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.
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.
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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.
