Marta Popivoda

MASS ORNAMENT #1
Watch out for gorillas in your midst!

3-channel video installation by Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović

Editor: Nataša Damnjanović
Sound: Jakov Munižaba
Running time: ca. 30 min
Year: 2013

The video installation investigates a controversial mass performance from the late Yugoslav era—the Youth Day celebration (slet) in 1987. On the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall and only a few years before the civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, the slet was a hybrid and feeble socialist spectacle that displayed striking signs of the imminent collapse of the country, which spectators seemingly didn’t “see.” We take “the blind spectators” as the video’s main protagonist. Avoiding too much explanation, we want to open a dialogue between the disembodied spectator of the slet and a bodily present spectator of our video. By disembodying those whose bodies were literally violated, harmed, or destroyed during the wars, we attempt to displace the focal point from the screen to the live bodies of spectators of the video, in order to point out their own historicity.

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CULTURAL WORKER 3 IN 1
a film by Marta Popivoda

Serbia / Macedonia
53 min / 2013

Cultural Worker 3 in 1 is a documentary film about the role of the left-oriented independent cultural-artistic scene and cultural workers in the region of ex-Yugoslavia. Following the life and work of several characters in four cities of former Yugoslavia the film explores two issues – what it means to be a cultural worker in post-socialist contexts of Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana, and what the possibilities for action and intervention in social reality are, from the position of art and culture. In this way, the film reflects on actual tendencies and problematics at the critical independent cultural scenes, as well as on relations between art, theory and activism, which are strongly present in the region.

Participants, in order of appearance

Belgrade: Jelena Vesić, Kontekst Kolektiv, Ana Vujanović, Miško Šuvaković, Milena
Dragićević Šešić
Skopje: Biljana Tanurovska Kjulakovski, Iskra Geshoska, Slavčo Dimitrov
Ljubljana: Lidija Radojević, Rok Vevar, Aldo Milohnić, Marina Gržinić
Zagreb: Emina Višnić, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Teodor Celakoski

Crew

Director: Marta Popivoda
Cinematographer: Maja Radošević
Editor: Nataša Damnjanović
Sound Designer: Jakov Munižaba
Music: Draško Adžić
Producer: Dragana Jovović

Produced by
TkH (Walking Theory), Belgrade
Kontrapunkt, Skopje

*This film was made during a two-week research journey by Marta Popivoda through four cities of the former Yugoslavia, as part of the Toolbox of the project Deschooling Classroom (o^o), conceived by Iskra Geshoska, Marta Popivoda, and Ana Vujanović.