Goodbye to FAKI Festival: 8 years straight out of hell

This year was my final year at FAKI Festival, ending 8 years of visits to Zagreb.

FAKI is a self-organised and mostly artist-led festival that invites performing artists each year to perform and live in the former pharmaceutical factor Medika. Medika has a notorious reputation among Zagrebians - people seem to have had either their first overdose, witnessed something crazy, or had their first sexual experience there, sometimes all at the same time. Each year in the last week of May, the usual carousel of drugs and punk is invaded by a delicate community of international performing artists, who sit (sometimes uncomfortably) beside the squalour and splendour of the place.

To have this situation as a supermassive site of critical writing for 8 years might seem absurd, but in a context of increasing institutionalisation of theatre, where the stage is controlled by profit motives or political-cultural power, FAKI sits as a bright community-building project and a unique site of resistance. It has some strange features: this year, for example, was the 25th FAKI (meaning I was around for approximately 1/3 of its life). This makes it an oddly long-running festival, rivaling some much better-resourced counterparts and outlasting many.

In 2018 proclaiming the objectives of the festival as"world domination" 

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yepzEB7oSNo)

Bringing critical writing to this often informal space has its difficulties - some might even say today it would be impossible among the minefield of sensitivity, as I would not be able to make the errors I have made. Yet this problem is itself an indicator of a current crisis of performing arts, building the bridge from a protected space of cultural expression to a public (increasingly more like a 'mainstream') is increasingly difficult as the gulf between them becomes wider and wider. As protected spaces are built and funded, they (arguably) lose touch with more general conditions, and few stages today can say they are without elitism, racism, classism, or sexism of some kind, nor that they can conduct the act of translation necessary to bring these contradictions to a wider negotiation. FAKI has been an important place for me to navigate an un-navigable territory, and to an extent to attempt to document and publicise work that would otherwise leave little formal trace.

Occasionally these works have been outrageously brilliant, and the circumstances of the festival have brought out magnitude in works that never had a right to achieve such lofty heights. From the moment I began writing at the festival, community has been at the heart of each word as it has been with each gesture of the stage, an implicit support that fed the fire, not of wanting to define the art, but of wanting to connect it with the habit of thought - to share in the communal resources of discourse, and to insert it into a wider situation. It should also be noted that many have been burned, and scarce financial resources create continual conditions of unacknowledged labour. Reading through my some 100 reviews over the last 8 years, it's obvious to me that the results have also been some of my best critical writing - as I took the view that I would use myself as a type of tool for investigating performance in this specific situation.

Leading the festival in 2021 through an impossible period, where the choice was made to host a festival in a situation of otherwise absence and epic losses for the performing arts, was a unique privilege, as well as a huge burden to bear. I now know more about COVID-19 protocols entering and leaving Croatia than I would have ever imagined, as well as testing centres, emergency alternatives, and convivial shortcuts. Nevertheless, I will always claim this as an important gesture, building on the digital 'rescue mission' of Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo of FAKI 23 in 2020, that accepted risks which much better-funded festivals decided were not important enough. FAKI 24 - a relatively noncontagious platform that equally protected public health and the traditions, practices, and cultures of performing arts - will always be something that I look back on with great pride.

The reluctance with which I leave the festival is mixed with a large dose of hope for its future - with a confident community built around it, dependable if not substantial funding, and helpful support structures to build upon. The festival existed before me, and will of course exist after. May FAKI continue to build on its unique contingency and move from strength to strength - I will be watching with love and curiosity!

GREATEST HITS: SELECTED CRITICISM FROM FAKI FESTIVAL 2015-2022

Malik Nashad Sharpe AKA Marikiscrycrycry lifting the roof with his vulnerable, resilient celebration of Blackness (2016)

Sura Herzberg finishing her performance with a line of cocaine on stage (?!) (2018)
 

Blackism drawing on real-life incidents from their residency to attack the audiences for its microaggressions and embedded racism (2017)
 

Rosa Palasciano creating a pure, intimate moment in - honestly - a pretty disgusting toilet (2015)
 

Elisa Arteta answering audience questions and turning a simple etude into a mass participatory dance (2015)

Charly and Eriel Santagado building a choreographic language around therapy (2021, with Dijana Karanović and Liam Rees)
 

Collective B returning to Faki Festival with the triumphant Wonderful World (2018)

Sifiso Seleme dangling from the ceiling in a work of art-activism about domestic labour (2017)
 

Marje Hirvonen  and Anni Taskula announcing their Finnish FEST, drawing out a weirdly erotic-subversive reaction (2019, with Monika Jašinskaitė)

Tereza Sikorová and Tomáš Moravanský taking a clown to the shores of Lake Jarun and creating an existential questioning of everything (2022)
 

Andrea Lagos Neumann falling, over and over again (2018)

Dror Liebermann dressed as Spider-man climbing buildings in Zagreb's main city square (2016)

Syed Taufik Riaz acknowledging the courtyard of Medika with smoke and rose petals over the course of 1 hour (2016)
 

Evie Demitriou rhythmically hitting her body screaming "The more I dance, the more I get" (2016)
 

Chan Sze-Wei and Gabi Serani's live participatory-disciplinary slapping of the audience (2016)
 

and... me... "smashing the koala" (2021)

There were many more. Thank you to everyone that made this happen.

 --
Note: Current publication is done with the understanding that colleagues and communities from Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Lutsk, and Lviv among others in Ukraine are currently under attack in an attempt to erase Ukrainian culture and identity. No artist should be forced to rehearse how to pick up the gun.

Dead in the Pool

(Disclaimer: this performance was presented as part of Faki Festival, for which I was an Artistic Director)

"Where is the clown?"

I stood at the panorama of the famous Lake Jarun - the only lake for swimming in the city, and where I had never been in my 8 years visiting Zagreb - and scanned the different lifeguard-chairs. The approach had been fascinating, with the various desire lines and pathways through the surrounding bushes pointing to a often-repeated journey of Zagreb's luxury-loving population. Standing amid the beach-goers, looking for the central actor  of the performance Dead in the Pool - a clown intervention and 'indefinite cultural event' by Tereza Sikorová and Tomáš Moravanský - I was dwelling on the unique perspective, on the uniqueness of the situation: here I am, with people who possibly care only about the sun and the water, looking for an artwork without knowing the exact location, or even what I am exactly looking for. Finally, off in the distance, a black dot greeted me from the top of one of the chairs, and I trudged off in the direction of the clown.

Dead in the Pool is a durational (4-hour) performance in which a clown intervenes in a body of water - normally a swimming pool, this time adapted for Faki Festival to the shores of the lake. A creation of Czech former clown Sikorová and intermedia artist/dramaturg Moravanský, part of the Brno-based collective Institut Institut, the work offers a macabre underbelly to an otherwise mainstream human activity of chlorofied swimming. Previously staged in Brno at Lužánky City Swimming Pool, the performance creates a question mark amid an otherwise unquestionable situation. My own question "Where is the clown?" could equally, therefore, be "Where am I?"

Photos: Jahvo Joža

In keeping with the sharp negative tone of the work (the clown's costume is an ominous black-on-black ensemble, reminding somewhat of an adjudicator), Dead in the Pool is perhaps more significant for what does not occur. The intervention seems a minimal one: as clown, Sikorová sits atop the lifeguard chair, and does little apart from occasionally changing the direction of her gaze. Yet, as you bathe in the clear waters of Lake Jarun, you cannot help but be aware of the clown's perspective, and the significant element of doubt that it brings. Taking my first swim, I felt something like a guilt, or maybe simply a sense of connection, with those vast majority who, for whatever reason, could not enjoy a cool dip in the water. The clown in Dead in the Pool very much functions as an inherent critique: it asks a question merely through its existence in a particular place, at a particular time.

Rewards came when one shared the clown's perspective. Looking around, it seemed I was not the only one experiencing this existential uncertainty. A family joined nearby, appearing to largely ignore the surreal vulture-like figure perched on top of a lifeguard chair. Yet overhearing their conversation in Croatian (I think) as they entered the water to throw a ball, I could hear the word "Joker" as part of the conversation, even from where I was sitting some 50 metres away. Children came to stare, and, receiving only a mirrored-gaze in return, were left only to wonder. This is a work that exists as a splinter in the mind.

The intervention became more marked when the clown made what would be one of just two significant pivots: walking down the stairs of the lifeguard chair, taking the long journey over the pebbles, to take position on a second chair 100 metres away. I witnessed this with some sense of entertainment: initially, as Sikorová's black-booted foot hit the first step, it created a shattering interruption to my perspective sitting behind the chair. The journey across to the second chair was faintly hypnotic: the clown seemed to float across the pebbles, somewhat reminiscent of Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.