15.09.2007
[Prologue]III
September - December 2007, Graz, Austria
Exhibition opening 22. - 23. 9. 2007
Trilogy Worklab 2. - 5. 10. 2007
Upstage performance 4. 10. 2007
Symposium - 8. - 9. 11. 2007
Check the programme.
02.02.2008
About
[prologue] is an international annual symposium, exhibition, and journal dedicated to critical theory, activism and visual arts. [prologue] addresses groups of women and mixed groups of activists who want to include engendered and situated knowledges into emerging fields of art, culture and media. [prologue] as a series has shown an inbuilt power to expand itself. Originally planned as a two-year project of continued dialogs on current feminist strategies in art production, [prologue]III in 2007 marked its fifth year of existence. In this period of time, over a hundred artists and theoreticians from different fields of expertise have met in Graz, Manchester, Berlin, and Rome. While communities in Skopje, Barcelona and Istanbul are joining this self-organized network in the near future, the great variety and number of collaborations that sprang out of past encounters proves that [prologue] indeed serves its purpose: it facilitates support for each others' work and enables collaborative artistic production.
When association ESC and [prologue] joined Trilogy in 2007, the existing network of collaborations expanded to Ljubljana and Amsterdam and broadened the fields of possible exchange. [prologue] was able to deepen Red Dawn's understanding of performance and performativity while [prologue] itself gained insight into the activist efforts of Ljubljana's feminist and queer community by participating in its 2008 festival program. [prologue] also re-established its relationship with Eclectic Tech Carnival which was hosted by ESC in 2005. Translator and media activist Aileen Derieg who participated in [prologue] III and Eclectic Tech Carnival observed that "it is interesting to see how different people use technology differently ... how people communicate ... and how people feel more and more helpless if they are just given something and they don't have a chance to learn how to use it, to feel in control... Overcoming that sense of helplessness is something I could contribute to making a better society."
The main [prologue] III event took place on November 8th 2007 in a form of symposium. The symposium was focused on performative strategies in art and brought together young artists, activists, theoreticians and organizers from Austria, Romania, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Serbia and The Netherlands. The symposium was preceded by video screenings from the first and second [prologue] and accompanied by Reni Hofmuller's review of past discussions that lead to the concept for 2007's [prologue]III. While the prolific composer, activist and organizer from Graz spoke about the underlying principles of organizing international gatherings like [prologue], her concept of 'performative strategies' clearly stretched beyond organizational concerns. Together with philosopher, video artist, activist and [prologue] journal editor Marina Grzinic, she referred to our increasing subjection to mechanisms of biopower and the benefits they guarantee to economic elites as grounds for artistic and political rearticulations of the concepts we use to speak of society (employment, migration, development of nation states, precariat) and the concepts we use to speak of body (gender, skin, borders, performance). The need to analyze the potentially existing open spaces and opportunities that emerge from sociopolitical and technological developments was further developed in the presentation of New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions, a collection of feminist writings edited by Marina Grzinic and Rosa Reitsamer. The 41 contributions written by 60 theoreticians, artists, and activists seek new feminist approaches to questions, topics and agendas reacting against (wo)men trafficking, the forces of migration and bare lives as ways to reflect on possible new mode(l)s of their representation and articulation.
Art collective h.arta connected the theoretical framework of [prologue] III to Romanian context while the media activist Agnese Trocchi addressed the necessity of connecting feminist theory to everyday experiences of women and men whom it claims to represent. The difficult question of representation - of who is entitled to speak and whose voices can be heard - was also tackled in several art works by Zoe Gudovic, Klub Zwei collective, Nicole Pruckermayr, Marina Grzinic, Eva Cruells, Alex Hache, Nœria Verges and collective h.arta. They exhibited next to Elke Auer's and Esther Straganz's cuntstunt do-it-yourself zine workshop and presentation. [prologue] III was completed with Vilbjorg Broch's inventive performance Kunstmaler, nein, solange ich lebe, niemals and the improvised audio-visual collaboration between Reni HofmŸller and Agnese Trocchi, demonstrating the interweaved relations and creative possibilities that exist between artists who are open to change.
[prologue]III fostered highly interesting debates on current issues. As such, it was engaging for participants and for local audience which has been following discussions about art, cultural theory, feminism and queer strategies long enough to relate these most diverse approaches to each other - and themselves. Last but not least, [prologue]III also reached an international audience that followed [prologue]III over the internet or read its journal.