Eleven artists from the country, under the curatorship of the previous winners of the "Golden Triga", this year are Macedonian representatives at the world's largest event for performance, design and space, which is held in Prague.

The winners of the main award "Golden Triga" at the previous edition of the Prague Quadrennial for Performance, Design and Space, Filip Jovanovski and Ivana Vaseva, this year are the curatorial team of the exhibition "The City as a Stage" at the National Pavilion of the Republic of North Macedonia at the quadrennial, which are takes place from June 8 to 18 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Through the works of the artists Alembic (Viktor Tanaskovski and Iva Damjanovski), Besfort Idrizi, Victoria Ilioska and Anastasia Pandilovska, curated in the joint exhibition "The City as a Stage", the project uses the city as a text to reread historical events by evoking (tectonic) displacements , clashes and (self)exploitations in contrast to local official and unofficial stories.

Martina Peneva, Dimitar Milev, Tamara Jerkov, Deniz Ajdarevic, Aleksandar Jovanovski and Martina Petresca participate in the Student Pavilion, curated by Kristina Lelovac and Filip Jovanovski.

- The presentation of RSM in Prague gathered a large team of participants and I am especially happy and grateful for the trust that the team has invested in this active and complex process over the past six months. Receiving the main award "Golden Triga" at the last edition in 2019 was and still is a motivation for us as a team to try to distribute and share the city as a resource ("capital") with the wider artistic community, and that through a national pavilion , and for the first time with a student pavilion at this big event - points out Filip Jovanovski, one of the curators of the national pavilion.

The performer and choreographer Viktorija Ilioska, referring to the four-month preparation of the project, points out that the process took place according to the "reading buildings" methodology of Jovanovski and Vaseva: "Each of us, Anastasia, Besfort, Alembic and I, made a personal reading of that methodology and we created a performative installation consisting of four parts. It is particularly gratifying to work with a community group and to reach a structure that represents multiple forms and disciplines. In my part, I focused on the essential, the necessary, on the resource. To the one we don't have, but also to the one we have, which is being exploited by someone else," explains Ilioska.

The exhibition "The City as a Stage" aims to learn from the city as a resource, from the traces of abandoned solidarity and through engagement with the local population to rethink the idea of ​​how transnational solidarity can reshape the city.

The Prague Quadrennial was founded in 1967 in order to bring the best of performance, scenography and theater architecture to one place, and this year has its fifteenth edition.

The Macedonian National Pavilion and the Student Pavilion are organized by the Association for Arts and Culture "Faculty of Unlearning - FRU", in partnership with the Youth Cultural Center, the International Theater Festival MOT, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and the Faculty of Architecture from Skopje. The national pavilion is organized with the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at UKIM and the project "Active GRA(D)/Djani", financed by the European Union.

(The text was published in "Cultural Press" number 182, in the printed edition of the newspaper "Sloboden Pechat" on 10-11.6.2023)