Ida Hiršenfelder, “Body Archive /The Body as the Archive”, in: Maska, Performing Arts Journal, year XXXV, No. 200bb, Fall 2020, Actualities, page 74–83
Link to the publication online [PDF]
Editors: Pia Brezavšček and Alja Lobnik
Link to online publication in PDF: Network Museum in Slovene and English.
Editorial statement
“These issues have recently become more pronounced with the sudden urgent and increasing need to insert our technological extensions in places that used to be reserved for physical reality. The shutdown established a state of emergency that forced us to slow down, and the topic of standstill and inactivity that swept through the world thus strangely coincided with this year’s topic marking the 100 years and 200 issues of Maska. In the year marking this milestone, we are prolonging our celebration as we will issue three double 200th issues, taking our time. We are archiving and digitalising in collaboration with the Network Museum (Ida Hiršenfelder) and going back to the roots in order to gain a better and deeper understanding of the magazine in its actuality. Since the turning point in the 1990s, Maska is fundamentally de ned through a few characteristics detected by both articles about the magazine published in this issue (by Bojana Kunst and Aldo Milohnić). As Emil Hrvatin explicated in 2006’s Maska, the magazine has always co-existed on equal footing with other events in the theatre landscape. Juxtaposed with performances and exhibitions, it demanded eventfulness: “A magazine is a festival on paper. The more insecure and irregular its frequency, the more it feels like an event. This was Maska in the 1990s” (Hrvatin 2006, 8). Its eventfulness is directly related to understanding its place in the eld – the aim of the magazine was to create a eld where there is no di erence between artistic and theoretical production. To create theory that does not smell of academia and allows itself to be looser and more playful in its form and content. A kind of performativity of writing – that has always been the magazine’s purpose. Maska has always been precise in re ecting limits, perceiving itself as a point of contact and confrontation between various artistic and social practices re ecting the assumptions of the medium itself. Its speci c in-betweenness is an attribute that has kept it vital and permeable in all its years of operation. That is our wish for Maska: to preserve the uninhabited in-between spaces, either through internationalisation, which can open up narrow national contexts, or through transdisciplinarity, constantly questioning the limits of writing and theatre.”