Debatna Kafana, 2022. Photo: Nada Žgank.
This year, the Festival’s tradition of Discussion Cafés under the Tabor chestnuts over coffee, which continue to reflect on the role of art in the problem-oriented issues, will be linked to our Summer School. Its theme is Our Many Easts, while both Discussion Cafés will be dedicated to the topic of imagining or even creating future spaces. Spaces that are “ours” or shared are constantly under attack from many different forces – urbanisation, gentrification, commodification, commercialisation, as well as wars, resource depletion and consequent degradation – or subject to attempts to transform them by various interests.
Wednesday, 28 August 2024 | 5.30 p.m. | ŠD Tabor (in collaboration with Mladi levi festival)
Discussion Café: Ala Younis, Bojana Kunst, Ivana Müller (moderated by Klara Drnovšek Solina)
The first panel will try to initiate a reflection on common spaces as spaces of potential for reparative practices, or how to rethink change in a way that brings community practices into the space and allows for the emergence or support of community.
Ala Younis is an artist with curatorial, film and publishing projects. She has exhibited in Amman, Dubai, Sharjah, New York, London, Seville and Prague. She curated the first Kuwaiti Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013), and co-curated the Singapore Biennale (2022). In 2012, Ala Younis co-founded Kayfa ta, a non-profit Arabic publishing initiative. She is the Artistic Director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne), and Research Scholar at the al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturge and performance theoretician. She works as a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies of the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she leads an international master program Choreography and Performance.
Ivana Müller is a choreographer, artist and writer. Through her choreographic and theater works, performances, installations, text works, video lectures, audio pieces, guided tours and web works she rethinks the politics of spectacle and the spectacular, revisits the places of the imaginary and imagination, questions the notion of “participation,” investigates the idea of value and its representation, and keeps on getting inspired by the relationship between performers and spectators.
Thursday, 29 August 2024 | 5.30 p.m. | ŠD Tabor (in collaboration with Mladi levi festival)
Discussion Café: Dubravka Sekulić, Maja Simoneti (moderated by Bojana Piškur)
The second panel will focus on community management and self-organisation in defending specific spaces and planning their future purpose and use.
Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her research explores transformations of contemporary cities at the nexus between the production of space, laws, and economy. She is the MA City Design Programme Lead at the Royal College of Art. She holds a PhD from the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich (CH), on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-Aligned Movement. She is working on a book with a tentative title, “City against the City – Minor Planning for a Liberated Future.” In addition, she is working on several co-edited volumes Take Back the Land, with Godofredo Periera, Life of Crops - Towards Investigative Memorialisation, with Milica Tomić and Philipp Sattler, and Curatorial Design with Wilfried Kuehn. She is the author of several books, including Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), and most recently she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on Don’t Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored the spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform.
Dr. Maja Simoneti graduated and obtained her PhD at the Department of Landscape Architecture of the Faculty of Biotechnology. Her professional activity is based on 30 years of experience in spatial planning in practice, which she has transferred and upgraded in recent years to consultancy and public interest advocacy in spatial planning and environmental protection, managing to combine her planning experience with the development of new practices and applied research. With a scope of activity and commitment that goes beyond the usual professional engagement, she has significantly influenced and contributed to the establishment of landscape architecture as a profession, while paving the way for newer generations in landscape architecture and other disciplines, including through her teaching work at several faculties.
