Red dawns Festival

I traveled to Ljubljana to attend the 9th edition of the feminist and queer festival Red Dawns where a mix of performances, acts, workshops and interventions were hosted in collaboration with the autonomous cultural space of Metelkova between march 5-9, 2008. I attended dance performances, storytelling evenings, workshops and music evenings, not only witty music and queer talk, not at all, but with a leading red thread of ecycling and education of/from technology, topics and machines that needs to be unpacked and divide of roles.

Donna Metzlar (Genderchangers) during the workshop presented how to reassemble hardware and discussed issues of internet privacy.

The poetry of e-waste addressed and opened during the workshop led by Gözüm opened with collective recyclin’ letter mis usage. A great tool, if you have already separate boxes with letters that helps you in your creativity. building a game of letters, on keyborads waste. a simple use of buttons, attached to a plastic frame, that which is considered only a sensor for the inputs on the screen, now transforms into a repository of meanings, metaphors and images. plain plastic. Thank you for such a great workshop.

Ksenija Glavc opened Natasa’s car and illustrated layers and dimensions of car-repair and Emeli Ronhdale showed how queered fashion can be, something that does not only reveal an attitude of dissent and confronts the fashion world, but also that opens a dialog with the intimate and the hidden. Using scars as simply attaching red marks for cloth decoration can be very subtile in action, but an exploration of terror and  violence.

Also a new book was launched by Marina Grzinic and Rosa Reitsamer (eds): “New feminism: worlds of feminism, queer and networking conditions” with 60 contributors intervening on radical issues about global capitalism, migration and the relation to representation – at the marginal level.

In addition a public action performance took place in the streets of Ljubljana inspired by Noha Ramadan’s work “the body as a site of action”.