Recently, Urbana Vrana Institute and RogLab have started a special programme to encourage the creation of graffiti and street art by women. Called GraFEM (the name combines the “gra” from “graffiti” and the “fem” from “female”), it aims to empower female graffiti and street artists and promote women’s graffiti and street art culture. Incidentally, linguistics...Continue Reading

The Ljubljana Feminist Bike Tour is a new take on the popular Ljubljana Feminist Tour, an educational two-hour walk around the city centre that has been run by the Urbana Vrana Institute since July 2017. Offering a gender perspective on Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana Feminist Tour has become a Ljubljana mainstay. It is a popular way...Continue Reading

Please note! This is merely hypothetical. Just some random thoughts. Just words on paper. Here I am, dreaming, doodling, thinking, looking at the map and all four corners of the sky. Where to go, what to do? I’m thinking about what’s worth seeing and I’m trying to think of interesting people with stories to tell...Continue Reading

In November 2019, the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana hosted RIO: Begnagrad, Srp, D’Pravda, an exhibition that covered the work of three Slovenian bands from the late seventies and early eighties that were not part of the punk and new wave scene (covered by Ptich’s punk tour) per se, but nevertheless belonged to a circle of...Continue Reading

The one thing I always notice braving the serpentine-like winding roads from Ljubljana towards North Primorska region is the dominance of green. And blue. All shades of green and blue. Lorca would appreciate it. There seems to be nothing but “verde te quiero verde” – green woods, green meadows, green pastures, green trees, green grass....Continue Reading

No, this is not about the birds and the bees, but about how folk music is made in a specific location. Who creates it, who discovers it, who transforms it? How and why? Folk music is something old, something that is transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth, something authentic, primordial, something that...Continue Reading

mmOver thousands of years humankind developed many ways of expressing its inner self, its “soul”, its connection to the natural or supernatural worlds. Music has always played an integral part of the process, from indigenous and shamanic rituals to the religious ceremonies or new age celebrations. Spiritual elements in music – speaking as broadly and...Continue Reading

Slovenian electronic music producer Gramatik is undoubtedly one of the most interesting global musicians of the last decade. Not only because of his unique type of dance music which has millions of views on YouTube, but also because he makes his work available for free. His winning recipe is a mixture of hip hop beats,...Continue Reading

One night several years ago, in Ljubljana’s then jazz-oriented Sax Pub (the heritage still apparent today through the building’s saxophone-related murals), I faced a dilemma. Should I order another beer? Or should I make a beeline home, since my boisterous friends have left me to my own devices in order to achieve their higher purpose?...Continue Reading

Solo female vocal artists aside, let’s check out the (post-)Yugoslav all-female bands rocking the stage since the 1960s. Beat We are kicking off with Belgrade’s Sanjalice (1965–1969), the only band from a bunch of 1960s Yugoslav all-women beat groups that back then managed to record some songs. Actually, they released several best-selling EP singles and...Continue Reading