Just a rebranding of the usual autumn festival fare, or a curatorial step forward?

With autumn and the events calendar in Zagreb heating up with a great selection of festivals that have become a part of everyone's social calendar, a new cultural umbrella brand is created by city officials to envelop them all and to... to do what exactly?

With summer behind us the temperatures may be going down, but the cultural events calendar in Zagreb heats up. After two months of "school holidays" during which festivals (with a few noble old institutions being the exception) relocate to Split, Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Svetvincenat, Motovun... theaters are finally opening, e-mails with announcements are starting to circulate and invitations to exhibition openings begin arriving at a regular pace once more. Working in arts and culture I still do get that "fresh notebook and pencil case" feeling every September. And this September brought with it press conferences and a logo of a new cultural conglomerate.

Modeled perhaps on the longstanding success of large-scale manifestations like Festival d'Automne of Paris, Zagreb's city officials have created a cultural umbrella brand, a new grand player on the autumn calendar of events, YES.ZGB.

A wordplay on the English "Yes" and Croatian "Jes(en)" (autumn), "YES.ZGB - Autumn in Zagreb, International Multicultural Festivities" (I admit the full title gives me shivers, in a bad way) in its first inaugural installment brings together five festivals: Zagreb Film Festival,  Zagreb Theater Festival, Queer Zagreb, New Circus Festival and VIP Zagreb Jazz Festival (the first three in their 6th year, the later two in their 4th year), plus a myriad of different cultural events ranging from opera and contemporary art exhibitions to open-air rock concerts by local bands and literary street events.

Hiring theatrologist, critic and theater intendant Mani Gotovac to program events making up the flesh to the festival backbone of YES.ZGB has been an interesting move, as this is a woman with PR smarts and one completely unapologetic of her taste in theater. Her previous stints at two National Theaters (Split and Rijeka), years of working as a critic and editor, plus her general presence in the media (gossip magazines included) have made her a household name. Still, Gotovac has so far made no statements delineating her curatorial direction, only those of a general nature romanticizing the arrival of autumn (literarily far more successfully then my intro for this text, I admit), so one must ask whether this is in fact a curatorial new step forward for Zagreb or just a rebranding of the autumn festival fare we have become accustomed to?

If the format does carry on - our City's officials have in the past shown lack of interest in creating sustainable cultural policies that might actually help develop Zagreb's cultural and artistic scenes - it will take a few years before we can tell whether the move to conjoin such a varied selection of events will bear fruit in form of surplus value for Zagreb's cultural consumer or whether we have just one more example of bureaucratic institutionalization in effect.

Ivana IVKOVIC, Setpember 2008