This year, Spider festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary!
Jun 16- 20 Jun, Tivoli Park in Ljubljana
AGAIN, NEVER THE SAME
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Spider festival – Festival of Radical bodies. Ten years of a continuous push on bodies to radicalize themselves as well as their surroundings, to see through the “de facto” state of mind and fuel it with a movement of critical and transformational flow, to sense potentiality in all its force.
But how is the “radical” infused in a conventional system of an annual festival? Does it survive as “radical” within the logic of mere continuation? Are the temporal and perceptional “moving forward” together with the drive for novelty really an expression of radicality, or could it be said that the radical is in such conditions is threatened to become only a mask of a conventional, standard model?
We believe that following a conventional logic – a line-up of dance performances which we haven’t yet seen – would be no more than affirming the standard model. Furthermore, the 10th anniversary as an historical achievement and the “radical” as a horizon can easily be placed under the normative regulations of the standard model: they are both free to create the same relations of domination and subordination which neoliberalism glorifies enthusiastically. When embedded in the standard model, the deregulated and disruptive “radical” doesn’t resist or avoid the neoliberal market logic, but rather feeds it. Thus we aim for a certain non-standard model.
But what would its logic be? Perhaps what we should (and are) now be looking for is not “every year someone else”, but rather “someone again, never the same”. A rejection of the binarities that are intertwined in the dreariness of informational structures as well as our everyday lives.
The 10th as a concept: following the numeric order from 0 to 10, 9 stands as the last whole single number before these entities begin to be divided into two, 1+0 into 10. 0 1 is a binary system, a base for digitality which permeates our daily lives. The combinations of 0s and 1s are omnipresent; from credit cards and social media algorithms to carefully manicured backgrounds for control and surveillance. The technologies that supposedly “empower” us are instruments that create an illusion of liberty – they “liberate” us into efficient producers of surplus value and relations of domination.
On the other hand, the division that follows after the last natural single number 9 into two also announces the division of “one” into two, three, four, and so on. And here comes the swap of the logic. The same binary system which is at the core of digitality allows us to logically proceed towards scientific axioms of high abstraction and in direction of dividing the time/space continuum (i.e. quantum physics logic). The difference being that the analog world (from Greek ana “up, on, upon, above,” and logus “reason, word”) appears to be heterogeneous at its core, yet striving to be joined in a whole, while the digital is whole at its core, yet allowing for (many) parallel realities to appear on the outset. In other words, could we think of digitality in terms of periodicity, as a cut from the ossified binary system?
What digital stands for is a site of contemporary power which organizes technologies, bodies, and societies, a site where capital exploits labour. It’s no wonder that the most horrible socio-political, neoliberal dichotomous systems, rooted in white supremacism, still hold control over digitalism. Could we envision the digital in terms of art and Dance performance as a cut from this standard model?
In a non-standard model, the digital is challenged by the physical presence of both living and nonliving organisms. The challenge to create the festival where the events that are formed by and through physical presence of bodies (living and nonliving organisms) is to form an experience of a community following the logics of a non-standard model, a community where one divides in two. A concept of a new materiality might be on the horizon. Yet the physical presence of the human body is challenging and is challenged by the terms of dominance and conservativism.
Bearing all that in mind and following the logic of non-standard models, this year we are inviting all the artists that were present at our 9th edition of Spider festival to be part of its 10th anniversary and – repeat it: the same Dance Hood, same place, yet challenging the idea of repetition.
One of our last year’s statements was that we don’t want to go back to what supposed to be a “normality”, literally meaning a standardized way of living. If the 9th edition is the last instance before the age of the festival divides in two, this year the festival will be the 1,0 festival. And this is what we want to celebrate! We will meet at the same place once more, facing the same conditions of the Tivoli park.
Last but not least, the idea of a radical non-standard model which proposes a radical repetition of the 9th edition of the festival addresses not only the artists, but also the audience. This artistic experiment allows both the artist and the witness to test experience – not to think “about” experience, but to think “according to” experience. In this way, the artist and the witness become identical, which allows for an auto-testing of experience. This mode of artistic experimentation abandons the age-old question of reference, it abandons the this-that structure of representation. Radical repetition as a way of event without representation? We invite you, dear audience, artists, witnesses, viewers, critics, and all the other living and non-living creatures to come again at the same place and experience a radical critique of the loop of one single public presentation.
This year, Spider Festival is celebrating its 10th (TENTH!) anniversary. But none of this
happens without your support. In order to preserve the festivals future of radical art and
radical dance of radical bodies, we kindly invite you to help us with donations, all of which will be spent entirely for the organisation of the festival. A little goes a long way. Thank you, and see you in June!
Donations and ticket reservation: pretix.eu/pekinpah/spider2021
The festival will follow the instructions of National Institute of Public Health regarding the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
