25 May Skopje Pride Weekend 2023 | QUEER CHRONOPOLITICS: History, Affects, Utopias
It is with great pleasure that we invite you to the 11th edition of the Skopje Pride Weekend Festival, which will take place from June 1 till 13 at three locations around Skopje: the Museum of Contemporary Art–MoCA, the Youth Cultural Center–YCC and CSS Center–Jadro.
Skopje Pride Weekend is a Festival for queer arts, culture, and theory, whose goal is creating space for presentation and promotion of non-normative forms of world-making, relations, affects, identity positions, bodily styles and sensibilities that have been marked, by the heteronormative, nationalistic and neoliberal capitalist context, as queer, eccentric failures.
The thematic focus of this years’ edition is QUEER CHRONOPOLITICS: History, Affects, Utopias. The problems that this year’s festival will address rise from the multitude of queer theories and historiographies that place the question of time and history at the center of their investigations. A particular interest of the festival is the questioning of hegemonic nationalist historiographical narratives and policies of national archives, as well as their strategies of erasure, exclusion, and ignoring of the invisible and secret histories of sexual and gender minorities and their experiences, as well as the possibilities of revision, rereading, rewriting and reimagining the historical (absent) traces and voices, and ephemeral archives of queer people. Additionally, with this theme, we aim to critically explore the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms that mobilize temporality as a key technology and vector of power in the reproduction of heteronormativity, capitalism, and racist/colonial violence. Finally, queer research on the politics of time focuses on the affective dynamics and socially organized experiences of negative emotions, as lived experiences that reject the progressive idea of forward-looking time as a capitalist hetero-chrono-normativity of productivity.
The Festival’s big opening is on June 1 at 20:30 at the MoCA, with the exhibition Remembering Futures by the famous Polish interdisciplinary artist Karol Radziszewski. Radziszewski is known for his artistic practice that includes unique tools for editing materials, combining facts with fantasy, composing documents from shreds of memory and misleading the viewers in order to show us alternative trails of remembering. The exhibition will present his multidisciplinary and archival practice through multiple series of works.
The very next day, on June 2 at MoCa, the latest performance GONER of one of the most attractive names in contemporary choreography and dance practice Malik Nashad Sharpe (UK) known as Marikiscrycrycry will take place. On June 3 at YCC, to our great pleasure, the choreographer and performance artist of Chilean and Swedish origin, Shirley Harthey Ubilla, will have the performance Abject of Desire, whilst on June 4 at MoCA, the famous philosopher, theorist and artist Marina Grzinic (SL) will give a lecture on “PUNK and ex-Yugoslav LGBTQIA+ community in Slovenia and beyond: Sex and politics undone in racial capitalism”.
In the second half of the program, one of the most outstanding young artists in our country, Jovan Josifovski, will have the opening of his solo exhibition Elastic Violence on June 8 at CSS Center-Jadro, while on June 9 at MoCA the fantastic trio STEAM ROOM, consisting of Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva, Darío Barreto Damas, will perform a dance and a choreographic concept for eternity dragON forever, their last part of the choreographic trilogy dragON. The festival will close this years edition on June 13 at YCC with our favorites Rumena Buzharovska and Ana Vasileva from PeachPreach who will moderate the Night of Queer Storytelling – SHAME ON YOU!, followed by a DJ set by Ivana Dragsik.
For more information check this year’s poster and catalog that contains the detailed program. The catalog also includes a collection of key theoretical texts on the topic of QUEER-CHRONOPOLITICS. The publication will be available as a physical edition on the Festival’s opening.
The 2023 SPW Festival is organized by Coalition MARGINS and LGBTI Support Center, and is realized in partnership with TransFormA, Stronger Together, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, CSS Center Jadro, Tiiiit!Inc., and thanks to the selfless support from Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Foundation Open Society Macedonia, Ministry of Culture of North Macedonia, and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. The exhibition of Karol Radziszewski is realized in partnership with Stronger Together, and is partially supported by the European Union. Malik Nashad Sharpe’s performance is realized in partnership with TransFormA, and is partially supported by Transgender Europe. SHAME ON YOU! is realized in partnership with Tiiiit!Inc. and is supported by Sweden and the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation.