26 May Skopje Pride Weekend 2021 | The Queer Commons: Politics of Friendship, Love and Affects
It is with great pleasure that we announce and invite you to the ninth consecutive Skopje Pride Weekend, which will be held in the period from June 2-9, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, CSS JADRO and the subcultural centre ShortBus. Skopje Pride Weekend is a festival for queer culture, art and theory whose goal is to create a space for presenting and promoting non-normative forms of worldmaking or, in other words, relationships, affects, identity positions, body styles and sensibilities marked by the heteronormative, nationalist and neoliberal capitalist context, as queer, eccentric and unsuccessful.
The main curatorial theme of this year’s edition of the Festival is The Queer Commons: Politics of Friendship, Love and Affects. With this topic, we aim to place at the center of the queer political, social and cultural orientations the issues related to the opinion, distribution and establishment of the common and common goods (the common/s). We will approach the common/s through critical research of the normative assumptions of friendship, love and emotions framed in hegemonic heteronormativity and male political imaginations, as well as their implications for our socio-political horizons. The festival also seeks to offer alternative forms of thinking, practicies and embodying the common and policies of friendship and love, starting from the structural position of the margins, as well as socio-cultural and intimate practices and infrastructures for care, support and communion in queer and feminist communities and networks.
We open this year’s festival on June 2, at 8:30 pm at MoCA, with a retrospective exhibition BLINDED BY LOVE by FRANCO B, one of the most important contemporary performers and visual artists in the world. He does not separate his work of art from life, and his works balance between isolation and seduction, affection and confrontation, suffering and eroticism, punk and poetry. He strives to make the unbearable bearable, provokes the viewer to think about his own understanding of beauty and suffering. He uses his own body as a metaphor for the social struggle, embodying representations of the personal, political and poetic. Crossing love and pain, FRANCO B shows that humanity, as a condition, can be improved.
The audience will be able to see the latest performance by Nao Bustamante (USA), a legendary Latin artist, whose works include performance, video installation, cinematography, sculpture and writing, and in Skopje she will perform together with Markus Kuiland-Nazario (USA). Within the overall programme there will also be performances by: the dance trio STEAM ROOM, which last year unreservedly won the hearts of the Skopje audience, then the performance team SPIT! from Great Britain, in cooperation with the Macedonian queen Tokyo de Ville, the Macedonian artists Zorica Zafirovska and Darko Aleksovski with a joint exhibition at CSS JADRO, and the jazz trio
Svetlost. As in the past, this year we have two lectures, one performative lecture by prof. Jelisaveta Blagojevic from Belgrade, and an online lecture by FRANCO B. The audience will also listen to DJ sets by Vera Vendetta and Ivana Dragsic.
This year the festival catalog is accompanied by an edited collection of texts by some of the most important contemporary theorists addressing the focus of the festival, such as Michael Foucault, Laurent Berlan, Jose Esteban Munoz, Michael Hart and Antoine Negri and others.
The festival is organized by Coalition MARGINS and the LGBTI Support Center, and is realized in partnership with MoCA and JADRO, with the selfless support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation, US Embassy, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Open Society Foundation Macedonia, The international project TIME IS NOW by the
European Union, the Ministry of Culture of N.Macedonia, and the City of Skopje. The media sponsor of the festival is PORTRET Magazine.
The entire program of the festival is designed to respond to the protocols for holding public events due to the situation with the pandemic, where we as organizers in cooperation with the institutions, will take care to be fully respected.
Your attendance at the Festival will be a special honor and pleasure for us. For all additional questions and information related to the Festival, please contact Slavcho Dimitrov, curator of the Skopje Pride Weekend, 078 208803.