Performance, 30min, Korzo (in front of Mali salon)
Performance deals with the inability and the lack of will to see the inequality in front of us, the fact that some of us must put in the double effort to put down the highly rooted prejudices. In this case, the lack of readiness to eradicate the discrimination that is still present in sports today. From the lack of support for women’s sports, readiness to accept the LGBT athletes, lack of condemning varies injustices that often are related to Olympic Games and so on.
Even if the Olympic Games and sports, in general, have the nice and noble idea of equality, usually the latter is poorly respected. In fact, one of the big problems related to inequality is the outing of gay and lesbian athletes: Marc Naimark of the Federation of Gay Games called the lack of openly gay athletes “a symptom, not the problem, of the Olympic Games.” He said that the International Olympic Committee should “pressure countries to repeal anti-gay laws the same way it once excluded South Africa for its apartheid system of racial segregation, and more recently, succeeded in getting all competing nations to include female athletes on their teams in London.” Probably the biggest discrepancy can be observed in the differences between man and woman’s football league. In 2014 to win the FIFA World Cup for men meant earning US$35 million, while the following year the prize for the first place for women cup was only 2 million US$. The minimum salary for U.S. male soccer players is 10 times higher than that of their female colleagues.
In the opening week of the European University in Rijeka and Zagreb (12-25 July 2016), and after the EURO and the month before the Olympics in Brazil, organizations and initiatives from culture and activism look back on the field of sport through critical and creative practices of artists, activists, academic researchers, organizers, fans. The ccSPORT initiative launched around the Contesting / Contexting SPORT project started in Berlin, organized by the NCBC, will be in Rijeka and Split. Within the theme of sports spectacles, diversity and inclusion in sport, normative imposition, masculinity / femininity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, social dissatisfaction, politicization, competitiveness and mechanisms of conformism are explored. The program in Rijeka will consist of performing, lecturing and filming in the Mali salon, gathering works of foreign and domestic authors.
NIKA RUKAVINA 