Mariia Bakalo: Who has the privilege to imagine future?

Meet the artist. Mariia Bakalo @ Culture Utopias residency in Bucharest, June 2024. In her ongoing work, Mariia tackles the urgency of what she can do with art in times of major crisis and the topic of futurelessness. She believes in connection emerging in the silence of shared physical presence in a certain space.
Mariia Bakalo is a choreographer from Ukraine (Crimea). In her recent practice Mariia questions art’s futility in the time of mass human sufferings. She is a recipient of the Gluck Fellowship, as well as I-Portunos grant, the Danceweb Scholarship Program, Ukrainian Presidential Award for the distinguished cultural activists in the field of dance, and the Tanja Leidke Foundation stipends. She received her MFA degree in Experimental Choreography at University of California Riverside.
Interview by Mara Mărăcinescu/ Sunete pe bune and Ștefania Ferchedău. Footage from Mariia Bakalo’s sharing of the hollow body theme working process. Footage from the Culture Utopias workshops and events in June 2024, thanks to all participants. performing utopia is a content thread developed in the frame of WHAT'S NEXT? programme.
The Culture Utopias residency is part of “What’s next? Safe cultural multi-spaces for the multidisciplinary reflection of (post)war and (post)crisis European identity”, project co-organised by Gabriela Tudor Foundation (Romania), MitOst e.V. & zusa (Germany), Musiktheatertage Wien (Austria), Wrocławski Instytut Kultury (Poland), and Proto produkciia (Ukraine), co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, cultural program co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund, and undertaken with support from Austrian Cultural Forum, Institutul Polonez / Instytut Polski w Bukareszcie, Goethe-Institut Bucuresti and Romanian Cultural Institute Warsaw.