Artists: Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a Tomislav Gotovac and BADco. Curators: What, How and for Whom/WHW Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a Tomislav Gotovac and performative collective BADco. will represent Croatia at the 54th Biennale di Venezia in the exhibition entitled One Needs to Live Self-Confidently... Watching, curated by WHW. The Croatian presentation will be in the Arsenale. Tomislav Gotovac's complex and multilayered projects, combining a range of different art practices, are considered pioneering and anticipatory in the areas of structuralist and experimental film, conceptual art, body art, and performance. The presentation of his work will include the key structural and experimental films, and series of photographs from the beginning of the 1960s through to the end of the 1970s. This selection of Gotovac's work does not aim to 'discover' or canonise him internationally, but to show how relevant his work is today and to contextualise it beyond the usual representational clichés of the East European dissident artist. BADco.'s artistic practice, operating at the intersection of theatre, performance and dance, engages with a redefinition of the performative act and of the established relations between the audience, performers and performance. The acronym of the name BADco.—'Nameless Author's Assoc.' indicates a consistently executed collective working model. The Venice installation, conceived as theatre by other means, will construct a field of friction between the power of images to engage with our collective imagination, to open or close the horizons of the future, and of different modes of spectating. The red thread connecting the work of Gotovac with BADco.'s practice is the critical discourse based on the thematisation of the procedures of watching. Gotovac's methods of observing refer to the structuring of a film, and they always imply the construction of reality as art. As he once said: "I am constantly bewildered by what lies between my eyes and what I am seeing". In BADco.'s work the thematisation of the gaze springs from focused and continuous exploration of the relationship between the protocols of viewing and performing, their similarities and differences. Antonio G. Lauer a.k.a Tomislav Gotovac (1937–2010) was an avant-garde film director and performer. He graduated in film directing from the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television in Belgrade. Gotovac made his first performances, films, collages and series of photographs in the early 1960s. His artistic activities combined visual art, the avant-garde, experimental, documentary and feature films, performance, body art and conceptual art. In addition to various individual and group exhibitions, performances and experimental film practices, Gotovac showed his films at local and international film festivals. In 2005, he changed his name to Antonio Lauer. The Croatian Film Clubs' Association and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb published a monograph on his work in 2003. BADco. is a Zagreb-based theatre collective. The collective, a confluence of interests in choreography, dramaturgy and philosophy, is nowadays made up of Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Lovro Rumiha and Zrinka Užbinec. Since it was founded in 2000, it has systematically focused on theatrical and dance performance as a problem-generating rather than problem-solving activity - questioning the established ways of performing, representing and spectating. BADco. approaches the theatrical act as an unstable communicational exchange, a complex imaginary, challenging the spectator to look beyond the homogenising media reality and reclaim her or his freedom of spectating. What, How and for Whom/WHW What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective founded in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia. WHW has been involved in a wide range of production, exhibition and publishing projects. Since 2003, WHW has been curating the programme of Gallery Nova in Zagreb. In 2009, WHW curated the 11th Istanbul Biennial entitled What Keeps Mankind Alive?. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Croatian Film Clubs' Association and Zagreb Youth Theatre. It is funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. |
croatia (2)
Include hashtag #dancetechtv in your tweets!
One poor and one 0 by BADco. (Croatia)
World premiere: 17.-19.10.2008 @ 19:30 Dom im Berg, Graz
In 1 poor and one 0 BADco. returns to the scene of the first film ever shot – Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory: the factory gates. The first moving images ever made show workers leaving their workplace. The movement of the workforce from the place of industrial work into the world of film: the starting point for the problematic relationship between cinema and the portrayal of work.
From its outset cinema tended to leave the manual labor out of the picture, focusing rather on atomized stories of individual workers once they have left their workplace: their romances, their transgressions, their destinies in the course of world events. Cinema starts where work ends.
Starting from these initial images, 1 poor and one 0 sets about exploring the multiple ways of leaving the work behind. What happens when you get tired? When is the work we devote ourselves to exhausted? What comes after work? More work? What happens when there is no more work? What is the complicity between the history of contemporary dance and the history of post-industrialization?
1 poor and one 0 is a twofold performance: while the performers develop the manifold forms of dissolution of the working subject before the audience, the audience is slowly drawn into a process of transformation: from the popular medium of cinema to the political theater of populism. Theater exhausted in moving images, images exhausted in the theater of movement. A change of perspective.
Directors: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš
Authors and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Stage: Slaven Tolj
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Video: Ana Hušman
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Sound design: Ivan Marušić-Klif
Sound technician: Jasmin Dasović
Company manager: Lovro Rumiha
Inspired by the work of Auguste and Lois Lumiere, Samuel Beckett, Vlado Kristl, Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki.
Coproducers: Steirischer Herbst, University of Zagreb – Student center – Theatre &TD
Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
– Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983
Little by little we are replaced … by uninterrupted chain of images, enslaving one another, each image at its place, as each of us, at our place, in the chain of events on which we have lost all power.
– Dziga Vertov Group, Here And Elsewhere, 1972
This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor.
– Johnathan Beller, Cinema, Capital of the 20th Century, 1994
The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind… In the Lumière film of 1895 it is possible to discover that the workers were assembled behind the gates and surged out at the camera operator’s command. Before the film direction stepped in to condense the subject, it was the industrial order which synchronized the lives of the many individuals.
– Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory, 2001
Interview with vana Ivković and Tomislav Medak at the Balkan Dance Platform 2009, Novi Sad, Serbia
