Category Archives: community&interactive

By the Reborn

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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.

Frottage drawings

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Blurred in their non-existence

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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

Heads looking deeply down

Drowned by public criticism

Swallowing malaise

Under the branches of withered will

Drawing an internal scream

Without a warm meal, building a shame

And while the rays of that same shame spread

To our fridges bombarded with food

We allow, we do not react

Our senses are numb

We are rotting like a thousand pieces

Of unsold fruit and broken gifts

Blurred in their non-existence

The river in me; the river around me

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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.

Gallery FELTSpace in Adelaide, December 2021

A Reverse Line Game

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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!

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Pacify of Shivers-Exhibition of the Earthquake Artifacts

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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.

To Reflect Possible

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Knap Centar- Zagreb

2020

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.

Home Displaced

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AK Gallery- Koprivnica

2020

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.   

in(visible) nomads/emptiness of home

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2019

Culture Center KNAP, Gallery Događanja, Zagreb

“Curious head is squinting flats with grey bricks. The associations are cluttering through the needle with the drops of adrenaline, blurring the little mirrors in my chest. Stepping over the color of distrust and reservation. Mind cuddling. Breathing out the plan.”

In this piece, I study the term “habitation” as a passive everyday action, and focus on homes as fictional objects that are impossible to be afforded by young people today. I interviewed friends who live in rented homes or with their parents, asking them to tell me a story about their living space. At one point, we bring to mind the socialist working class, i.e. our parents and grandparents, who were given their homes by their respective companies because they were valuable as workers.

I focus on comparing the past and the present as two opposite poles. Today, a company providing a home for its employee is considered pure fantasy.

With no money to afford our own home, possibilities open up for a taste of life in other countries. However, I cannot help but wonder whether we really want to do it, or whether we are merely forced into it? If we have other options – which are they?

While the interviews are emitted through speakers and a megaphone, I make an edible mixture of dried fruit, shaped in the form of my parents’ flat.

Facing a wall – this time not the one at home, but rather the impossibility of achievement – I share my frustration and helplessness with the audience by breaking the edible supporting walls of an unfulfilled dream and offering them to the public, hoping that one day it becomes

Link to audio: https://soundcloud.com/user-2799856

When did you fall in love with knowledge?

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2017

Portugal-São Luis

This project is a work in progress in which I focus on finding the trigger that activates our love of knowledge. During the residency programme Cultivamos Cultura in São Luis (Portugal), I interviewed artists from around the world and asked them when exactly they fell in love with knowledge, what knowledge is, and which subject they would like to invent and introduce into the school curriculum. I am pinpointing the exact period of time when we discovered knowledge and began to yearn for it. Was it during regular education? Or was it later in life? How do we awake a person’s desire for new knowledge that can be used on a daily basis? The project is a critique of existing school systems, which are based on receiving information without practical use.

With this space intervention, I seek to encourage people of all ages to share with me the creative strategies for opening up creative channels that can be applied in practical life. Having collected the statements, I wrote them down on stone blocks that I had removed from the sidewalk, and then put them back in.

Knowledge comes from my interacting with the world. Gail Hocking

Knowledge is pattern seeking: lost and found and lost and found. Before I knew what knowledge was and everytime ideas syncronize for me for the first time. Sarah Hermanutz

Knowledge is a process that takes the mistakes from the future and moves them into the past, they skip the future. Nenad Popov

Knowledge is an illusion that destroys previous ilussions. It is oximoronic endles task which allows us to turn unknown unknowns into something else, expending our awareness of our own ignorance. Manuel Furtado

Special thanks to Martha De Menezes and Cultivamos Cultura.

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Self-reflexive herbs

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Herb installation in the forest near Krapina

2016

In this ephemeral space intervention, I planted an herbal installation in a forest area. I replanted sedum, a cover ground plant, from one part of the forest to another. With these plants, I formed the word “Working?”

I chose this word as a marking and a resting spot in the forest. I relate it to the current social and economic problems that are particularly felt by the younger generations. This is a place for reflection and self-reflection.

radis zeleno