Genders & PowerGenders and Power 4 Programme
By Syspirosi Atakton, Fri 25 November 2016, in category Programme
By Syspirosi Atakton, Fri 25 November 2016, in category Programme
Genders and Power festival is being organized for fourth consecutive year by Syspirosi Atakton, an anarchist, anti-authoritarian, anti-oppressive group rooted in Nicosia. This year our aim is to discuss and elaborate on the ways genders, in their intersections with multiple sociopolitical and cultural categories of difference, interact in myriad ways and arbitrarily produce systemic inequalities in terms of power, but also on the ways our voices resist to hegemonic structures. Genders and Power festival neither essentializes nor naturalizes any kind of identities or experiences, but rather seeks to signalize, understand and deconstruct various societal systemic power relations in order to resist them; besides, here lies its political importance. Accountability, situatedness, and self-reflexivity are all really important elements of our festival’s approach that seeks to denormalize and delegitimize power differentials and categories through engaging discussions, interactive performances, and parties with politics. The festival will take place during November, starting on Thursday, November 3rd until Saturday, November 26th. Join us!
At Kaymakκιν, unless otherwise noted
Aydın Mehmet Ali: “Writing as Resistance and Activism…”
A young woman is raped at a roadblock outside Famagusta as she escapes military invasion. Love stories across ethnicities, time zones, barriers, generations, spanning London, Jamaica, US. A journey to find a friend lost in the wars and divisions. Young migrant women from remote villages of Turkey fight for survival on the streets of Islington; gay love challenges the façade of morality in the Diaspora communities of North London; two women activists in Hackney put their lives on the line for other women. Cities with layered stories in many tongues, London, Nicosia, Beirut, forced migrations, refuges for those who come looking for hope and in the process help create cities of hope. Presentation of ‘’Forbidden Zones’‘, a book about: defying and sabotaging borders and definitions, breaking taboos. Provoked by invisibility, selective memory, remembering, forgetting and silences.
Stavros Karayiannis: “When the Body Re-members”
This is a dance performance that explores a space where orientalism and postcolonial subjectivity encounter Judith Butler’s theories of gender and Leo Bersani’s questions on masculinity. Informed by theoretical discourse, the costumes and choreography of this piece evoke rites of transformation and re-membering, crossing and transcending. The moves are powered by a paradox in the body’s experience of gender embodiment: while the performance of a certain identity yields a life-giving force, at the same time it yields to the sorrow of loss. The dancing body assembles memories that inflect gesture and compose an anxious but gratifying, even rewarding, sense of being en-gendered. Through its course, this dance performance attempts to weave into its material the numinous dimension of kinaesthetic experience while engaged with its theoretical and embodied dimensions.
Maria Siakalli: “Women’s Literature in modern Turkey”
The configuration of woman identity in Turkish Literature is very much related to the political, economic and cultural development and transform that took place in the country. Most of the modern female authors refuse to treat woman as an inferior gender and is observing her in the framework of her human side and her gender. Today the woman in Turkish Literature begun to resist to the oppression against her and started deciding for herself. Yet in order to do that she will have to fight with the injustices of the patriarchal society. It may be said that nowadays in Turkish Literature the lead belongs to the women authors.
]()Eleana Alexandrou: Spoken Word Performance “In a nut_she_ll”
‘Thisis not a rap song
It’s my attempt to sing song
I’ musing math and ping pong
with a hint of pro-te-sting’A short performance of crafted text and language by dancer and performance artist Eleana Alexandrou. This presentation is part of a solo performance work entitled “in a nut_she_ll” which premiered in September 2015 at_Sexpectations- 6th Open House Dance and Performance Festival_ in Limassol. For more information on the performance visit www.bythewayproductions.com.