EXTRAVAGANT BODIES is a collaborative, intermedia and interdisciplinary art event addressing the theme of disability as important social and political issue in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. The main focus is a critical questioning trough art activity, of the social, political, and cultural position and identity of people with disability. This includes creating a productive environment where the specified theme can be contextualized through a variety of artistic projects as well as close collaboration of artists with non-artist local organizations and initiatives dealing with disability. Artists featured in the festival are disabled persons themselves, who use their bodies in performance art, photography, film, to talk about their bodies and needs. The project is conceived through interdisciplinary approach offering different perspectives on the subject by experts from the fields of art, medicine, sociology, philosophy and psychiatry. The project will be publicly presented, in different scales and versions in Zagreb (Croatia), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Belgrade (Serbia).

Extravagant Bodies is an art event, dealing with the politics of normality. It is based on the fact that what is considered normal (as well as what is not) is ideologically determined and deeply rooted into the structures of society. The knowledge of existence of something other and different generates negative identification, social exclusion, fear and hatred. The artists participating at mostly belongs to the minority sections of society - the disabled - and in their works they deal exactly with what makes them different, using their difference as a theme and bringing it into focus. unafraid of social critique and judgment. All the works that will be presented are performance-based.

Performance art of the 90ies, and at the beginning of the new century, is based on the issues of transsexuals, homosexuals, cyber-bodies, biotechnological bodies, diseased bodies, bodies with special needs. The presentation of such identities helps to crush the concept the constructed Real - it is a strategy of deconstructing and destroying the normative. Bodies with special needs belong to the bodies whose existence is seen as one of the options of the norm. They show the ways in which social production of the body can surrender in the face of the biological fact, and also discrimination.

In relation to the norm, the body with special needs is read as different, abnormal, traumatic, foreign, stigmatized, unacceptable - or acceptable, but only under specific circumstances (e.g. court jesters, circuses, freak-shows,..). The social position of such bodies, named disabled bodies, is inscribed also in language - the Latin word invalidus means uncapable, without ability. During the twentieth century the socio-cultural sensitivity for difference has been gradually increasing.

The bodies with special needs are seen as dependent, in need of special attention, demanding movement within a different time frame, a different speed. Their esthetics is subordinated to a different canon of beauty. One of the famous works by the Irish performer Mary Duffy Cutting the Ties that Bind, deals exactly with these issues. Mary Duffy is one of the talidomid victims. The most known extremeties' anomalies caused by this "medicine" is amelia (absence of one or more extremities) and phocomelia (derived from the Greek word designating the extremities of a seal, and referring to the body with extremely short hands or legs). Many children were also born blind, deaf, with damaged hearts, kidneys, genitals, nervous systems, digestive tracts, or they would die soon after birth. Mary Duffy was born without hands. The Classical sculptures reach us exactly in a disabled state - without hands, legs, even heads. But while they invoke admiration, embodying the criteria of beauty, real bodies without extremities invoke horror - they are considered insufficient and unbeautiful, traumatic: "the presence of a person with special needs is problematic in many social situations: he/she threatens the established status quo, by causing the observer, faced with what is 'abnormal', to suddenly perceive his/her own bodies or selves as potentially different", sais Petra Kuppers in her book Disability and Contemporary Performance.

The different, extravagant bodies of people with special needs have become the source of creativity for artists that will be presented at the EXTRAVAGANT BODIES festival, inviting only the most courageous to witness their existence. This body is a place of constitution of the identity, traumatic for "others", but performing its function.