Production
New Mobility for New Normal
New Mobility for New Normal aims to map and document newly established culture hubs in time of lockdowns, curfews, and border closures as points of knowledge exchange/networking, give recommendations for the best practices, and implement some of them. The project deals with the inevitable effects of pandemic on the immediate surrounding and individual cultural actors’ responses whether the outreach led to knowledge and skills sharing, or creating new artistic practice or residency programs in culturally under-privileged municipalities. Our vision is to rethink the possibilities of artist`s mobility – during and beyond the global pandemic – by focusing on more conscious, fair, green, and “self-sustainable” ways of movability and collaboration. We are convinced that the current discrepancy between the Old and the New in ever-transforming work for artists and cultural professionals need to be explored.
Funded by the International Relief Fund for Organisations in Culture and Education 2021 of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and other partners: www.goethe.de/relieffund
New Slogans for the Wanted Future / Grandmothers and Frogs, August – September 2021.
7th Movable residency in Babe
This year’s concept of Movable residencies appropriates marketing agencies’ procedures that are aiming to creation of consumers’ desires, to sell merchandise, colonizing his/her imagination while, at the same time, ZMUC sets up a reminder on the totalitarian realm of the free market. Besides referring to a toponym Babe / eng; grandmothers, the use of an idiom “babe i žabe” /eng; grandmothers and frogs, suggests to a fusion of discordant elements, deliberately uncritical violation of taboos and exclusions in the field of contemporary art. Loose constructions, formally unlimited, are to become segments of the One Possible Future Manifesto – a collective and collaborative artwork, incited by personal freedoms deprived from any historical self-importance. The harsh neoliberal logic of the free market based on the Thatcherian credo – there is no society but only individuals – leads us to a dilemma, succinctly summed up by the philosopher Boris Buden: Are we going to have a society without a future or a future without society? Artists in residence were writer, publicist and journalist Goran Gocić and Marija Iva Gocić, photographer Stefana Savić, fashion activist Marina Ilić, writer Đordje V. Gregović and multimedia artists Vesna Vesić and Miomir Moca Jeremić. The curator of the residence is art historian Maida Gruden.
The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Information of Republic of Serbia.
Gordy’s Knot
Processional and collaborative sculpture titled Gordy’s Knot refers to archeological methods involving material traces and evidences, becoming itself a tool for emancipatory rethinking of cultural identity. It aims to bridge ever more fragmented “identity communities” all solely framed within certain ideologies, yet without any material foundation. The connection, through collaboration with the local institutions – elementary school and Center for Culture Sopot, Gordy’s Knot perpetuates a complex understanding of cultural identity.
Gordy’s knot is a piece, made of 700 kg of forged and twisted steel tubes, borne out of sculptor Goran Denić initial idea – that the form itself should emphasize intricate relationship between contemporary person and cultural heritage, at the same time opening up itself to possible integration of predecessors’ cultures at the given locality of village Babe into oneself cultural foundation. Following up a thesis that contemporary artist is dissatisfied with societal progress shaped upon technological advancement only, Gordy’s Knot is made of pieces, remnants and bric-a-brac iron above the soil but also beneath, representing the present and the past, respectively.