Mise-en-scène for Conversation
single channel 3D animation,video installation,
duration: 6’45’’, dimensions variable, 2022
Produced and first presented in Prazan prostor Drama studio,
Exhibited at Youth Biennial, ULUS in Belagrade (2023)
and as part of Montenegro Today exhibition in Museum of Contemporary Arts in Podgorica (2024)
Mise-en-scene for Conversation is a video installation, comprised of the projected 3D animation and integrated spatial intervention in the form of sleeping bags. The work which began as a thought experiment on and during a all-night vigil around a dreamed-up hearthstone became the research synthesis of several themes:
Foremost, the subject of affective economies, particularly those within the notions of queer kinship. Taking clues after the politics of friendship from Derrida, the theoretical construct of this work understands the self as a transient, non-transparent, non-self-knowing, and non-sovereign and — the friendship as a mutual contamination.
At the heart of the subject of this work is an idea of radical extensions of friendship acting as sweaty relationships that can organize in ways that could undermine governance and oppression of binary heteropatriarchy under neoliberal capitalism.
The Mise-en-scene for Conversation tries to do that by widening the horizon of the possible portrayal of the body without falling into the dominant binary opposition. The volatile floating bodies are an attempt at portraying bodies inseparable from the landscape, but without language, codes, and representation, which are approached with distrust, from fear that codes can be easily twisted, and that representations of a particular identity always imply the exclusion of another.
Thus, in the work, the virtual space is explored as an allusion, a space that slips away, the space we try to reach through ephemeral social interactions that break through the dominant patterns of everyday life. Audio in the video work is just such a game, a note of the ephemeral of a night vigil, of an intimate friendly conversation, which is cut up, coded, and suppressed. The montage uses a technique that reminisces the pop-culture phenomenon of reversing audio recordings, popular during the 80s. The record becomes a displaced sound, separated from the subject, and as discordant, the sound streams back from the mirror. Such inversion aims to undermine codes to the point of complete incomprehensibility, as a means to keep the friends secret, but also a trial in turning intimacy from away representation to intuition.
Ultimately, the work aims to create a space that does not exist as a physical space — but is present as an internal or virtual space, as a space marker of longing and wishes. Latent spaces, which don’t have room for actualization in the public, which are marginalized, which accumulate through the private as deterritorialized projections, and find a way to stream back and undermine the dominant hegemony.