Performance Hafetopia
Performance Hafetopia will be performed on November 20th, 2021. at 19.00 in the Legacy Gallery in Belgrade within the international project Other Ways of Communication. The performance is presented by a multimedia artist, professor and vice dean for teaching at the Belgrade Dance Institute, Prof. dr. Snežana Arnautović Stjepanović, with her nine-year-old son Teodor. The music for the performance was composed by Ivica Stjepanović.
The performance is dedicated to our great artist Era Milivojević.
“Hafetopia, hapephobia or hapetophobia is the fear of touch.
We live in a time when just one touch can be deadly to someone. Changes in lifestyle and social interactions (life without hugs, kisses and touch) have led to a state of anxiety that can be identified with the symptoms of this phobia.
Hafetopia’s performance points to the need for touch, for tactile and manual act, which has become impossible in the period since the beginning of the pandemic. Returning to nature and acting according to its laws is presented by establishing a new way of communication: sensory, tactile and intuitive. “
Snežana Arnautović Stjepanović
Project Other ways of communication
Happiness is in connection and compassion with others, as a source of hope, empathy, responsibility and authenticity. The real purpose of art is to communicate feelings. The global experience of the Covid 19 pandemic has caused changes in the way society works: working from home, online classes, meetings on various Internet platforms, so establishing interpersonal relationships as “other ways of communication” is a challenge.
The project includes artists from Belgrade and Berlin, whose works and dialogue will consider man’s relationship to the body, as his most immediate nature, and that relationship speaks of man’s relationship to nature. The development of the senses and environmental awareness improves the environment, but also aims to establish empathic interpersonal relationships, sociability and culture. The language of contemporary art is a field of re-examining “other ways of communication” with the use of different human senses, tactility, manual work, bodily gestural free movement in space, overcoming the limited gesture of typing on a mobile phone screen and computer keyboard, where conversation with others is limited to seeing and hearing.
Artists: Snežana Arnautović, Marijana Oro, Marko Nektan, Ana Cvejić, Magda Radojlović, Melih Sarigol, Emre Birişmen, Merey Senokak, Funke Collective Berlin.
Project author: Isidora Fićović PR: Pavle Knežević Catalogue: Ivana Vidić
Project partner: Selda Asal, Apartment project Berlin
The exhibition at the Legacy Gallery in Belgrade, Kraljevića Marka 8, from November 19th to 25th, 2021, will be opened on November 19th, 2021 at 7 p.m.
Photography by Lidija Antonović