Intelektualne kurbe
The intellectual prostitution as a prologue to this year’s Performa Festival
2012 will be an exception for the Performa Festival that, in the year that Maribor is presenting itself as European Capital of Culture, will not take place only during the usual period at the end of November. This year the first long-term event of the 17th Performa entitled “Intellectual Whores” has already been announced as 25th of May, the Day of youth, when, for two months, we will transform Poštna ulica in Maribor into the Red Light District of Maribor.
In this red light district of Maribor, every weekend from 25th of May until 28th of July the intellectual whores of different professional profiles will operate in artistically modified discarded gondolas of the Pohorje cable-car. These young intellectuals will offer their expertise to customers in the form of conversation, advice and debates on topics as diverse as literature, art, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, indeed any topics of academic discourse, all of course for a suitable payment.
The main purpose of this, to seen by many as a morally controversial street art campaign, is to highlight the undervalued and underpaid, and increasingly negative value of intellectual work – to emphasize what jobs young educated people must do, that is those who cannot find adequate and suitably paid work or employment in the field in which they have been trained. Attention must be drawn to the humiliation and shame related to the fact that from day to day they are forced to perform and to be “liked” in all ways possible by different persons, upon whom it depends as to whether they are able to collect enough money to cover the bills for their basic existential needs. For many among them, this is a life situation in which sooner or later you loose basic human dignity, it leads to such severe existential distress that the most vulnerable among them even search a solution in suicide – but it should not be talked about; most people speak very little or almost nothing about it! As a response this year's Performa will – among its topics – discuss this situation, and it’s thread will highlight the boundaries between what is public and what is personal, between inside and outside, between acceptable and unacceptable or respectively that invisible line and / or link, that separates and / or joins both entities.
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