PERIPHERIES I

In this issue of Maska, we began by moving away from a dichotomous view that rigidly separates the center from the periphery. As Bojana Kunst notes in her text Performing the Other Body – when assessing particularities, it’s crucial to go beyond recognizing differences within a totality and instead focus on individual practices that traverse the “in-between” space of the center and periphery. This approach emphasizes not how the periphery secures its uniqueness by remaining on the margins, but rather how it employs indirect strategies to encompass and connect with other elements, reflecting where and with whom one feels a sense of intimacy. The authors in this issue acknowledge their singularity while they also recognize the periphery, proposing multifaceted practices. The notions of centrality and peripherality are not fixed; they are fluid, influenced by culture, society, and situational contexts.

Nefeli Gioti wonders about the concept of artistic practice which was invented by the Judson Dance Theatre pioneer choreographer Deborah Hay to expand the possibilities of creation. But to have a practice has now become a norm, something one has to have in order to be compatible in the context of Western art institutions. These institutions, under the agenda of progressiveness but in a neoliberal manner appropriate such innovations and exhaust them. Through her involvement in the 5th round of the project Critical Practice Made in YU, the author had the chance to visit the Choreographic Turn #7: Deborah Encounters in Ljubljana, where these questions came about critically.

By revisiting notions of nostalgia and grief, Hanna Launikovich, through the voice of a third consecutive generation, which had experienced a devastating scattering of a future utopia, creates a collage image made of dreams, artistic work and fictional reincarnations of her home city Minsk in Belarus, which has, due to political and economic reasons, become a place of longing without a desire to return.

An altogether more optimistic peripheral agenda comes from Kukily, a transnational afrofeminist arts collective which emphasises the links between afrofuturism and anticolonialism. They trust in the knowledge of African and diasporic peripheries, which become a ground from which it is possible to imagine different futures and new ways of organising and relating.

Youngsook Choi critically introduces how to address events on the periphery within the political discourse through her main agendas and practices. Her writing considers emotional solidarity and alliances – manifested through shared anger and frustration in response to social disasters stemming from discrimination against specific races and social classes – as artistic practices and critical language. She discusses the process of mutual transformation and healing through collective gatherings. These connections extend beyond anthropocentrism, forming interspecies communities that venture into ecological realms. By declaring, “Let’s start from the very end. And finally, we are not alone,” she suggests intentionally beginning from the periphery to share intimate and ephemeral moments of ecological grief.

Crumbs from the Scene section presents the script for the performance Stream, a recent work by the Japanese choreographer Neji Pijin, where he explores experiencing isolation and disconnection from the outside world, one can reflect on their surroundings and attempt to establish relationships through micro-level methods. By navigating the periphery of art, the work investigates how art can coexist with other elements and society. This reflects the artist’s survival disconnected from the stage, raising questions about the realities of art, including capital, labor, time, institution, and family. This work reveals the practice of artists who, by distancing themselves from the center of art, re-examine the existence of art and navigate through the present.

The texts in the Neodvisni section are too dealing with margins, the precarity of dramaturgs who write for theatre in Slovenia and the subtle dance practice, which thematises embrace as a means of bridging the loneliness of selves through the touch of our skin, our most peripheral organ.

The sense of the periphery presented by the authors does not manifest clearly, but instead resonates in a vague state, suggesting ways to navigate through the waves of the uncertain world. This does not imply moving from the periphery towards the center, but rather transversing the periphery, connecting different elements, and facilitating transformation. Artistic practices that sense the trivial, distant from the center, listen to the unclear elements at the edges of the world, and mobilize political actions that respond to what cannot be spoken.

Some peripheries thus materialise in this issue, others are still to follow.

Jae Lee Kim and Pia Brezavšček