 and Tjaž Juvan’s The Musical Table, both of which he takes as a starting point for a reflection on the dramaturgical role of the clown. As he writes, the function of the clown is not to convey inner emotional states, but rather to have the advantage of being a folk character, which is familiar to the general audience and can therefore lead them to less understandable aspects of the performances.