Slavcho Dimitrov: Skopje Pride Weekend - Thinking Together the Political and the Curatorial: Affect, Relationality and Performativity

Slavcho Dimitrov (Skopje, North Macedonia)
Skopje Pride Weekend - Festival for Queer Art, Culture and Theory
Thinking Together the Political and the Curatorial: Affect, Relationality and Performativity

Moderated by Marina Grzinic

In this lecture, Slavcho Dimitrov explores the concept of the political (le politique) by examining its complex and constitutive entanglement with corporeality, affect, and matter. He refers to some important philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière and places them in a critical dialog with the transdisciplinary possibilities of corporeal feminism, new materialism, affect, and body studies. He will relate the political to the performative dimension of the "curatorial," its instituent power, and its ability to create “temporary social situations” (Lind 2012). All these concepts will be reflected through my Dimitrov curatorial work in the context of Skopje Pride Weekend - Festival for Queer Art, Culture, and Theory.

Skopje Pride Weekend is an annual festival in North Macedonia organized by the Coalition MARGINS which takes place in North Macedonia. The overarching goal of the festival is to create space for the presentation and promotion of non-normative and non-binary relationships that form affects, identity positions, body styles, and sensibilities that have been marked as queer, eccentric failures by the heteronormative, nationalist, and neoliberal capitalist context.

Slavcho Dimitrov, PhD in Contemporary Arts and Media from SINGIDUNUM University, Belgrade. He is the founder of the International Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures, and Politics in Belgrade and curator of the Skopje Pride Weekend, a festival of queer arts, culture and theory. Dimitrov has published dozens of articles in the field of cultural and gender studies, political philosophy, and queer theory in regional and international journals and books. He is the recipient of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory Grant, 2020.