City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts

City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts Mesto žensk, Mednarodni festival sodobnih umetnosti Street address: Mesto žensk, društvo za promocijo žensk v kulturi, Kersnikova 4, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Telephone: 386 (0) 1 438 1580, 386 (0) 40 816447 Fax: 386 (0) 1 438 1585 E-mail: contact@cityofwomen.si Website: http://www.cityofwomen.si Proprietor: City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture Contact: Sabina Potočki Programme Co-ordinator and Producer E-mail: mesto.zensk@guest.arnes.si Contact: Katja Kobolt, Dunja Kukovec Programme Curators Dates and duration: Annual, Oct, 2 weeks

City of Women was first organised in 1995 as an initiative of the Governmental Women's Policy Office (later renamed as the Equal Opportunities Office), in order to draw attention to the relative lack of participation and presentation of women in the arts. Since 1996 it has been organised as an annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts by the City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture. The festival presents women artists from Slovenia and abroad working in different disciplines and contexts. Over the 10 days of the festival some 40 events are presented, including film, video, theatre, visual arts, performance art, dance, literature and multimedia. City of Women celebrates diversity. The festival is a platform for a variety of opinions and perspectives of artists and theoreticians from several countries. Events are held at various sites around town. Apart from performances and exhibitions, each festival features round-table debates, lectures and workshops, focusing on themes dealing with key problems of modern women. The 2007 festival's title was 'Lough Out Loud'. The 12th City of Women Festival of 2006 presented artists from 13 countries and focused on the meaning of history and memory. On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a special tribute was paid to this German political theorist of Jewish origin whose works the organisers said 'created one of the most influential works of reference on political thinking of the 20th century'. A performance reconstructing a 1972 conference on her work, followed by a debate, was staged at Metelkova. The festival was opened by Germaine Dulac's Smiling Madame Beudet, a silent film screened to live music accompaniment. Joseph Valencic, who is involved with Slovene-American immigration history and popular culture, gave a lecture on Slovene women in American arts. Some 50 archival photographs from his private collection were put on display under the title We Are Bold American Women. Slovene women and their descendants in the US were also portrayed in the documentary 100% Slovenian by Mirjam M Hladnik and Hanna A W Slak. The festival also featured Life Differently, a documentary by Loredana Bianconi (Italy) which depicts four Moroccan-born Belgian women, and One Point Two by Silvia Ferreri (Italy), which deals with the problem of declining birth rates in contemporary western society. Italian journalist Sabina Guzzanti also showed her Viva Zapatero!, a satire of the Berlusconi government. In 2006 one of the debates, themed 'Gender, Literature and Cultural Memory in the Context of South Eastern Europe', compared two periods: the era of Yugoslavia, with its common literary market and inter-textual and intercultural links, which were broken as a result of the disintegration of the common state, and the post-conflict literary milieux that exist today in Yugoslavia's successor states. A party dubbed Valpurgis Night with City of Women Witches closed the 2006 festival at Metelkova mesto Autonomous Cultural Zone.