The main curatorial theme of this year's edition of the Festival is QUEER COMMONS: Politics of Friendship, Love and Affects. With this topic, we aim to put at the center of the queer political, social and cultural orientations the issues related to thinking, representation, distribution and staging of the commons. We will approach the commons through a critical investigation of the normative assumptions of friendship, love and emotions in the hegemonic heteronormativity and masculine political imaginations, as well as their implications for our socio-political horizons. The festival also aimsto offer alternative forms of imagination, practice and embodiment of the commons and the politics of friendship and love, by starting precisely from the structural position of the margins, as well as socio-cultural and intimate practices and infrastructures for care, support and communing in queer and feminist communities and networks.
We opened this year's festival on June 2, at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, with a retrospective exhibition BLINDED OF LOVE by FRANKO B, one of the most important contemporary performances and visual artists in the world. He is an artist who doesn't separate life from practice, with his work situated somewhere between isolation and seduction, benevolence and confrontation, suffering and eroticism, punk and poetry. His concern is to make the unbearable bearable, and provoke the viewer to reconsider his own understanding of beauty and of suffering. He uses his body as a metaphor for social struggle, and embodying notions of the personal, political and poetic. Projecting the confluence of love and pain, Franko B demonstrates that humanity, as a condition, can be reformed.
The audience also had the rare opportunity to see on June 04 the latest performance of Nao Bustamante (USA), a legendary Latin artist, whose works include performance, video installation, cinematography, sculpture and writing, and in Skopje she performed together with Marcus Kuiland Nazario (USA). The festival program also presented: the dance trio STEAM ROOM (05.06), who unreservedly won the hearts of the Skopje audience last year, performance by the UK based SPIT! collective in cooperation with the Macedonian drag queen Tokyo de Ville (06.06), the Macedonian contemporary artists Zorica Zafirovska and Darko Aleksovski with a joint exhibition at CSS JADRO(09.06), and the jazz trio Svetlost (06.06). Like the past festival editions, this year we had two lectures, one performative lecture by prof. Jelisaveta Blagojević from Belgrade (08.06), and an online lecture by FRANKO B (03.06).
This year the catalog for the festival was extended with an edited collection of texts by some of the most important contemporary theorists who address the issues in the focus of the festival, such as Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Jose Esteban Muñoz, Michael Hartd and Antonio Negri and others.
The Skopje Pride Weekend is organized by the Coalition MARGINS Skopje and the LGBTI Support center, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Arts and JADRO. This year’s festival was supported by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the Embassy of the USA, the Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands, Foundation Open Society Macedonia, the EU through the TIME IS NOW project, the Ministry of Culture and the City of Skopje. Media sponsor of the festival is PORTRET Magazine.
