Darko Dragičević: Dumpster (2025)
Wednesday, 2 December 2026, at 7:00 pm
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
performance
* The performance will be held in English with Slovenian surtitles.
Duration: 50 min.
Tickets: 10/12 EUR (this ticket is also valid for the performance DILF)
The humiliation of women, LGBTQIA+ people, racially marginalised groups and individuals, migrants and others, through choices forced upon them, is a well-known and, unfortunately, still quite widespread form of degradation or mortification. The artist draws on a personal experience from 2001, when a gang of violent men in Belgrade forced him to shut himself inside a dumpster; he himself then decided to turn that dumpster, through art, into a symbol…
Visual artist, performer. and choreographer Darko Dragičević has been a guest at CoFestival on several previous occasions. He first appeared in 2016, when he and Martin Sonderkamp led the workshop Extensions #1; in 2019, he presented his book Failure as Practice and carried out an artistic intervention of the same name in the upper foyer of Kino Šiška; and in 2025, together with Sonderkamp, he presented the dance duet Tonträger (Sound Carrier) at Nova pošta.
It isn’t always obvious to the public how, in queer art, the so-called trash aesthetic (trash, waste) functions as a tactic for turning around the very means used to humiliate or erase individuals and communities on account of their sexual preferences, orientation, non-normative appearance, or simply a different relationship to life. In queer art, the trash aesthetic disarms and neutralises processes of mortification by affirming precisely what was meant to wound, humiliate, and harm the individual. In its own particular way, this is a queer form of so-called subversive affirmation, in which an ideological operation is turned into an object of social and political analysis or critique, made visible in order to be seen. Darko Dragičević’s Dumpster does not itself belong to the trash aesthetic; rather, it is a work of art that reconstructs the original traumatic cause, the genesis, out of which the trash aesthetic is born as a form of social critique − and, not least, as a psychoanalytic process in which the subject separates itself from desires that are not his own.
Concept, Choreography, Text: Darko Dragičević
Sound Design: Hara Alonso
Lighting Design: Evelina Dembacke
Programmer: Julia Petterson
Outside Eye: Anna Koch
Camera Assistant: Lena Kunz
Produced by: Weld Stockholm and Darko Dragičević
Organised by NDA Slovenija and Kino Šiška