Children’s world is full of dangers; real & imagined. Most children’s fears are normal and temporary. Statistics show that the probability of children serious injuries during unstructured outdoor play is extremely low. Today’s children are obsessed with technology, which sometimes they cannot resist. Outdoor group games are less and less attractive to them, they experience less of the physical world around them and spend more time in the virtual world. The goal of the workshop was to encourage the children and give them ideas for some new joint outdoor games. We used quick drawing, rubber jumping and performance technique.
The piece is a sketch for an artistic intervention in the Dotršćina, Zagreb memorial park. During the Second World War, the Ustasha regime used this location for the mass killing of anti-fascists, Serbs, Jews and other victims of terror. Scientific research determined about 7,000 victims, and that number is not final. The fundamental goal is to return the memorial area of the park to the collective memory, through the contemporary art interventions, organized every year on the World Day of Peace (September 21).
Although my project was not selected that year, I made a land art intervention at the beginning of spring. In it, I deal with signs that are naturally formed in the bark of forest trees. I painted a row of young trees with beetroot juice and found features on them that I attributed to women. Thus, the forest indirectly evoked the memory of the young and brave women who died here, and their names remained, as in everything, behind the dominance of the male gender.
The whirlwind dried up into a silence of protruding joints poking out. The muscle fits into the hollow of my palm. I lift the body that is overflowing my chest with warmth. Pink with a black dot, rumpled mounds of dry skin and thinned out white hairs that the storms laid flat. A patch of brown steeply illuminates the area below the two air openings. Veins of red streams surface from the crevices. One narrow path has been left bald, bare atop. As if bound by invisible weights flowing down onto the body from the lungs.” N.B.
The day after he was gone, I went into the forest, pressured by the bitterness and the weight on my lungs. My eyes were constantly darting around and looking back, around and ahead, searching for what they had been watching over for eight years. An emptiness lingered behind me, my view awash with salty tears, hoping for the return of what went missing. As I walked on, heavy-pettaled white flowers started appearing. Hellebore – a poisonous plant – a folk remedy for terminating pregnancies. An image of a tired gaze, asking me for help, was spinning in my mind. As if stabbed by a knife, a feeling of having betrayed him overwhelmed me. Paws and body, they are the forests and nature, while the drooping head is just like the disappearing oceans and jungles. He left too early; his body internally consumed by tumors. He was left a skeleton, a mere shadow of the dog he once was. This too is a sight we behold each day; nature fading, fires turning trees into skeletons, plastics poisoning wildlife and contaminating our oceans, seas, rivers and streams. We eat food pumped up with various artificial additives to prolong its shelf life. This is what we feed our pets with, too. We are sick, they are sick. And then what do we do? Do we give ourselves injections to fall asleep?
This piece is a participatory installation consists of poetry, drawings, sound and objects taken from nature and returned to it. It was exhibited as a part of group exhibition How to Look at Natures?-Art and the Capitalocene
“Have you ever witnessed dogs or cats adopting some of our states and illnesses? If so, share that experience in a few of sentences.
These are series of graphics and drawings printed on pieces of found, aggressively knocked down trees. I was materializing a sequence of different memories, which formed activities that honestly depict current state of the Planet, through the gestures of poetry-performances, woodcuts, drawings, and brief land art interventions. I’m wondering can active memory open a new trajectory that has not existed so far? A memory of the less polluted and richer Earth as it once was.
As an elementary school art teacher, I can see the emotional burden of climate change in children. Talking to younger generations about climate change narratives, gives a fresh perspective on the absurdity of doing so little about the climate emergency, highlighting the troubling disconnection between what politicians say and what they do in reality.We have to find a way to face our vulnerability, painful truths, collective denial, grief and loss, developing the emotionally informed and sustainable actions desperately needed. These series of graphics are up for sale, and the sale becomes a participatory act, with each graphic there is one poem; materializing a braveness we want to see in the future. Please contact me by email if you are interested in purchasing the graphics.
Also, if you are a person who, seeing the destruction of the human species towards other species and our own, does not want to become a parent, you can elaborate thoughts in a shorter essay, send it to my email and receive a frottage drawing as part of a participatory exchange.
2022. Locations: Flower square, park Tuškanac, Vlaška street- Zagreb
Performative action, supported by Domino Association, in public square ”Cvjetni trg” in Zagreb/ December 2022.
The action of wrapping the monument is a continuation of the work in which I collected people’s statements about rising food prices and local, climate-neutral food. Entering into a conversation with random passers-by, I became aware that a large number of people daily do not have the possibility of a cooked, hot meal. The topic of poverty is primarily neglected, and there are no concrete and consistent solutions to address this problem. The fact that restaurants that want to donate food have to pay VAT on the donation is devastating, as is the fact of how much food is wasted in large stores. The crisis of rising food and energy prices will create a new wave of poverty. Through the gesture of wrapping monuments with cheap, thin paper, in a symbolic way, I cover some parts of them to attract the attention of passers-by. On the piece I wrapped, as well as on the thicker cardboard, which partly looks like a banner for an imagined protest, I write my own poem in prose, inspired by the collected stories of people.
Under the branches of withered will
Blinking tremors mirror their flash
Passing within unknown crowd
Threads twisted, gray, gravitating
Bending for articles from the back shelves
Counting the outlines of the shadows with their irises
Gallery CEKAO; Public Open University/Gallery FELtspace Adelaide
‘Erosion of a Future Memory’ is in response to collaborative research activity between Adelaide based Gail Hocking and international Croatian artist Nikolina Butorac for exhibiting at FELtspace Adelaide December 2021 AND Gallery Cekao – Cultural Centre University of Zagreb, Croatia April 2022
Truth is an emotion, it flows through our body. Veins, chest, heart. And the question is how much do we hear her rustling, her warmth melting our in our chests. We bathe in a storm of warm and cold that murmurs and shakes under the flash of the thunder that revives and changes us. To accept the new means to enter the struggle. n.b.
We want to materialize a sequence of different memories, which form activities that honestly depict the current state of the planet and us, through the gesture of writing, poetry, drawings, ephemeral interventions, performances and sculptural objects that can shape boundaries, indicate trajectory, and enable views.
The accidental audience is the seed of reality that processes the artistic act, thereby growing together with the artist. Art activity can express the elements of truth in the culture, so every time a work of art is created, new meanings are rewriting old ones.
Wanting to learn more about the past of the Sava River, Nikolina Butorac led workshops in two nursing homes in Trešnjevka, asking the protégés to associatively draw a positive memory for her; the smell of the river, the water that called for bathing, the plants that grew near it. She composes the resulting works into new collages, which follow the photographs of Gail Hocking’s artistic interventions in the empty riverbeds of South Australia, reminding us of the great droughts, shortages of drinking water and fires that have become more prevalent in recent years. Part of the work are artifacts, created by a symbiosis of natural and artificial, taken from several different places that the artists addressed important for their research. At the opening, Nikolina Butorac handed out blank papers to the audience, asking them to draw or write a new work that would protect the river and raise awareness of the importance of water, and hung their drawings among other works. Nikolina Butorac was a mentor for a collective performance piece by students of the non-verbal theater- academy for art and culture in Osijek, focusing on the river Drava. They were re-examing their own responsibility towards social and environmental events that surrounded them and conducting research about the possibilities of overlapping individual and collective experiences.
In this piece, I designed games that should contribute to understanding and recognizing specificity as a virtue. One of the games is the distortion of the accepted norm – in the game, a person without dyslexia is put in a situation of seeking assistance, as opposed to the division of roles within the school system, where dyslexic people are still stigmatized. Dyslexic myself, I want to achieve two-way, equal communication, in which the values of different perceptions are equalized, and differences enrich each other. In addition to photographs as notes of interference in the park’s public space, I used collected natural artifacts, such as dried lichens, branches, soil, my dog’s hair, my own hair, red pepper powder, leaves, cones. The park is a place where my breathing has changed from shallow to deep and where the traces of bitterness, discouragement and misunderstanding caused by school have slowly disappeared.
A game of drawing and solving puzzles, some letters are written upside down, so the team is looking for a person with dyslexia, who will contribute to faster solving and playing the game.
N e i g h b o r s;
draw a neighbor who is unusual to you in some way. Have you ever helped a neighbor? Write the story with chalks on the sidewalk!
L i v e s o f g a m e s f r o m o t h e r p a r t s o f t h e w o r l d; find peers who were born in a distant land. Ask them to teach you a new open air game!
G a r b a g e; collect garbage from the meadow and throw it in a larger container. Draw the most interesting object you have found!
S n o w:
ask parents or grandparents how much snow there was before and where the sledding points were. Draw a map of these points!
Exploring personal discomforts and fears initiated by the earthquake experience,I conducted a series of workshops in Zagreb’s libraries. Workshop participants are invited to engrave or print their feelings on objects from their flats that have fallen and been damaged in the earthquake, making the everyday object not only a direct conduit of emotion, a place of rebellion or frustration but also a point in communication, the intersection of different narratives. These objects, collected through several months of artistic action, have become a kind of anti-souvenirs that recorded a common experience, becoming a well-known place and point of recognition of the community of citizens affected by the earthquake. I exhibit them in a glass case, which on the one hand musealizes them, and on the other contrary to the exhibition rules, pushes, twists, stacks broken plates and jugs, building a space of tension between the value and worthlessness of things, artifacts and everyday objects. On some of them, the owners have written a critique of inert city and state structures. In this twisting of the inner outwards, the intimate feeling turns into a collective and, indirectly, a dedication to the city; “wounded city”, writes one of the participants in the workshops. I’m using the scaffolding on the front of the Gallery building, which, precisely because of the slow and long construction work, this time related to the energy renovation of the building, is out of its function. The third segment of the work was my performance at the opening. I’m writing the names of the streets damaged in the earthquake on the construction helmet, and visitors are helping me. The helmet – the index of damaged locations – is invested in the display case among other items.
In the performance “To Reflect Possible”, I am interested into destinies of people from the cultural sector who most often work in precarious conditions, constantly proving that their work has a value. I am recording statements of people working in KNAP- Pešćenica Cultural Center, about future activities in difficult epidemiological conditions and the impossibility of using the theater hall, due to earthquake damage. I’m engraving the text of the visitors and workers on the mirrors, placing them in the gallery space. At the opening day, I made a writing performance on the gallery windows.
Statements on the mirrors: ” Cultural institutions can now accommodate fewer people, but fewer people will be able to participate: it is a double threat to cultural production. Many institutions, not only in this situation, but also otherwise, should go out into public spaces and occupy them somehow, because they are being converted to other commercial spaces very fast. When I think of culture, public spaces are very important, and that is something we actually forget in cultural and political terms, and on many levels. It may be cynical to talk about how some institutions will maintain their programs, when many no longer even have their homes, but it’s all part of a political decision and a political moment that we have to put some kind of pressure on. ” D.K.
“Communication with the local community is important to us. We listen to what would be interesting to them. We also have a Creative Family workshop where children and parents come, our workshop teacher guides them a little, so they can work together through play. The idea was given by one of our young students. The goal is for the center to be accepted by the local community as a living room, so people from the neighborhood can come read the newspaper, sit down, have a meeting or just hang out. ” A.P.
” With a minimal number of visitors because of the corona, when we set off, we were afraid the audience wouldn’t come at all, but people are eager for theater. And there is a desire and hunger for culture. Comedies are going better than ever. Now I imagine an audience moving in spaces that can be heated. Although, it would be best to have more space with less production. ” D.B.
The exhibition “Home Displaced” consists of several segments: a net made of almonds that connects parts of the installation, children’s statements written in pencil on paper, audio recording of the working experience outside of state, stones with recipes against problematic phenomena in society and opening performance.
The inscriptions were created as a result of my interaction with pupils, whose parents or close family members went to work abroad. Their task was to write a text and turn the shapes and sizes of letters into emotions, focusing on a family member they missed the most.
The audio work records my cousin’s experience. He moved to America as a ballet dancer and retrained as a computer programmer. Here again, I deal with the situation of cultural workers and artists whose position in society is often marginalized, requiring a superhuman skills in order to survive. In the ‘’exchange’’ participatory performance from the opening, I’m asking visitors to write in two to three sentences something about their experiences of working abroad. Who does not want to write, can also draw. I’m putting paper plates, a wooden board, dried fruit in front of me and I start to mix dates, cranberries, dried figs, coconut with rice milk into an edible thick mixture, whom which I form one word from their text, or a drawing. In this exchange, each of the visitors receives an edible artifact. The performance act of preparing and consuming food, is an intimate ritual that functions as a metaphor for sharing, recording and exchanging personal stories.
nikolina butorac 