This year's Faki Festival was hit with not one but two of what the insurance companies calls significant 'Acts of God' - the COVID-19 pandemic, which made gathering in public impossible, and the 5.3 magnitude earthquake in Zagreb, which put parts of the former pharmaceutical factory Medika out of action.
It's surprising that there is a festival at all in 2020. And yet, as I've written previously, there is no more important time for culture than now. Not just any culture either: free non-institutional culture, dedicated to principles of free expression, free exchange, and development of alternatives to the unidirectional mainstream. 14 out of the 16 shows will be livestreamed through the ZONE OF CONTROL, Faki's independently-developed web performance platform, which allows for HD performance streams, live chat, and Zoom-style discussions, which will be led by yours truly together with the globally-feared critical mastermind Jana Perković.
Snapshot of the 'countdown' system, used in the front-of-house protocols for Faki 23.
This year the festival accommodates an unusually wide variety of shows in response to the theme of 'Control'. On day one, the ecoanarchist and animal-rights activist Robert Franciszty (HR) opens the festival with Anticorona happening or "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution", one of just two performances happening on-site at Medika (and not live-streamed). While a lot of opposition against COVID-19 restrictions has been massively privileged and without any solid argument beyond 'personal sovereignty', Franciszty's participatory work is described as a "Joint dance therapeutic relaxation in the dystopian state of the world", hinting at an act of collective resistance departing from a simple complaint about government intervention. Hugo Baranger (FR) follows this with his work Les mots de recours, a short sensorial experience designed around a type of digital noise-theatre, and the first work delivered over the festival's ZONE OF CONTROL livestream platform. Finally, Day 1 will see the first performance of Brazillian performer-composer Manuel Pessoa de Lima's Red Light Piano, a performance adapted for the online format, where the artist will create a sort of 'lounge piano', playing off the theme of a commodification of love, and drawing on his usual themes of failure and the colour red. In the daytime, there's also Yasen Vasilev's (BG) workshop, titled Nutricula, which runs over three days, which will see participants will have the chance to re-imagine parts of their bodies as objects, and the tension between local and global politics of the body.
