The eleventh edition of Pride Weekend - Skopje will be held from June 1 to 13 at three locations around Skopje: the Museum of Contemporary Art, MKC and KSP "Centar-Jadro".

Pride Weekend is a festival for queer culture, art and theory that creates a space for the promotion of non-normative forms of worldview, that is, of relationships, affects, identity positions, body styles and sensibilities that are marked as queer by the heteronormative, nationalist and neoliberal capitalist context. , eccentric and unsuccessful.

The thematic focus of the festival this year is "Queer Chronopolitics: History, Affects, Utopias". The publication addresses the multitude of queer theories and historiographies that place the question of time and history at the center of their investigations.

A special focus of the festival is the questioning of hegemonic nationalist and historiographical narratives, as well as the policies of national archives, their strategies of erasure, exclusion and ignoring of the invisible and secret histories of sexual and gender minorities and their experiences, as well as the possibilities of revision, rereading , rewriting and reimagining the historical (absent) traces, voices and ephemeral archives of queer people.

This is precisely why the choice of the program stems from a commitment to the idea that the "aesthetic" is essentially rooted in bodily experience, which as such lies at the base of social, cultural and political experiences. Curator of the Pride Weekend festival - Skopje is Slavcho Dimitrov.

The festival will be opened on June 1, at 20.30:XNUMX p.m., at the MSU, with the exhibition "Remembering Futures" by the famous Polish interdisciplinary artist Karol Rajszewski. He is known for his artistic practice that includes unique tools in editing materials, combining fact with fantasy, composing documents from fragments of memory and presenting unexpected alternative traces of memories.

The exhibition will present his multidisciplinary and archival practice through the periodical fanzine "Dick", which he published and edited, and the project "Kai", which represents the para-institution Institute for Queer Archives, which he founded. In addition, the monumental series "Portrait Gallery" (2020 - ongoing), the series "Sida" (2012 - ongoing) will be presented through a strategy of combining archival materials with gestures of appropriation, exhibited in the form of prints, paintings and wallpapers, his seminal work Hyacinth (2019-2020) and the films Kiseiland (2012) and My Dear Friend from the Soviet Union (Mon chéri Soviétique, 2021).

The very next day, on June 2, the latest performance "Convict" (Goner) of one of the most attractive names in contemporary choreographic and dance practice, Malik Nashad Sharpe (UK), will be held at MSU.

The choreographer and performance artist of Chilean and Swedish origin, Shirley Harty Ubila, will perform the piece "Abject of Desire" on June 3 at MCC, and on June 4 at MSU the famous philosopher, theorist and artist Marina Grjinic (Slovenia ) will hold the lecture "Punk and the Former Yugoslav LGBTQIA+ Community in Slovenia and Beyond: The Untangling of Sex and Politics in Racial Capitalism".

On June 8, the artist Jovan Josifovski will have the opening of his solo exhibition "Elastic Violence", while on June 9 at MSU the fantastic trio "Steam room" consisting of Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva and Dario Barreto Damas will perform the dance and choreographic concept for eternity, their last part of the choreographic trilogy "dragON – dragON forever".

The festival closes on June 13 at MCC with Rumena Bužarovska and Ana Vasileva from "PitchPritch", who will moderate the Queer Storytelling Evening - "Shame!", followed by a DJ set by Ivana Dragšić. The design of the poster for the festival is by Igor Delov.

(The text was published in "Cultural Press" number 180, in the printed edition of the newspaper "Sloboden Pechat" on 27-28.5.2023)