video: Melanija Pović Jagarinec postproduction: Miran Krčadinac It started with a journey to Mauritania, went on around France, pottered around my Zagreb quotidian, a photographic diary with no date, no rationalisation of feelings and no order. Undisciplined and inconsistent. Incomplete, with outbursts of rapid thoughts, fictional dialogues and commentaries in which I invoke favourite Greek…
The performance This Too Shall Pass is based on a story of an exhibit shown in the Memorial Museum of the Jasenovac Memorial Site. This is a ring on which the words This too shall pass are engraved. It was told to me by an acquaintance a year ago, attempting to comfort and encourage me,…
fact f In the mid-nineteen-forties my father attended the Second Zagreb High School in Križanićeva Street, in the mid-seventies my sister, and a few years later, I too. In the same high school we learned about literature, philosophy, the laws of physics and algebra and a vast mass of historical facts. But nobody ever mentioned…
The performance Ballad of Two Grave Blocks was done in Zrinjevac park in Zagreb in 2015; this is a work in which I discuss an inherited familial burden and the manner in which I try to cope with it. I refer to the headstones as blocks, denoting the heavy emotional burden passed on to me.…
During World War II, Koprivnica synagogue was devastated. The partially salvaged and preserved liturgical items are today part of the permanent exhibition of Koprivnica City Museum. The synagogue’s organ, however, was rescued and moved to the five-hundred-metre distant Franciscan church of St Anthony of Padua. It is still there, and is fully in use. Prompted…
Jumping until I drop around the Fountain of Life was my first effortful physical activity after a complex surgical procedure and then recuperation. I quote a scene from the Pasolini film in which Ninetto Davoli, jumping around, naively asks his father in the film, Toto: “E Papa, perché beati, beati?” In my case the quote…
The rules of the project I invited ten curators, or curatorial collectives, to work with me. They were each to send me to Paris with a commission, a task to be carried out. I was to go to Paris, follow the precisely defined instructions and carry out the assignment. On my return to Zagreb, I…
It’s a sunny, windy September day at Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery. On the dark grey marble slab, gradually, letter after letter, the name and surname of my father appear, with the dates of his birth and death. I watch the movements of the engraver, Martin. I take and listen to the short ringing blows of his…
How do I perceive a mentally ill person? What disturbs me when I think about madness? With and without them is a self-portrait, a video document of my dilemmas, doubts, and optimism. In the form of a video diary, each day after coming out of the hospital, in front of the camera in an improvised…
To the Bone is a work that tells of the two-way relationship of two close people. The point of departure for the production of this piece was the fact that after my operation and during convalescence, my mother looked after me. Her total submission to my daily needs drew a reaction and response from me…