By the Reborn

Posted on February 4, 2023 by nikolinabutorac

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

The river in me; the river around me

Posted on May 16, 2022 by nikolinabutorac

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

Posted on February 7, 2022 by nikolinabutorac

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!