Rok Vevar is a dance historian and archivist who founded the Temporary Slovene Dance Archive (TSDA) in 2011. TSDA is a platform for documenting and historicizing modern and contemporary dance in ...Slovenia. He first opened the archive to the public in his private apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and then in March 2018, he transferred it into the premises of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana. The material is now more accessible to its users who are at the same time witnesses of the development of this peculiar archive. TSDA has thus become a performative, time-specific and site-specific installation presenting the archive as a structure evolving over time and without end. It seems that by entering the institutional framework as an individual, the archivist has found material support and space while retaining his relative independence. In the introduction of his article, Aldo Milohnic presents the genealogy and the structure of TSDA and then, in the main part of the article, he analyses a specific complexity of the relation artist–activist–archivist, represented by TSDA’s founder Rok Vevar.
It was Matisse who once said that artists should periodically change their names; Slovenian artists Žiga Kariž, Emil Hrvatin and Davide Grassi have been actively working on materialization of that ...idea since 2007 when they officially changed their names to Janez Janša (a name which a majority of inhabitants of Slovenia automatically associate with the president of the strongest right-wing party and so far two times Prime Minister of Slovenia). Although the artists insist that they had strictly 'personal reasons' for this act of a radical intervention on their own personalities, it is quite obvious that in this case a 'real name' is actually being 'pirated' by them and turned into a kind of multiple name. Their new name is no longer a pseudonym, rather, it starts to function as homonym - it is shifted into a more complex net of meaning. This complexity can be examined on numerous examples accumulated as a series in the last ten years of the 'Janša Project'. This article is devoted to two examples of that 'series':
Signature Event Context
(2008) and
Signature
(2010). In the first part of the text the author discusses a theoretical context of the signature and then, in the second part, he comes to the main point - the performativity of (re)naming by the three Janšas' interplay of signatures and identities. Finally, he offers possible answers to two questions provoked by the three Janšas' attempt to do things with names and signatures: first, how the performance
Signature Event Context
and the exhibition
Signature
are related to other projects in the 'series', and second, does the signature still serve as a guarantor of the authenticity of a work of art or is it rather a product of the method of name-creation?
The article reflects on the synergic interaction of artistic creativity and activist engagement through a humorous approach of some contemporary civilian protest actions in Slovenia. The article ...proposes the concept of “artivism” as a hybrid term for activist-artistic interventions. Case studies discussed are examples of subversive re-appropriations of insulting statements made by the former Prime Minister and his party in a creative and humorous way. These infamous and defamatory expressions, initially used by politicians to verbally attack protesters, were re-appropriated and recuperated by “artivists” and turned back, like a boomerang, at those who had originally sent them into the public, as offensively constructed verbal degradations. Uprising of Zombies in winter 2012–2013 and the public protests organized by the movement called the Erased in 2003 indicate humorous artistic expressions that are turned into symbolic weapons of people’s resistance against domination of corrupted political elite.
Exploitation in the sphere of production is not specific only to capitalism. However, only in the capitalist mode of production is the extraction of surplus value made legally possible by mediation ...of the sphere of circulation: the wage worker enters into contractual relations as a free legal subject in order to become the object of exploitation in the sphere of production. In recent decades social and economic distance between artists and the industrial working class has been diminished due to overall precarisation of labour and the global division of work. Displaced work propelled by growing economic migrations, expanding self-employment, temporary work, project-based work and other forms of insecure and irregular work are rapidly becoming "standard" types of employment in many branches of economy, not only in cultural industries, while unlimited full-time employment contracts are becoming almost an endemic way of legal agreement between labour and capital. The author analyses several contemporary performances as examples of artistic critique of current ideological canons and power structures governing labour relations in the globalised capitalist production. He is predominantly interested in projects by Stefan Kaegi / Rimini Protokoll, Sebastijan Horvat, Brane Zorman and Irena Pivka, dealing with labour relations, migrations and the global division of work as well as experimenting with workers and/or spectators as performers. The performances referred to in this article are just a few examples of a new wave of critical art practices dealing with the brutalisation of labour relations and the destruction of social solidarity. Although performance is maybe not the best place to rehearse revolution, these artistic statements against degradation of work in the age of austerity are nevertheless a valuable attempt to swim against the tide.
Il saggio esamina alcuni esempi di movimenti autonomi (“alter-globalisti”, sociali) in Slovenia negli anni 2000 che hanno coinvolto “l’estetica” nel condurre la loro attività politica. Di pari passo, ...il saggio si interroga su eventi artistici ‘politicizzati’ ovvero, su quegli eventi che possano essere intesi come appartenenti al mondo dell’arte, perché creati da artisti o perché si dichiarano come artistici. Sulla base degli esempi di performance artistiche analizzate, l'autore spiega quanto l'artivismo sia una sorta di interventismo pubblico la cui natura ibrida consente rapidi passaggi dalla sfera prevalentemente artistica a quella prevalentemente politica e viceversa.
V prvem delu prispevka avtor analizira pojav režiserja in spremembe njegovega položaja v slovenskem gledališču od druge polovice 19. stoletja do danes. V tem kontekstu ga še posebej zanimajo premene ...gledališke režije, ki so se zgodile v drugi polovici 20. stoletja s pojavom skupinskega gledališča. Avtor metodološko kombinira zgodovinsko in primerjalno analizo, saj ti procesi potekajo še danes, ko se čedalje pogosteje govori in piše o »snovalnem gledališču« in drugih oblikah gledališkega ustvarjanja, ki se oddaljujejo od konvencionalnega postopka, po katerem dramatik napiše dramsko besedilo kot literarno umetnino, režiser pa jo prevede v gledališko umetnino. V sodobnem slovenskem gledališču je vse več predstav, kjer vnaprej napisano dramsko besedilo ni ključno za končni produkt ustvarjalnega procesa. Najpogosteje uporabljana izraza, ki označujeta to vrsto predstav, sta »po motivih« in »avtorski projekt«. Čeprav izraza nista sinonima in ju ni mogoče enačiti, oba implicirata tako imenovani »snovalni« tip gledališča. Avtor primerja skupinsko s snovalnim načinom ustvarjanja in opozori, da gre za praksi, ki sicer lahko potekata vzporedno, vendar ju ne moremo enačiti. Premislek o razmerju med skupinskim in snovalnim v sodobnem gledališču zgosti v ugotovitvi, da je za skupinsko gledališče konstitutivno specifično razmerje med ustvarjalno skupino in pozicijo režiserja, medtem ko je za snovalno gledališče ključno razmerje med ustvarjalno skupino in pozicijo dramatika. Na koncu se dotakne tudi povezav med postdramskim in postrežijskim gledališčem ter pojava ustvarjalne skupine kot kolektivne subjektivitete.
In the first part of the article, the author analyses the appearance of the director and the changes in his position in Slovenian theatre from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. ...In this context, he is particularly interested in the changes in theatre directing that took place in the second half of the 20th century with the emergence of collective theatre. The author methodologically combines historical and comparative analysis, as these processes still take place today, when devised theatre and other forms of theatrical creation are increasingly spoken and written about, moving away from the conventional process by which a playwright writes a dramatic text as a literary work of art and the director then transforms it into a theatrical work of art. There are more and more performances in contemporary Slovenian theatre in which a pre-written dramatic text is not crucial for the final product of the creative process. The two most commonly used terms for this type of performance are po motivih (based on the motifs) and avtorski projekt (auteur performance). Although the terms are not synonymous, both terms imply a devised type of theatre. The author compares group creation with the devised way of creating and points out that although these are practices that can take place in parallel, they cannot be equated. The author concludes that for collective theatre, the specific relationship between the creative group and the director’s position is constitutive. In contrast, for devised theatre, the relationship between the creative group and the playwright’s position is crucial. Finally, the author also touches on the connections between postdramatic and post-directors’ theatre and the emergence of the creative group as a collective subjectivity.
V začetku 21. stoletja sta dve letnici zaznamovali teoretsko produkcijo o sodobnih adaptacijah (prireditvah) starogrške dramatike: najprej leto 2006, ko sta bili objavljeni temeljni študiji na tem ...področju Linde Hutcheon (A Theory of Adaptation) in Julie Sanders (Adaptation and Appropriation), potem pa leto 2017, ko je izšlo kar pet pomembnih monografij: Tragedy‘s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 Erike Fischer-Lichte in Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Re-writing Tragedy 1970–2005 Eleftherie Ioannidou ter Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, ki so jo uredili Emer O‘Toole, Andrea Pelegri Kristić in Stuart Young, Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, ki jo je uredil George Rodosthenous, in Adapting Translation for the Stage, ki sta jo uredila Geraldine Brodie in Emma Cole. Naslednje leto je izšla tudi obsežna pregledna knjiga The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, ki so jo uredili Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs in Eckart Voigts. Vmes so seveda izšle tudi nekatere druge knjižne izdaje, ki so se tako ali drugače ukvarjale z adaptacijami in predelavami antičnih in drugih klasičnih besedil, med njimi študija Barbare Sušec Michieli »Težave s klasiko in z zgodovino: starogrška tragedija v slovenskem gledališču 20. stoletja«, ki je izšla kot poglavje v zborniku Dinamika sprememb v slovenskem gledališču 20. stoletja (AGRFT in Maska, 2010) in posredno tudi knjiga Andrijana Laha Slovenska dramatika z antično tematiko(Slovenski gledališki muzej, 2011). Zdaj se je temu obsežnemu korpusu pridružila tudi knjiga Adapting Greek Tragedy: Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts, ki sta jo uredila Vayos Liapis in Avra Sidiropoulou.
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