The first decade of the twenty-first century was a decisive period for queer festivals in post-Yugoslav space. The intensity of this festival decade generally in Eastern Europe is reflected in the fact that some thirty-five new LGBTQ festivals have emerged in that region since the turn of the millennium (Dawson and Loist 2018). The sense of continuity and rootedness in regional history, in the face of all transformations, is to be found in a fascinating history of the only long-standing festival organized since 1980s in this wider region—the Lesbian and gay film festival in Ljubljana started in 1984 in Yugoslavia. This book explores the ten years of one Croatian festival, Queer Zagreb (which started in 2003), and one Slovenian festival, the veteran Ljubljana gay and lesbian film festival, and their participation in the regional network of queer festivals. In addition, this project analyzes the regionalist influences in queer art and activism 1 of the post-Yugoslav festival sphere. It is based on my multi-method research 2 into queer festivals in the post-Yugoslav region in the years from 2003 to 2012.
All of the LGBTQ festivals active in post-Yugoslav countries in this period, except the Ljubljana festival, started during those 10 years. These festivals do a lot of networking and exchange artists, art works and audiences, as well as concepts and strategies of representation and politics. In my view, the geo-historical links of the organizers and audiences to a former shared country, as well as their embeddedness in the transnational space created through activist networking (feminist, LGBT, anti-war activism), can be accounted for in terms of engaging in creation of a specific regionality. The travelling of art and activism in this space is paralleled with the constant mobility and travelling of the organizers, artists and audiences of the cultural events, and influenced by the meanings that these participants attribute to the festivals. I argue that the pull of the regional queerness is one of the “desire lines” (Ahmed 2006, 19) that shape the symbolic maps of meanings of non-normativity in the successor countries to former Yugoslavia.
I look at festivals’ preferred symbolic geographies as “chronotopes” in Bakhtin’s (1982-repr.) sense of the word in order to approach the question of what is subversive and what is regional about them. Based on the awareness that there is no unequivocal definition of the term queer (Loist 2007) and no simple consensus on the role and program of queer festivals, my project tracks down the visuals of the festivals in their materiality as billboards, posters, works of art, official or private photographs; and in their mobility (Rose 2007). The latter entails following the trajectories of particular visual objects across the borders of post-Yugoslav countries and beyond, and the paths they traverse between their creators, users, critics and viewers. My interest in visual representations of regional queer art and politics is motivated by the claim that representation is not innocent but matters greatly. One of the major stakes in the struggle for meaning consists in the ability to imagine ways out of hegemonic representations; in Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2002) urgent formulation: “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (ibid., 186). Both queerness as a key term and its travelling and use in the post-Yugoslav space 3 need contextualization. 4 They continue to function in Jackman’s (2010) formulation as contested terms and remain challenging in their application to the post-Yugoslav queer festivals field. However, broader post-socialist literature (Kürti and Skalník 2011) articulately discourages thinking in easy “us/them” oppositions, for instance in regard to national and transnational relations. Keeping this in mind, in the field of feminist theory, the politics of visual representation continue to constitute key debates as “the struggle is… over imaging and naming. It is about whose representations will prevail” (Braidotti 1994, 72). This framework foregrounds how both non-normativity and visibility cannot but function as “struggle terms” that fuel analysis and actions (Hennessy 1994, 31).
My main argument is that the post-Yugoslav queer festivals negotiate not only within the boundaries of new nation-states, but in the region and the wider international context for the time-space that is not repressive of non-normative sexualities and gender expressions. The practices which emerged as the most important ones consist of the organizational strategies of creating festival symbolic geographies, those of politics of naming, and of programming. Since festivals include various actors in addition to the organizers, the participatory practices also include the strategies and tactics of artists and audiences. I assume that the region of post-Yugoslavia (as named in everyday speech), partially overlapping with that of Western Balkans (as called in political discourse), is important for understanding these festivals, and explore to what extent it is possible to see post-Yugoslav queer festivals as moments of transformative belonging—in the sense of challenging the geopolitical marginalization in the global queer space and that of the marginalization within the particular nation-states. Recent research on queer globalism (Galt and Schoonover 2016) has analyzed the affective as well as institutional circulation of queer cinema—through human rights initiatives, on Internet, and importantly on the global circuit of queer film festivals. Also, the global queer film festivals are seen as occupying a contradictory position in between the commercialization and their social function as community-oriented events (Richards 2017). Looking through the lenses of critical regionality (Binnie 2016), it becomes possible to see organizational and audiencing patterns specific for the post-Yugoslav region, such as an interest in regional artistic production which is impossible to disregard.
Although I have started this project researching one festival in Zagreb, very soon I became aware that it would be difficult to understand its politics and importance without talking about its regional context. As I proceeded, my interest in this regionality broadened the research field but also my understanding of post-Yugoslav conflicted and rich interconnectedness. This regional focus developed along the line of how Bilić and Dioli (2016) understood the project of Queeroslavia imagined at the Queer Beograd festivals as desiring to “bring together linguistically and culturally proximate people separated by the predominantly elitist project of the 1990s Yugoslav wars” (ibid., 107). At times, during my interviews with the post-Yugoslav “festival people”, 5 they would directly comment on the post-Yugoslav region—for instance, discussing borders and belonging or not to the Balkans, when comparing Zagreb and Ljubljana festivals. For instance, Gabe is an occasional visitor of the Queer Zagreb festival and an organizer of another feminist festival in Zagreb—Vox Feminae festival. Here she talks about her experience of crossing the border from Croatia to Slovenia to go to the queer feminist festival Rdeče Zore (Red Dawns) in Ljubljana: “I haven’t been much to Slovenia, not even at the time of Yugoslavia – once or twice. But I find that border incredible – I mean the difference between here and there. When I come to Ljubljana, I really have a feeling as if I were somewhere in Germany or Austria. I really do not have a feeling that it was ever a part of the Balkans!” (Gabe, personal communication, 2010). The train distance between the two capital cities is only about two hours, and for most of my Zagreb interlocutors, also Gabe, by the end of the festival decade of this research, it would become a frequent cultural trip. They would mostly go to see the performances at the Red Dawns or other festivals, and more rarely to the Ljubljana gay and lesbian film festival, allegedly because the films travelled easier to Zagreb.
On their side, the organizers of the Ljubljana gay and lesbian film festival see their festival as so much oriented to their local Slovenian audience (which very much is also the local lesbian and gay community) that they discuss the relative lack of relations between theirs and other post-Yugoslav festivals but do not experience it as so relevant. So Suzana, a veteran Ljubljana festival organizer and activist, laughs about the paradoxical geography of attraction when it comes to festival travelling: “Maybe they prefer to go to Berlin or Paris when it comes to something like that. Maybe this is too close! You know how you visit the least what is the closest to you? (laughter) I am not sure why it is so!” (Suzana, personal communication, 2010).
Another positioning within the regional post-Yugoslav space in terms of the network of LGBTQ festivals for Damir, an activist from the Sarajevski Otvoreni Centar (Sarajevo Open Center), is related to the geographical and historical proximity of Sarajevo to other regional capitals but also to the activist mutual support: “It’s a fact that the region has influenced us, of course it has! If it were thousands of kilometers away, maybe I wouldn’t think about it, but like this, we communicate. Belgrade is relatively close, also Zagreb – in comparison with Berlin and other cities. They are all close to us, and there is this circulation of people in between those cities” (Damir, personal communication, 2010). For him, the most important influence of the region is found in what he calls solidarity—a sense of support and exchange among the individual activists and organizations which a...