COURAGE

connecting collections

The staging of materials from Queer Archives Institute in Sao Paulo was part of the exhibition "Acervo Videobrasil em Contexto #2". Visual materials chosen by Karol Radziszewski to be exposed in Brazil aimed at showing the forgotten and unknown history of Central-Eastern European queer community. Too often region of Central and Eastern Europe was perceived as peripheral in modern queer history and theory. Radziszewski's activities had the purpose of showing ambiguity and struggle of LGBTQ communities in (post)-socialist states.

“Enkel and other Folk - Upheaval in the 70”  (the Enkel is a reference to the group “Karl’s Enkel” - Karl’s Grandsons) is so far the last of the countless exhibitions of the Association Song and Social Movements. Before that only few people addressed the emergence, expressions and general history of cultural opposition in the GDR. But this exhibition explicitly examines this topic. It traces songwriters, song theatres and folk groups that developed in the mid-1970s, “looked for new paths and tried out what you could and couldn’t do”. It portrays, among others, the groups 'Karl’s Enkel', 'Brigade Feuerstein' (with its songwriter Gerhard Gundermann) and the Dresden song theatre group 'Schicht'.

“The night at the movies with a discussions about the films of Nikša Fulgosi and Luchino Visconti” was held in 2017 on St. Catherine's Island (near Pula) on the subject of the Hollywoodization and commercialization of everyday life. As a part of the thematic evening, two significant films were shown - Luchino Visconti's film Belissima (1952), and A Hundred Beauties per Day (1971) by Nikša Fulgosi.

The imperative of beauty (in women) is an interesting phenomenon of post-war European society. Visconti's film Bellissima is one of the most important achievements of Italian neo-realism. The protagonist is a woman from a modest Roman working family who is obsessed with movies, but also with the idea that her little daughter can win in the Most Beautiful Girl in Rome competition and become a movie star. The film shows an unscrupulous struggle for success.

Fulgosi in A Hundred Beauties per Day deals with the Yugoslav ideology, and as in other popular-cultural content, develops a complex attitude toward this phenomenon. The scenes of singing and acting stars who entered the lives of residents through magazines and television shows, helped to create the cult of popular personality in the western style. On the other hand, partly built according to the Italian model, the promotion of modesty was an integral part of the construction of the Yugoslav fashion and the beauty industry. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the Yugoslav system emerge in the beauty contests where socialist morality comes in contrast to the commercial success of the product, in this case feminine beauty.