Future Bodies

The Body Concepts series is based on the principle of transdisciplinary encounters. The session begins with a lecture by Pia Brezavšček, followed by a dialogue with artist Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald.

LECTURE BY PIA BREZAVŠČEK: From YUFU to XENOFU: starting from Yugofuturism, I will speculate on the future of bodies or future bodies. Yugofuturism is a proposal of a movement we started at MASKA institute, which puts into account a proposition that is regionally and culturally situated in the Balkans to design a future in what seems like a futureless world. Its anchoring point is ambivalence – an almost mythologically haunting but inevitably lost feeling of sovereignty and hope.

The inspiration is drawn from both the hope and the failure alike. It is this marginality, peripherality or ‘failure’ that sculpts the bodies of the future and can contribute to their interconnection on a global scale. Finding out what a body can do is no longer enough – for its future prospects we have to consider its failure, what it can’t do, how it can become a different, other, posthuman body. This is what the writer Octavia E. Butler does in many of her surprisingly somatic novels, most notably in her Xenogenesis series. It is a sometimes painful transformation of a body as an identity (of a species) to give space to something utterly new. Xenofuturism, which is a future without nostalgia, is possible if we are prepared to make way for strange alliances and learn from our failure.

Link for livestream. Free admission. In English.

PIA BREZAVŠČEK is the editor-in-chief of MASKA, a bilingual journal for contemporary performing arts, based in Ljubljana. She works as a cultural worker in several roles - editor, publicist, critic, theatrologist and dramaturge. She is a philosopher and art historian, a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She was amongst the co-founders and editor (2019 – 22) of the internet site www.neodvisni.art that focuses on the critical reflection of the local independent performing arts scene. From 2017-2020, she was the president of the Association for Contemporary Dance Slovenia. Her topics of interest are also feminism and contemporary philosophies of the body, on which she has published articles in various publications. As a dramaturge, she participated in the projects of Bara Kolenc, Magdalena Reiter, Snježana Premuš and often collaborated with Saška Rakef.

COLLEEN NDEMEH FITZGERALD is a multidisciplinary performance artist, activist and cultural worker of Kpelle (Liberian) and Irish-American descent. Her movement-based practice centers women of the African diaspora, as well as her feminist, antiracist and anticolonial politics. She has trained extensively in Afro-diasporic, West African and Contemporary dance techniques. She received her BA in Dance and Anthropology from Bates College (US), a post-graduate diploma in "Territory-Based Artistic Practices" from the National University of the Arts (Argentina), and is finishing the MA SODA Berlin at the HZT Berlin. From 2014-2019 she lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina where she engaged in artistic and political practice in community with Afro Latin Americans. There she co-founded Kukily, an international afrofeminist arts collective that works across borders and cultures in performance art, audiovisuals, installation and community-centered practice. She has performed and taught in the Americas, West Africa and Europe.

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