City of crossed destines
Portland, Oregon, 2005.
Stylistic excersise [ 2.6 MB ]
… What is our lived space? What is the city of our mind, of our life? Certainly, it is not the same as the objective map. It is a network, mosaic, juxtaposition of places that hold our memories, places of meaningful activities, joys, revelations, but also fear? In what form do they exist in us? If we were asked to give a visual representation to this city of our mind, what would it look like? Will it be one city, or a composite of many cities, some of them imaginary, dream cities?
Our spaces are also spaces of people we know, interact with, those, in particular we grew up with … Our intimate, lived space intersect with theirs. As we ARE in a sense these other people (and they are US), what would happen if we jointly tried to represent these interwoven cities of our minds and lives?
This project comes from reflecting on how to respond to one's space, one's environment, how to engage with it in an artistic way. This made me think about my relationship to my new environment here, as well as the one I left behind in Yugoslavia (an imaginary country par excellence). I examined my own responses to what surrounds me here, what moves me to create. And it turns out that what engages people around me here, is not what will engage or move me. But then, it is not as simple as saying that " my " space, the space that I find meaningful and moving is something called Serbia or even Belgrade. That's why I started examining the very idea of what it is that one can call one's space – one's place in the world. This is, for me at least, not something defined by geography or political boundaries. And it never was. What makes one's space, what makes it meaningful, I am realizing, is meeting with other people.
The City of Crossed Destinies has been growing in my mind since its inception last Spring. In the meantime, it has been crossed by other projects and meditations – on fractals, on nets, and knots, on lines and angles that characterize different cultures, on societies of spectacle, and many other things. I still don't know where it all leads. I call it " SITUATIONS " …
Instructions for use:
- Ask artist friends whose life space overlaps with mine to depict, in whatever medium they choose, their imagined city, the spaces of their reveries, the map of their movements and reposes, the loci of their memories. It could be a map of one's significant spaces, something like a city seen not with an objective eye of a planer or geometer, but " seen " with one's feet, imagination, necessarily fragmentary memory. The assignment could be to make visible that ideal, or imaginary city we carry within ourselves. And it should be specified that this need not be any particular city, although it will probably be composed of fragments of real cities.
One artist then assembles a number of other people's projects and organizes his/her own imaginary city around, in-between, overlapping in juxtaposition with other people's cities. If this is a group of people whose lives richly intersect (in space and time), then, in principle, each participant can do the same with other's projects. If we start from the idea that we ARE others and vice versa, than our imaginary city will indeed be composed of cities of others.
Artists presented:
+ Xavier Bougarel
+ Ana Cerovic
+ Jérôme Cornette & Darya Pushkina
+ Srdjan Dobic
+ Ana Gak
+ Jef Gunn
+ Vladimir Mitrovic-Vanja
+ Dragana Pesic
+ Ivona Pleskonja
&
Tasja Joksimovic
+ Ivana Popov
+ Ivana Prlincevic
+ Mileta Prodanovic
+ Christopher Willis
+ Milica Simonovic
+ Christine Toth
+ Ivana Kalina Vidic
+ Aniko and Marika Toth White
+ Chel White
+ Gordana Zivkovic
+ Marko Zivkovic
