Chapter 1 | Feminist Storytelling

by Ana Vujanović & Marta Popivoda

May 9–27, 2022

This chapter will be held online

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED

This chapter will explore theoretical and artistic concerns and methods developed collaboratively over the years—revisiting dominant HIStory, antifascist legacies, transgenerational care, and prefigurings of the commons. 

Through a queer feminist framework, our practice deploys various strategies, from ecriture feminine and feminizing male narratives, to grappling with dominant male subjects and toying with gender poetics. 

In the materialist post-structuralist view, form and content are closely intertwined. An abstraction is never divorced from its material origin, as its medium is the material vessel of communication that intervenes in the realm of the signified to generate new meanings and possibilities.

The chapter will consist of lectures, seminars, screenings, and guest-led interventions. Using our works and theoretical writings as a repository of topics and tools, we will attempt to articulate a framework for understanding and practicing: Feminist story-telling, writing HERstory, the womanly face of war, landscape dramaturgy, multiplying gazes and perspectives, and radical slowness. Participants are invited to find and share examples from their own research and experience.

Week 1: 

MONDAY, May 9 at 4:30–7PM Beirut time

Introduction & Landscape dramaturgy: meaning, experience and attention

In this first encounter, we will introduce ourselves and our work, and outline the chapter. 

The introduction will be followed by a lecture with Ana Vujanovic outlining a dramaturgical approach from contemporary dance and performance, museum performance art, and film, which attempts to organize an egalitarian experience for being-together in the world, rather than conveying meaning from the stage or screen. We will also organize short artistic exercises, inspired by Gertrude Stein.

WEDNESDAY, May 11 at 4:30–7PM Beirut time

Feminist story-telling / Landscape dramaturgy / Slow cinema

Screening of Landscapes of Resistance (2021), followed by a discussion with Marta Popivoda.

THURSDAY, May 12 at 4:30–7PM Beirut time

[PUBLIC LECTURE]

Landscape dramaturgy: space populated with perspectives

This lecture with Ana Vujanovic examines how the spatiality of landscape performances or films are organized, beyond the Western paradigm of the one-point perspective. Ana will draw from Hubert Damisch’s thesis that the perspective is not simply a visual regime of representation, but ‘a model of thought,’ and present alternative proposals from contemporary art.

Week 2:

MONDAY, May 16 at 4:30–7PM Beirut time

[PUBLIC LECTURE]

A lecture by Nikita Dhawan, professor of political theory, who deals with postcolonial queer-feminist history.

WEDNESDAY, May 18 at 4:30–7PM Beirut time

Writing HERstory: performative archives

Screening of Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (2013), followed by a discussion with Marta Popivoda.

FRIDAY, May 20 at 4:30–7PM Beirut time

Feminist storytelling

A lecture and seminar with Ana Vujanović and Marta Popivoda around texts by Adriana Cavarero and Ursula Le Guin. 

Week 3:

MONDAY, May 23 at 3–5:30PM Beirut time

Radical slowness

Lecture and seminar with Ana Vujanović and Marta Popivoda attending to issues of time and temporality in contemporary art, culture, and everyday life under capitalism. Radical slowness is about being concerned with “doing everything at the right speed” rather than “doing everything at a snail's pace” (Carl Honoré), whilst shedding critical light on current speed economies. 

Seminar will be based on the excerpts from Benjamin Noys. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014)

Artworks on non-work to be discussed: The Nap Ministry, Mladen Stilinovic. 

WEDNESDAY, May 25 at 3–5:30PM Beirut time

SlowDance

Artist talk with Hana Erdman & Louise Dahl, followed by a discussion with Ana, Hana, Louise and Marta about the politics and the poetics of slowing down time as an artistic gesture.

FRIDAY, May 27 at 3–5:30PM Beirut time

Being populated with others

Closing session for reflection on seminar and works by Marta, Ana, and the participants.

Marta Popivoda (Berlin / Belgrade) is a filmmaker, video-artist, and researcher. Her work explores tensions between memory and history, collective and individual bodies, as well as ideology and everyday life, with a focus on antifascist and feminist potentialities of the Yugoslav socialist project. Popivoda’s first feature documentary, Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (2013), premiered at the 63rd Berlinale and was later screened at many international film festivals. The film is part of the permanent collection of MoMA New York, and is featured in What Is Contemporary Art?, MoMA’s online course about contemporary art from 1980 to the present. Her work has also been featured in major art galleries, such as Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York; MAXXI, Rome; M HKA, Antwerp; Museum of Modern Art + MSUM, Ljubljana; among others. Popivoda received the prestigious Berlin Art Prize for the visual arts by Akademie der Künste Berlin and Edith-Russ-Haus Award for Emerging Media Artist. Her latest feature documentary Landscapes of Resistance premiered in the Tiger Competition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, IFFR 2021 and by now won more then ten awards.

Ana Vujanović (Berlin / Belgrade) is a cultural worker whose practice brings together critical theory and contemporary art. She holds a Ph.D. in Humanities and a post-graduate diploma in Culture and Gender Studies. She has lectured at various universities and was a visiting professor at the Performance Studies department. of the University Hamburg. Since 2016, she has been a team member and mentor at SNDO – School for New Dance Development, Academy of Theatre and Dance Amsterdam. She was a member of the editorial collective of TkH [Walking Theory], a Belgrade-based theoretical-artistic platform, and editor-in-chief of the TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (2001–2017). She participates in artworks (performance, theatre, dance, and video/film), as a dramaturg and co-author with artists such as Marta Popivoda, Eszter Salamon, Christine de Smedt, Dragana Bulut etc., most recently on the documentary film Landscapes of Resistance (dir. Marta Popivoda). Vujanović has published a number of articles in journals and collections, and authored and edited several books, most recently A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, ed. with L. Piazza (Berlin: b_books, 2019) and Toward a Transindividual Self, A study in social dramaturgy, with Bojana Cvejic (Berlin: Archive Books, 2022).