Maska - Current Issue

My hometown, Minsk, is located some 1000 km and decades away from my current place of residence, and this distance is ever growing. I tried to look into the abyss and explore my feelings I cautiously label as ‘nostalgia’, which I define more as a complex longing than a mere desire to return home. To navigate this nostalgia, I engage with artistic works, including Artur Klinaŭ’s book Minsk: A Guide to the City of the Sun and Tania Arcimovich’s multimedia project Belarus 4:33. City of the Sun Point Zero, while incorporating my own, third-generation perspective. Ultimately, it is a journey of collecting and weaving together fragments of transgenerational memory into a cohesive narrative about the place that might have never truly existed.

In this text Kukily collectively approaches the topic of peripheries and processes of recognizing new centres. Initially defining their position – from where they are talking, from which peripheries and which centres – they move into a broader discussion of periphery-centre relations as they exist today. The knowledge of the periphery, especially that which comes from Africa and its diaspora, becomes a departure point to imagine futures, as well as create new ways of organising and relating. Kukily emphasises the links they find between afrofuturism and anticolonialism, which helps us understand their approach to connecting political and artistic work. By bringing their multidisciplinary artistic work XTRÆNCESTRAL into this text, they bring life into the theoretical work with practices rooted in their community and experiences as people of African descent.

The article threads the lineage of Youngsook Choi’s performative practice centring on grief. It witnesses the voice of recurring ghosts from the racist hysteria during Covid-19 outbreak, the continuing exploitation of the Global South and persistent anthropocentric violence towards the land and more-than-human others. Suggesting resentful deaths and political spirituality as critical margins of neo-colonial capitalist oppression, this article takes a glimpse of Youngsook’s attempt to activate grief as an intimate site for collective interrogation, community-oriented healing and solidarity building.

The text was written for the performance Stream performed by Pijin Neji in March 2023. This performance, which mainly consists of text readings, looks back on the events that occurred in Neji’s daily life and the social situation during the pandemic period from 2020 to 2022. At the time, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike dubbed social life during the pandemic ‘with corona’. This naming normalizes the state of emergency, makes us accustomed to new rules such as wearing masks, sanitizing hands and staying at home, and puts the pandemic at the centre of society’s concerns. It had the extremely political and subtle effect of relegating other various concerns to the periphery. While I acknowledge the political cleverness of the naming, in the same way I dare to refer to the current state of 2024 as ‘with corona’, and also express the great concern of ‘with war’. The performance and the text are grief works in which I attempt to mourn them with the trivial aspects of life ‘withs’.

In this text on the production frameworks of staging contemporary drama, Varja Hrvatin and Nika Švab discuss the paradoxical relationship between the non-governmental sector, playwrights, and the institute of calls for tenders that results in the phenomenon of plays being performed by their authors. This claim addresses different standards in naming contemporary drama texts and defining their authorship, which is, again, tied to the ‘difference’ between public and non-governmental organisations.

A more or less direct record of somatic manifestations from the project Asymmetry of the Embrace/Transmission (by Snježana Premuš and Zrinka Šimičić Mihanović).