12:30-15:30
satellite meetings 4: Biljana Tanurovska
Advocacy, a Collective Action/ or – How to voice our needs together?
This workshop will explore advocacy as a collective and strategic practice, focusing on how artists, cultural workers, and organisations can articulate their needs, resist structural marginalisation, and influence cultural policy. Through a mix of theory, regional case studies, and practical tools, we will examine how advocacy differs from lobbying, how to identify and frame problems, build alliances, and create campaigns that matter.
Advocacy is not only about claiming rights or asking for support, it is also about constructing arguments, occupying public space (discursively and physically), and generating pressure for systemic change. Advocacy is public, participatory, and rooted in shared values and solidarity.
We will look at concrete examples from the post-Yugoslav region, broader Europe, and beyond, including actions and strategies developed by Nomad Dance Academy and other cultural networks, associations and coalitions. Examples may include campaigns for better working conditions (in dance), public recognition of independent cultural spaces, advocacy for mobility and research funding, or feminist/eco-social interventions in cultural policy frameworks. Participants will be invited to reflect, connect, and begin imagining advocacy as part of their own collective artistic and political practice.
bio
Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski is a curator, researcher, writer and cultural producer at the intersection of dance, theatre and visual arts performance, art history, cultural policy, independent cultural scenes, activist, feminist and environmental (curatorial) practices. She works as a freelancer and as a programme director of Lokomotiva in Skopje. Currently, she is a co-researcher for the NADA Digital Archive of Dance and Performance; Dance Map research project; co-curator of the exhibition Dancing, Resisting, (Un)working (in Zagreb and Ljubljana) and Performance Platform festival in Skopje (2023-); curator of the international school Curating in Context, and mentor and lecturer on diverse educational programs. She is part of the platform Nomad Dance Academy, teaches and writes, is an art historian and holds a PhD from the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. She works collaboratively, believing that meaningful creation and art/cultural production thrive through connections and relations with others.
