WAITING (2016)

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Project was derived at the Zagreb Bus Station in 2016.

Waiting rooms are transit places. People are there to go somewhere else, they are temporary there. Also, never the less, they are the places of connections, place betwean place. Non-place, Marc Augé.

Non-place or nonplace is a neologism coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where the human beings remain anonymous and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places”. Examples of non-places would be motorways, hotel rooms, airports and shopping malls. The term was introduced by Marc Augé in his work Non-Places, introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.

Project consisted of questions and statements that were written on stickers and pasted in the waiting room, or area. They were placed along the area randomly to create the discussion with the place.

Some of the Questions & Statements:

- You're alive, you're breathing.

- You are beautiful!

- Where are you going?

- Are you bored?

- What is here so interesting?

- What are you doing to overcome your fears?

- What do you want to be when you grow up?

- Does anyone ever asked you: how are you?

- Do you like the coffee from the machine?

- If this was your last day on Earth, what would miss you the most?

- What would you like to know about the person you love, and you haven't asked him/her yet? 

After when stickers were placed randomly throughout the waiting area at the Station, people started noticing them. Some of them tried to “find” them all in the area. 

The project was a part of a two weak long group research lead by prof. Andreja Kulunčić.

Moving through space by recording of shoeprints and the wheel stamping of a wheelchair on a paper taped to the floor. The whole process has been photographed. 

The halls and passageways chosen for the placement of the paper are the ones that I personally use and where the footprints of others weave through my own. The sheet of paper, considering its placement, records the activities in the area it has been put in. Parts of the area I have chosen deliberately, and parts were forced upon me. It is the area that I move around and which I want to move about.

I would like to thank the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb that supported me in realization of this project!

DIS(this)ABILITY is a project divided into four workshops: How to paint with your mouth? I held the workshops at four different locations and the participants were volunteers and passers-by.

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As the workshop was held exclusively in English, I made a reference to the English word disability. This word can have a double meaning, the literal meaning being a disability, which is clear and understood. However, if I take that word apart into dis-ability, it gains a completely different meaning: this ability. In that sense, a disability becomes an ability of some other physical format that has its own dimensions, and by that I do not think they are limited but different. Thus, the topic of this event is not my disability but physical abilities and adjustments.

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The goal of the project was to try to portray my reality and to bring closer the challenges that I meet daily within my work.

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To accomplish a correlation between my and their world I woud choose a volunteer who would pose for a portrait. That was the first step in tearing down a barrier and possible predjudice about me as a painter. The initial fear turned into enthusiasm and I have accomplished one of the goals of the workshop.

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In the next step I put myself in the role of a mentor and with that tried to draw attention knowing reality to exactly observing reality. I have accomplished that by setting different excercizes that were meant to draw attention to what they are painting, not the subject they were painting. As an assignment I set up a cup and I noticed that everyone was approaching this object according to the conditioned pattern of behaviour. The bottom of the cup was portrayed as straight, while the upper part was portrayed as rounded.

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The end result was their personal satisfaction and getting to know themselves within something they did not get the chance to find themselves in before. It was surprising to see how they creatively responded to the challenge that was put in front of them.