DRUGAJANJE 2016

The political crises of contemporary day are deafening and no longer confined to the borders of nations or regions. After all, Maribor, too, is but a few dozen kilometers removed from barbed wire, and its students well aware of the uncertainties of the future, in part caused by the exhausted nature of our current political order. Which, then, are the terrains of resistance, struggle, or at least genuine understanding of our present situation and trajectory?

This year’s Festival Drugajanje artists engage in dialogue with the notion that the personal is inherently political. From the sixties onward, with second-wave feminism and the powerful student movements, we’ve come to understand that the private is indeed political, that the most intimate, most personal decisions are those that at once reflect the global political state and co-create it. In this manner, Mark Požlep travels the retirement homes of our ex-common Yugoslavian state to look our future in the eyes, Deborah Pearson searches for a path to the current and coming through the history of Hungary, through film and her own personal past, Beton Ltd. renounce great stories and venture into the realm of their own intimacy, their own “commune”, probing if true change and understanding may perhaps indeed arise only from micro-environments. In the meanwhile, the Balkan Kavkaz artist collective will tickle Maribor’s nevralgic points with their various interventions.

Sometimes, it is precisely the tiny changes, minute disturbances of the everyday that catalyze broader perspectives and action, with our collective intimate decisions, time and again, being what ultimately shatters the stasis of prevalent patterns and impossible boundaries.

Since 2012, Festival Drugajanje has been part of the network Festivals in Transition, a cooperation between thirteen festivals that, within the framework of their Urban Heat project, strive to artistically explore and examine relationships between the arts, the city and its invisible communities. This year, the festival hosts the socalled artist laboratory, which focuses on Maribor and on narratives of survival – socioeconomic structures of power.

more about drugajanje

Since 2001 Bunker is organizing Drugajanje festival in Maribor. It started on the initiative of the headmaster of a high school II. gimnazija Maribor Ivan Lorenčič and it grew into a permanent and fruitful partnership between Bunker and the school and also built a very successful bridge between Ljubljana, the capitol of Slovenia and Maribor, the second largest city in Slovenia.

Drugajanje is a concentrated short contemporary arts festival organized in collaboration with secondary school in Maribor at their theatre and at other venues in Maribor. The focus is on performing arts, especially contemporary theatre and dance. The festival was founded with the purpose of bringing the young generation and the whole city some fresh and vibrant performance art. At the same time it enables Slovene performances to spread out from Ljubljana, where most of the national contemporary scene is being produced.

Contrary to the belief that special performances for the youth should be produced for the youth, Drugajanje has always had a strong artistic contemporary profile and the program through the years always consisted of state-of-the-art contemporary theater and dance.

In the last years the festival has developed from a Slovene focused to internationally focused festival in terms of geographical distribution and has also had a shift in the format: from merely presenting finished works of art to youth and other inhabitants of Maribor we have started developing more process oriented festivals that strongly takes into consideration the festival’s home: Maribor.