Solid Ground
2013
Installation with prints, drawings and a film projection
Art Radionica Lazareti, Dubrovnik
A collaboration with Siniša Ilić
Photo: Marko Ercegović
Travelling South: Monuments and Curiosities (16’20”)
2012
Video stills
A Baltic Art Center production in the frame of the program Paths Crossing – a production residency program funded by the Culture Programme of the European Union
Shown as part of the exhibition Solid Ground, Art Workshop Lazareti, Dubrovnik, Croatia
The film Travelling South is a visual essay composed of stills, found photographs (from 1960’s/70’s/80’s travel guides) and footage taken on the English coast, Elafiti (Croatia) and Gotland (Sweden). Exact geographical locations are not revealed, but are alluded to. There is an actor/protagonist in the film (one character, represented in two ways: as a still – ablack and white image-, and as an actual person), who has no specific role other than that of a conceptual character who wanders through the space of the film, and across times, Somtimes he is acting as the connecting component between shots, as an underlying constant, and in sound terms a repetative baseline or chorus.
Film/footage deals with themes of belonging and memory, displacement and imagination. It presents the idea of journeying and travelling south, which attempts to present a method of finding out, of investigation and discovery rather than representation.
The key questions that the film is dealing with are related to the impossibility of establishing identity on ‘solid grounds’, the lack of which encourages us to relate to various communities which can allow us a certain kind of identity; or which on the other hand allows us to wonder in standardised spaces produced by contemporary industries of the imaginary. Can we free ourselves from our heritage arriving at the place where we no longer depend on culturally specific categories/groups that we are born in, with a style of life that through our upbringing is moored in us?
Although related directly to the locations, the sound is not descriptive of the visual element and it is produced separately from the film. In places it may weave in and out of the footage. It may not be constantly present.
Sound in general creates the sense of an internal space (or weaving between private, interior, cerebral, bodily space and the outside world of things and people, concrete sounds, concrete realities…), relating to daydreaming, but not at all ‘dreamy’ in a cliché sense. There are some slightly ‘psychedelic’ elements to film, in which ‘real’ or figurative images turn abstract, and vice versa.
Travelling South: Monuments and Curiosities
2012
HD video, 16’20”
A Baltic Art Center production in the frame of the program Paths Crossing – a production residency program funded by the Culture Programme of the European Union