Reverie of Printed Voices
art research, 8 digital drawings 420x350mm,2 digital drawings 700x420mm; applied vinyl print;
video work, duration 2’50’’
2024
Reverie of Printed Voices, is an art-research project that seeks to revive the memory of the community of authors (Mara Radonjić, Luca Rosandić, Ružica Markotić and many others) of illegal techniques in Split of the People’s Liberation Movement during the WWII.
The artistic research is based on scientific anthologies Split in the People's Liberation Movement and the Socialist Revolution 1941-1945, memoirs, the book Ubojito slovo by Marinko Božić and transcripts of the archival periodical, primarily Naš izvještaj whose 175 issues were published continuously during the occupation. The project maps the places of former illegal techniques in the city itself, and on the trail of radical media archaeology, examines the so-called dead in the context of illegal media techniques.
The series of 10 drawings is made up of two parts, where 8 drawings are based on archival photographs of buildings where the techniques were located, while the remaining 2 drawings, also based on archival material, refer to the interior of one of the techniques and the gestetner machine on which the material was printed.
Taking theoretical insight from Saidiya Hartman, Donna Haraway (methodology of critical fabulation, i.e. thesis of becoming with), the work will bring artistic research into a hybrid connection with speculative narratives, in order to shed light on the value of these marginal and forgotten voices and examine the specificity of DIY printing expression as a possible means of resistance.
Being critical of the pervasiveness of the hegemony of techno-optimistic capitalism, this research tends to open up the possibility of playing with outdated media, uses the archive as a place of learning, with the aim of shaping a sense of the necessity of creating new solidarity configurations.
By using examples of the rudimentary technology of primitive schapirographs on which sheets were printed, the tendency is to point out the fact that a playful approach to technology can arise precisely from the rudimentary nature of technology and the freedom to mix mechanical interfaces, former ideas and movements with contemporary contexts. By referring to a kind of "neo-retroism", the exhibition critically departs from nostalgic views of the past, in favour of opening a reinterpretation of the present and possible futures through the apparatus of a reanimated past.