1-5, July 2010, ZAGREB, CROATIA
Encounters III
ART OF REMEMBRANCE
Mnemopolitics. Mnemotopias. Mnemopoetics
1-5, July 20 10, ZAGREB, CROATIA
Venues:
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth
Mislavova, 11
Zagreb Architects’ Society
Ban Jelačić Sq., 3 /I
Thursday, July 1
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
16.00-19.30
Katrina Petter:
Memory and Commemoration – public art projects in Lower Austria
Discussion
Theatre and Remembrance
Projection of the performance ‘BE FREE’
Discussion
Friday, July 2
Zagreb Architects’ Society
Ban Jelačić Sq., 3 /I
Entrance free
11.00 – 13.00
OPA – presentation of the project Memories – In Space II
Discussion
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
16.30-19,30
Theatre and Remembrance
Borna Armanini
Talk about the performance ‘Pasje godine’
Ivana Keser
Cinema and Remembrance
Screening of the film The Last Dance
Language: German/Croatian with English subtitles
Author: Michaela Strumberger
Saturday, July 3
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
10.00 -10.30 Gathering
10.30-12.00
Zagreb Through Eva’s Eyes: Kralj Petar Krešimir Square
Mnemotopias: Remembrance in Public Space (City Walk)
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
16.30 – 19.30
Screening of the film Circle of Memory
Language: Italian.English.Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Author: Andrea Rossini
Discussion with Andrea Rossini, the author of the film
Moderator: Franko Dota
Dino Igrec
The Story of Kralj Petar Krešimir Square
Sunday, July 4
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
10.00-13.00
Mario Kikaš
Presentation of the paper
The Complex of Srebrenica: Commemorative Performance of National(ity)
Panel discussion - Is There Art of Remembrance?
Cinema, Literature, Theatre, Public Space
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
16.30-17.00 Gathering
17.00-20.00
Park Maksimir
Zagreb Through Eva’s Eyes
Mnemotopias: Remembrance in Public Space (City Walk)
Visiting original building of Lavoslav Schwarz Home for Elderly People
Monday, July 5
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth,
Mislavova, 11
Entrance free
10-13.00
Sonja Leboš
The report from the sessions with members of the
Club for Elderly People Melisa at Centre for Culture Prečko
Panel discussion
3.age: Time for Remembrance. Who is listening?
14.00 – 14.15 Gathering
Square of Victims of Fascism (entrance to the Meštrović’s Pavillon, near the fountain)
14.15 – 16.00
Zrinjevac
Zagreb Through Eva’s Eyes
Mnemotopias: Remembrance in Public Space (City Walk)
Concept, production, organization:
Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research (AIIR)
Co-funded by:
City of Zagreb – Office for Education, Culture and Sport
Ministry of Culture – Republic of Croatia
In cooperation with:
Austrian Cultural Forum in Zagreb
Italian Institute for Culture in Zagreb
Zagreb Architects’ Society
Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth
About the programme
Memory and Commemoration
The talk on Memory and Commemoration will give a range of different examples (from memorials to temporary interventions) how artists work with this topic focusing on Erlauf and Allentsteig (Austria), where meanwhile a lot of different projects have been realised
VALIE EXPORT, Landscape Knife, Allentsteig, 1999 © Christian Wachter
memorial at the town lake of allentsteig
A monument was installed in co-operation with the town council of Allentsteig in memory of residents from the area, who between 1938 and 1941 were disloged by the national socialist regime and forced to leave their homes.
The 'landscape knife' created by VALIE EXPORT virtually cuts into the lake, its metal blades reflecting both sun and water. Next to the object a glass pane has been erected, depicting the names of the vacated villages and farmhouses, an area now being used as a military training field. Just as the expulsion all these years ago left a dramatic incision in everyone's lives. VALIE EXPORT too wants to express how painfully struck she was by fate of those people. With this monument she has created a centre of communication, but also a symbol of the dramatic events both of the past and present. For today, the inhabitants of the small town are forced to listen to the shots fired by the military on exercise, a kind of war in peacetime waged in their heads. Konrad Rennert composed a musical piece on this theme '... And bid his ears a little while be deaf ...'. It is performed with live musicians (and/or tape) and deals with 'unheared of' but everyday life events. The writer Rudi Palla compiled the catalogue 'Memorial Allentsteig' (see page 85) on this theme.
(Katharina Blaas-Pratscher)
Architect: Walter Kirpicsenko
Source: http://www.publicart.at/e/e_home.html
Katrina Petter
Born 1979 in Feldkirch (Austria), lives in Vienna. Studied journalism, communication theory and art history in Vienna. Currently working on her thesis on art in public spaces without assignment. Works for Public Art Lower Austria since 2004. Exhibition project: To Be Continued, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, 2009.
Theatre and remembrance
Projection of the theatre performance
BE FREE!
Language barrier-free theatre performance BE FREE! portrays displacement of ethnic Germans from Brno that took place on May 31, 1945. 25,000 to 30,000 people were forced out of Brno and its surrounding under the violent supervision of Czechoslovak partisans and Soviet soldiers. Up to 6,000 former residents of Brno died on the way to Austria. This is the sixth project within Feste Theatre 'Identity' serial. Project BE FREE! tackles German-Czech relationships, a taboo that has not been dealt with much even after 1989.
Feste Theatre (Brno)
Run by REPT o.s., based on idea of open society, social art and art aiming at cultural and sociopolitical education. Klára Mišunová is the Feste Theatre producer.
Theatre and remembrance
Talk
Pasje godine (Dog’s Age)
Borna Armanini is giving talk on his recent theatre piece, which was preceded by working with elderly people in one of the Zagreb's homes for elderly people. Some of them took active part in the performance.
Borna Armanini
As a theatre director with 10-year work experience, Armanini has worked on the texts of various authors: Popović, Ionesco, Sartre, Ravenhill, Naik, Lukić, McPherson, Homer. He writes and translates dramatic texts, theatre reviews and expert analyses. His MA thesis at the Drama Academy in Ljubljana was Approach to Myth in Theatre.
Ivana Keser,
Visual artist, filmologist, born in 1967. Lives in Zagreb.
Graduated painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. After postgraduate studies of Comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, she obtained a Ph.D. degree in Film studies.
She deals with the multimedia arts and exhibits at the numerous museums (MoMA, New York / Mamco Geneva / Manifesta 1, Rotterdam / Museum of Modern art, Dublin / Kyoto biennial, Kyoto / Sala Montcada- La Caixa, Barcelona / Institute of Art, Cleveland, etc.). In 2001 (together with A.B. Ilić) she initiates and runs Community Art, Permanent public forum for art in community, as well as School of Community Art in which she organizes lectures, workshops, film projections and discussions.
She teaches at the Music Academy in Zagreb and at the postgraduate studies of Comparative literature in Zagreb. She writes for magazines, books and radio, publishes essays and interviews. As coeditor she prepares the book Zagreb Conceptual: Conceptualization of Art since 1950.
Cinema and Remembrance:
Archive and medium of rumination and reflection
Films that deal with memories usually belong to documentaries or feature films, but films that most fundamentally problematise the different modes of representation of memory are actually essay films. Essay film resists definitons as part of a set category and that, like a literary essay, it can be described as a form in itself. The stories in these films are not teleological or continuous, but rather puzzle stories that deal with the construction of collective memories through societal prestructuring of the individual’s memory as a starting point.
Drawing on Plato and his Theory of anamnesis that he developed in his dialogues where he equates learning with remembering, for film essays or cinema of remembrance we can say that “we can only reach the truth by recollecting what we already know but we forgot”.
The filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Jean-Luc Godard, John Gianvito and Chris Marker intruduced in the lecture are authors who make (re)constructions of memories in their films. All of the movies represented as cinema of remembrence share an open structure. They belong to reflexive film, the one that does more than simply represent its subject. Film that deeply examines its own methods: filmmakers atitudes and perspectives.
Cinema of remembrance provides the viewer not only with the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use. Such films require recipients to actively participate in the movie. Namely, essayistic mode of filmmaking as an essay flows in different directions and reaches multiple destinations, as seen in examle of Jonas Mekas’ film Walden, Diaries, Notes, Sketches (1969).
The film material in such films does’t submit to the previous formulated goal, the one the author has already forseen in his story, but the author questions instead: “What can I do with the footage or reproduction aside from the reason it was made for?” –Thus, before the film editing an author in such a position is in front of his film material as a very first audience, as we can see in the film (Histoire(s) du cinéma (1999) by Jean-Luc Godard.
Cinema of remembrance is also marked by rumination that forces the filmmaker to turn a matter over and over in the mind, to consider, to contemplate, to meditate, to ponder which is obvious in Gianvito’s film Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), the visual meditation through graves, monuments, memorial places, made without presence of witnesses, without statements or narrator.
Films of memories are characterized by rhisomatic nature: constant moving, wandering thaughts, with no final goal, intention of power posession or spreading a final and dominant discourse. Chris Marker’s film Remembrance of Things to Come (2001), memorial film on fotographer Denise Bellon is such a visual archive. Film which is actually a montage of photographs from Denise Bellon's photo-reportage from the period between the two world wars, the proof of Marker’s opsession for documenting history which doesn’t officialy exist.
The Last Dance
(53’, 2002)
German/Croatian with English subtitles
Following a family retracing its path of expulsion, The Last Dance captures the last flicker of the Danube Swabians – ethnic Germans interned in concentration camps and driven out of former-Yugoslavia after WWII.
Michaela Strumberger
http://www.michaelastrumberger.com/
MA in set-design (University of Yale). This Austrian artist has had her residence in Berlin since 2000. From 1997-2003 she worked as a set-designer and director on various productions (Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, NewYork, Paris, Salzburg). Besides being theatre artist, she is also video and film-maker. Since 2004. she has been dedicated to visual arts.
Circle of Memory
(59’, 2007)
Italian.English.Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
The unique experience of a group of architects and sculptors in 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavia, introducing new ways to remember World War II and the victory upon Nazism and Fascism. The curse of history at the beginning of the 90s, with the nationalist forces using those same memories to manipulate the different national communities and lead the country into war. A journey into European memory of the 20th century, the century that started and ended in Sarajevo
Andrea Oskari Rossini
(London, 1966)
Italian journalist working at Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso (www.balcanicaucaso.org). He completed his studies at the Università degli Studi di Milano and at the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI), Milano. He currently lives in Venice. As a director he produced the following documentaries: Circle of memory (ITA 2007, 59'); Welcome to Brescia (ITA 2006, 28'); After Srebrenica (ITA 2005, 33'); Svetlana Broz: Good People in an Evil Time (ITA 2005, 12'); Planet Zastava (ITA 2005, 28'); Srebrenica, Europe (ITA 1999, 39'); Postcards from Yugoslavia (ITA 1996, 25'). Both Circle of Memory and After Srebrenica were included in the final selection of the Prix international du documentaire et du reportage méditerranéen (cat. Arco Latino and Memories of the Mediterranean).
Franko Dota
(1977)
Historian dealing with the memory of war and post-war period in Istria and the cultural and political relation between Italy and socialist Yugoslavia. He works as correspondent for Italian press from Croatia and Slovenia.
The Complex of Srebrenica:
Commemorative Performance of National(ity)
Srebrenica – place of dreadful 1995 genocide in last war – lives today not only as sacred topos in collective (national) memory, but as a place polluted by quotidian politicized discourse. That type of discourse was direct object of this small research during the commemoration in Srebrenica last year (2009). Commemoration and burial of newly identified bodies due to its presence in media, or in (un)official political rhetorics discovers certain power relationships or to be precise – dialogs which seem to be anything but dialogs. This dialogical structure (in definition of Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin) - is a matrix of political performativity during the official event of commemoration. It's used to describe paradoxicality of “real” addressee of political messages in commemorative and ideological space. Addressee in this context is national Other (Serbs or Bosnikas – depends who is message sender). Hence complex (of Srebrenica) as a term from title, does not emphasize the obvious (historical, juridical, daily political etc.) complexity of indicated place (in its various meaning) but underlines another Bakhtin's term in his theory of speech genres – secondary or complex speech genres including scientific, sociopolitical and artistic forms. Public performativity of these genre(s) makes frame of mourning process as a (third) complexity - one of gender relations and woman's (widow's, mother's, sister's) working through as they are the victims who survived.
Mario Kikaš
Born in Mostar (1987) in Bosnia and Herzegovina where lived until 2006. Nowdays lives
and attends University in Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Complex of Srebrenica: Commemorative Performance of National(ity) was his BA final essay at the Department for Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb.
The Report from the sessions with members of the Club for Elderly People Melisa at Centre for Culture Prečko in Zagreb
In this report Sonja Leboš is analyzing the conversations she had with members of one of Zagreb's many clubs for elderly people. They shared with her their working and life experiences. Together, they have been trying to find the modalities for future intergenerational cooperations.
Sonja Leboš
(Zagreb, 1967)
MA in Cultural Anthropology (University of Zagreb). SL has created various interdisciplinary research methods and platforms for articulation of multilayered aesthetical, ethical, ecological and sociological issues, cooperated with different societal organisations and studied manifold cultural forms. By her initiated recent on-going projects include: promotion of the publication ‘Space of Identity, Space of Interaction, Space of Alteration’, an interdisciplinary study of Zagreb city district Maksimir; 'Cybercine', media – archaeology and networked live-stream platforms; 'Mnemosyne-Theatre of Memories', research and building platforms for analysis, contesting and envisioning diverse cultures of memories.