MOONLIGHT is a choreographic project that focuses on poetic structures. This project explores dispersed meanings, as well as a malleable reality, on stage. It rediscovers identities that are persistently established, by unfolding and queering normativity.

Lokomotiva – Center for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture is hosting the first ACT network meeting, in Skopje. The main topic on the agenda is how to act, towards a just transition.

This performance installation represented the Republic of North Macedonia on the Prague Quadrennial for Performance, Design and Space (6-16 June, 2019). On this occasion, it received the award “Golden Triga” | 1st Prize.

“Facing these unpredictable times and our already fragile position in society, we found ourselves in need of urgent reflection with our colleagues, partners and friends.” Therefore, Lokomotiva decided to promote online reflections on the changing conditions brought about by the actual pandemic situation. It is an attempt to create a new public space since the existing one has been taken away by the virus. All reflections are on Lokomotiva’s YouTube channel.

In frame of the programme Contemporary Culture and Cultural Policies/Other Spaces, Lokomotiva organises SERIES OF LECTURES WITH DISCUSSIONS related to the position of the artists and cultural workers in the labour market, relations between artists, managers, and the public and their interrelations and influences, as well as, the mutual influence with the social authorities and the environment in which we operate. Besides, lecturers will offer views related to the ethical dilemmas and thoughts about the responsibility towards the relations between us, but also the environment, nature, and other beings with which we share the world.

The photographic research project of the urban and peri-urban forestry in Skopje investigates the politics of space and environment in the specific local context. It takes a form of an urban landscape photographic series that maps and documents individual trees on the level of the street against a backdrop of the built environment, groupings of trees, parks, and other urban woodlands. It is not a scientific, environmental project, although it uses some convergent trans-disciplinary approaches in its methodology, but rather a personal, poetic view of the shrinking nature in the city by one of its inhabitants.

The Trees Remember! is a research study in process, which starts with this action of “remembering” the history of the city (and the world) through the memory of the trees. With this action we start building an archive of the trees’ memories, an archive of the violence and destruction of the public space in the city. This action starts at the park near the Bristol Hotel, the place where we can still hear the “shriek” of the fallen trees, the sound of the chainsaws, we can see the shadow of the faces of the arrested peaceful citizens on the armored vehicles of the special task force units – the trees remember all of this. Our society forgets, keeps forgetting, and it is our job to collectively remember so that we can move forward, without forgetting our solidarity and struggle for public spaces.

The video “Grow me, water me, caress me!” is part of an ongoing project of the same title, which tries to record the rapid urbanization of the city and the growing need to go back to caring for public green areas. The video tries to document the “urban, domestic and abandoned gardens” in the hidden parts of the city, and at the same time record and map visible and invisible activities related to the importance of plants, nature and clean air in the city of Skopje. This work is part of the author’s extensive research and moves on the border between activist documentary and devotion to nature.

In her lecture, Suzana Milevska will present various art practices of women artists who have mounted ecofeminism as a critical frame that not only offers environment awareness, but also aims to deconstruct contentious assumptions that dwell on stereotypical and patriarchal hierarchical understanding of women’s creativity and productivity.

In this talk, dr. Suzana Milevska will discuss various art practices of women artists who mounted ecofeminism as a critical frame that not only offers environmental awareness, but also aims to deconstruct the assumptions that dwell on stereotypical and patriarchal hierarchical understanding of women’s creativity and productivity.

A project in process about (possible) futures of theatre conceived by David Weber-Кrebs with the dramaturgical support of Simone Basani.

And then the doors opened again continues in Skopje the research phase started in Bruxelles at Kaaitheater, during which a series of spectators shared individually their visions about future spectatorship and theatre. Part of the research is also an online collective workshop on the same topic with spectators from Macedonia and abroad.

The Zagreb Summer Lab was organized by Domino, as part of the European project ACT: Art, Climate, Transition. It took place from June 30 – July 3, 2021 in Zagreb. On the topic of “Natural disasters: Lessons from two Croatia earthquakes in 2020”, artists and activists shared their experience and knowledge.

Lokomotiva, partner of the project ACT: Art, Climate, Transition, invited Ivana Dragšić, a sociologist and civil operator working in the area of urban commons and governance, with a focus on ecofeminism, culture, politics and institutions, to be part of the artistic residency in Zagreb.

Lokomotiva, partner in the European project ACT: Art, Climate, Transition, invited Filip Jovanovski, a visual artist and cultural worker who works on socially engaged and interdisciplinary art projects that include working with different communities, cultures, politics and institutions – to be part of the residency in Ljubljana, at the second edition of Summer Lab Program, organized by Bunker.

In the wake of the Capitalocene and its severing consequences, the issue of humanity’s relationship with more-than-human world asks for searching philosophical and existential trajectories beyond anthropocentrism and Culture/Nature divide. Instead of that, usual reactions to ecological crisis in the field of culture deals with reduction of CO2, energy consumption and other rather technical issues that go by the name of “greening”. We propose going several steps further in rethinking the place of cultural policies and productions in the complex web of life than such “green”, “sustainable” and “resilient” cultural policy and practice approaches entail.

As part of the program Other Spaces, Lokomotiva creates a space for production, creation of knowledge and reflection on diverse issues concerning our future and topics related to social justice, the environment, post humanity, the Anthropocene, cultural policies, queer and feminist issues, etc. In that regard, we are supporting Viktorija Ilioska, a performer and choreographer who will work in Skopje on the development of her piece A Womb for an Adult in the period between November 10 and November 21. The research, which started in Germany and was partially developed in Skopje during the summer, will have its final stage of development in Skopje and later its premiere at the Theater Neben Dem Turm, Marburg on December 10 and 11.

The importance of the art practices and production in political action and activism (not just politics in art practice, media, or messages) has been central to movements such as Ocuppy Wallstreet, the Arab Colored Revolutions, or those in Southeastern Europe, the conservation movements, and even in one of the most common organized forms – the occupations (of theaters, dormitories, faculties and other public institutions). There, apart from the establishment of a new (often temporary) system of relationships, mechanisms of care, rules of conduct; there was also a discourse of applying artistic practice in joint action and organizing cultural and artistic policy (production, activity and use) as part of the assumed needs and potentials of the members of the new (temporary) micro society.

Networking as part of the ACT project is an important segment, in which partners are sharing and discussing the activities’ state of the art. This meeting was organised and hosted by Culturgest, Lisbon with participation of other project partners and representatives from: Arts Admin/London, Bunker/Ljubljana, Kaaitheater/Brussels, COAL/Paris, Domino/Zagreb, Kampnagel/Hamburg, NTIL/Riga, Theater Rotterdam/Rotterdam, and Lokomotiva /Skopje.

Follow the lecture on the You Tube channel of Lokomotiva, Skopje: https://youtu.be/9tDK4E6fdBg 

Faced with increasing inequalities and the inability of the neoliberal state to offer institutional mechanisms for the fulfilment of all people’s social and economic rights, which the market simultaneously fails to provide, the pressure to find alternative modes of production, social relations and forms of organization is overwhelming. The challenges that the TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) paradigm faces and the opening up of possibilities to imagine non-capitalist societies, as well as to avoid the capitalist appropriation of attempts to bring about change, are always present. At the same time, it is encouraging to see narratives and practices of resistance emerging, transforming and sustaining, and therein promising such possible change. Over the last decades, the concept of the commons has emerged as one of the potent political paradigms that has inspired different social actions and political mobilizations across the globe.

In this development/process project, Ana Lazarevska presents part of her research which is based on careful and unrushed observation of nature and society. Their functions, relations, and ways of functioning as a system. She compares them to the system by which the human body functions, which exists in its complexity as nature does, which depends on the functionality of the organs, their connection, the environment in which it develops and lives, depends on external influences, trauma, safe keeping, love, care, etc. By deconstructing the body, she reflects on the process of creating and on the bodies and systems in which they function, i.e. how cells combine to form tissues, tissues to form organs, and organs to form organisms that exist in systems – social systems and ecosystems.

Lokomotiva аs partner of the project ACT: Art Climate Transition,  is one of the partners in the campaign “Your birds, our birds” which is organized in Marseille and in the member countries of the ACT network in Europe. The campaign brings together 10 cultural and art organizations from 10 European countries that will create a mural and a programmme to give visibility for a certain rare bird in the region in which they operate. The project ACT puts the stories of these 10 murals into a collection across Europe, to be presented September 2022 online and onsite. Lokomotiva Skopje in cooperation with the Macedonian Ecological Society and the artist Dorotej Neshovski developed a programme in partnership with the primary school “Goce Delchev”, Skopje and the municipality of Centar.

This conference is a platform that brings together theoreticians and practitioners of various kinds to share and discuss knowledge about the possible ways of transforming the future into a liveable one, for both humans and non-humans (in an ecofeminist, post-colonial framework of care, solidarity and anticapitalism). The conference is part of the activity “Other Spaces”, from the EU project “ACT – Art, Climate, Transition”, which consists of lectures, discussions, artistic research, discursive programmes and other formats. Through them, we try to open up spaces for reflecting, questioning and mapping the role and responsibility of culture and art in our society and their political action; including their relation to issues of extractivism, erosion/appropriation and preservation/development of the commons and the environmental catastrophe.

In May 2021 Kaaitheater invited art theorist and curator Suzana Milevska for an online lecture on ecofeminist art practices. This October she will resume this talk in live Brussels and will be joined by researcher and ecofeminist activist Myriam Bahaffou. In her lecture, Suzana Milevska will discuss various art practices of ecofeminist artists who revoke the existing systemic hierarchies and models of knowledge production. Myriam Bahaffou will formulate a response to Milevska’s views, by answering them in the prism of her own thoughts. The idea is to create a fruitful ecofeminist dialogue between two researchers who value the place of the dirty, the mixture and the hybrid.

The main focus of the Summerlab Skopje 2023 will be the many public spaces in the country, known as the ‘empty spaces’ especially in the city of Skopje, which were privatized during the political transition of North Macedonia from a socialist into a ‘turbo-capitalist’ society. As part of the program, collaborators from Skopje will share and present the historical and political context of the city and its ‘empty public’ spaces, as well as urban ecology. Also, collaborators from Floating University in Berlin to present their project and approach, and the participants will share their work and experiences.