| "Its like being Paris Hilton, but it only costs a quid": an interview with Stav B |
|
|
| Sunday, 12 April 2009 | ||
 by persefonaWhat one could generally say about Stav B, is that she is an Athens-born, London-based performer, artist, photographer and activist, involved in several arts and activist initiatives. However, to me, she is a multicabaret extravaganza who made us all kiki at the 5th QueerBeograd opening night! Charismatic, flamboyant, extravagant even at breakfast early in the morning, inquisitive and curious, sensitive and strong, passionate, loquacious, full –on fast, over the top, loud and proud, positive and energetic, manly and womanly, funny and serious , beautiful and fierce… combative… both in her art /activism and life.
When I first saw her in person, I thought to myself…”Fuck, who the hell resurrected Frida and brought her to our festival?! I knew she was going to perform and spin some vinyl at the festival party… and boy did she!
Hello Milica, it’s very lovely to meet you, you’re amazing and I’m very proud to be a part of Queer festival in Belgrade, because I think Belgrade is a very important city just as the festival is extremely important. Yes, I’ve seen some things that are not very pretty (referring to the nazi attack from the night before) and that’s not surprising, so we need to stick together and show solidarity and also initiative as to how to fight and overcome these issues, that’s where I think the festival’s significance lies.
 I’m fundamentally a fine artist, a visual artist and I express my ideas through photography and performance. The performance art came from photography as it is: I was photographing myself to authenticate my work and also because it was easier, I was available, thus I created a male gaze and a masquerade with non-identity subjects. A lot of people thought and asked themselves who this person is and a lot of people who took the photographs. The answer is that it was my own male gaze, and it was always the photographs of feet and shoes, and eventually you’ll see that the feet had stepped out of the frame, acquired an identity and became performance. So yes, photography holds a very important place in my work, as everything basically starts from the photograph, which is actually a mirror and a representation.
Well, I am a political person as it is, and as Aristotle said, we are all political animals, so my politics is about equality, solidarity, and not necessarily about equality among women and men, but among people. It is all about human beings and this is all where queer has begun for me, so it’s not about homosexuality or heterosexuality, it has to do with us as people, accepting the fact that we are all different and unique in our own right. Pushing the limits is a very important point in my art, as this is what I do as an artist but also as a human being, and I do it via aesthetics, via beauty, humour, drama, and via spectacle, so for me it is a very queer way of doing it, and still quite radical and effective.
 I’m definitely queer, simply because I’m different, I identify as a biological human being, a homosexual, but my homosexuality doesn’t derive from sex, it derives from politics and my politics defines my sexuality, it also has to do with my relationship with my body, who I prefer to be with, it has a lot to do with my past. It totally reflects in my work, because I define, redefine and deconstruct femininity and the female, the female role, the stereotypes attached to it. As I’m getting older, I become less tolerant of people who want to take this freedom away from me like those nazi assholes down there (while the interview is being done, we get the information from the police that a small group of young men gathered in front of the entrance of the Labris building); I simply refuse to live in fear. As I‘ve said before we all have fate in this world, freedom of speech is extremely important, freedom of movement is extremely important, of ideas. We are all equal and unique in this world and we all have complexities but we deserve a little space to make our mark. And this is why I’m here for; I’m here to make my mark in a queer political dyke manner.
“Fuck the gender up” is my latest photographic project which basically aims at redefining and deconstructing notions of gender via costume, pose and gaze, and my subject is somebody that I really care for, very special to me, and she came out of the blue into my life. It is the first time that I’ve used somebody else as a subject, as a sort of delinearity, as an extension to my own creative process, and a kind of infinity of my project and also mirroring myself via  the lens. So I’ve moved behind the scene and I’ve taken photographs of a very androgynous subject. “Fuck the gender up” has successfully been presented as a part of the Transatlantic Pride exhibition – six of us gay and lesbian artists have participated. Hopefully, I will continue this project.
Yes I am, I’m a member of two collectives in London, one of them is ACTART! and it’s basically a collective of artists who use their body to actually manifest their work, so there’s a lot of bleeding, a lot of cutting a lot of primal use of the body, but I use my body in a different way. The other collective which started in 2006 is called Behind Bars, it’s a radical DIY queer benefit collective which raises money for various causes and collectives, helping them out (like Queer Beograd, LGBT Iraqi etc). I have been with them from the beginning and have been hosting and dj-ing but also performing there. Queen Bees is my own night, women s night, it started two years ago as a statement for women enjoying themselves among and with other women, having the opportunity to see other women artists, and it’s not necessarily lesbian, it’s a women’s night, very interesting and informative and for women who want to learn about different things. That’s what Queen Bees is basically about. But now I’ m doing Queen Bees again and I say it is polysexual, but really what I’m doing now is that I’m inviting men as guests, and I think this is good step forward. When it comes to different collectives, London is let’s face it quite privileged, it has and offers a lot of opportunities, it is the London plenty, it gives us what we actually need to think about and help out the rest of the world, and there are a lot of problems in the rest of the world (the west , too, but they re not the same), like, people get attacked for being gay, for being queer for being different, so we raise money to help make other things in the rest of world happen, to make it visible, to make it knowledgeable and back it up financially. There are five or six of us who have been with Behind Bars from the very beginning, but a lot of people come and go, too.
 You are absolutely right about that, I mean Greece is very important, and really I cannot avoid where I come from, but what I did is that I used the tools I had growing up in Greece. And as a girl, I was very privileged, coming from the privileged background, having private education in a girls school, but really what was being done to me was that I was actually manufactured in a way to have a good marriage and a good family and I knew from the very beginning, in fact from the age of nine that I didn’t really belong there, and I knew that with the first opportunity I was going to get out. Now, getting out was really about abandoning my roots, and really cutting my roots, and as I have said in my performance, cutting the umbilical cord. This has given me a new impetus to understand who I am, appreciate where I come from and see what I can do with it, so I use the chorus of my upbringing and my Greekness to do what I am doing now. And you are absolutely right cause my family is very matriarchal, I mean my mother was the one who really ruled the household, so she is the one who decided on my education, decided where we were going to go, how we were to do things, so I know and have learned a lot from her, but what I actually did, were these things that were against what she would have wished for, a traditional life for me. But the good thing for me about Greece is that the whole environment the burden of such immense cultural heritage has made me a theorist, a person of ideas, so I have used that as well in my personal development and my work, as a reference point. And I think I have come to terms with that I am a kind of Greek in a self-exile, living abroad, which is totally voluntary, I chose it myself, but as I have said, because of my background and my upbringing, I have had a luxury to do that, and I am aware of that.
Yeah, I mean it’s a very good question, because it was nearly twenty years ago, I was a very young child, an anglophile, had a lot of ideas, and I did give myself the option of returning , but I remember the first time I stepped on the Heathrow airport I was going to stay. I welcomed the transition very well, because I’m self-sufficient in surviving, and I spoke the language, and let’s face it, language would become a barrier, I mean even to this day I get people asking me where I am from, where is my accent from, and what I look like, etc, etc, so you can imagine what it was like then, but as I said to you before, I use my tools for my survival, and hopefully I haven’t really been completely lobotomized in the fact that I think of myself as completely English and a fake Greek, but also I saw a lot of changes ever since I arrived, how different it was then, and how it is now, and sometimes I sympathize with people who are just arriving now, because it is actually quite difficult - they come there with different ideas, these dreams of making it somewhere, fulfilling the dreams...and its obviously not like that at all… but because of the state of the world, this cruel capitalism, the political and economic reasons, so everybody now is considered immigrant and everybody is considered foreigner, so they will get a treatment that foreigners would get. But I am a strong person, and experience has always been important to me and the fact that I always knew what I wanted from day one… 
Thank you for your very accurate comment Milica, well, I think the mother-daughter relationship is a very important and strong one, and in my case I am blessed and cursed at the same time to have a mother who is very emotionally strong, but also very tenacious; and one of the reasons I left Athens is because of her, I thought of another city, but it was impossible, it would be too near, (laughing)... I mean for a very long time I was extremely angry with her, I was almost embarrassed that I was my mother’s daughter, and then as time went by I realised that the more I refused to accept who she is, the more I couldn’t accept who I was, so I decided to try and be in peace with my relationship with her and totally accept that a lot of the elements from my personality come from her, because I do come from her, so I finally relaxed about it. And as long as I thought, I don’t want to be like her, and the more I said that, the more I was becoming like her and it was something I definitely wanted to avoid… So I, as homage to her, decided to write a piece, because all my performances are based on personal experience and are autobiographic. Initially, when I wrote this performance it was extremely vitriolic and really vindictive, so when I read it, I realised that it is not the point, because I am not attacking her, I don’t want to kill her, what I wanted to do is say was “I know who you are and I know what you’ve done”, so I rewrote the performance over and over again, it actually took me a long time to finish. And as you’ve said very correctly the performance is brutally honest, personal but also extremely sensitive, funny, we had very funny moments, too. Now I think the biggest mistake parents can make, and the biggest mistake my mother had made was that she forgot that respect has got to be earned, and not just given because she is my mother. She betrayed my trust once and unfortunately she really ruined the possibility that we had to be friends as she demanded something from me that I couldn’t give her, and she didn’t give me things that she could, two essential parameters, that she could and should, which are freedom and respect.
And we all love you back Stav B!!! Photos: Jorge Monederostav b.2, by stav bee Hector de Gregorio Samira Shulz Stav performing, photo by Dominic Davies stav b djing at Behind Bars,March 2008, photo by Magda
Sugar Mary |
||
Stav has three meanings actually for me, in Hebrew it means autumn, in Serbo-Croatian it is attitude (which a lot of friends of mine have teased me about back in London, since I do have attitude), and in Greek it means cross, the B is my last name. But Stav B became a persona and a new kind of identity that I acquired, and to my surprise, and also my satisfaction, perversely, it has created a lot of problems because I always blur that I am a human and an artist, so I always say, there’s Stav and Stav B, and someone who I really like back in London, said to me once: “ I hope before Stav B, you’re Stav” (laughing).
I would like to say that I’ve had a fantastic time in Belgrade, and I’m certainly coming back, obviously if you’ll have me. I’ve met some amazing people; I’ve made so many friends in such a short time. You and Queer Belgrade have to continue what you do, with no fear and hesitation, and no looking back. Fascism will never prevail and this is not just a cliché, and I salute you and totally take my hat in front of you for living under these conditions and still doing these amazing activism and events, and doing it with spirit and bravery and intelligence. I think you are absolutely amazing people and I am really proud to have been a part of Queer Beograd Festival.| Next > |
|---|
