“Bonding Humanity (Perhaps Manifesto)”
“Bonding Humanity (Perhaps Manifesto)” is created by deliberately rearranging, reorganising and juxtaposing fragments from New Yugoslav Film* ("Yugoslav Black Wave'') and its cinematic heritage related to the interplay between collective spaces and their uses. Personal, social and political contexts intersect into a dialogic narrative form that advances possibilities for new interpretations. The voiceover manifesto is manoeuvred to evoke personal trajectories and collective memories. By involving the essay film as a tool for creative exploring, one is able to discover and question the borders of an uncertain past, present and future. Having in mind that it’s subject - a patchwork of decontextualised memories - be they artificial or authentic, personal or historical, is something to be nursed.
Director Biography
Nina Bačun acts in the domain of speculative design; visual communications; exhibition design, set design and self-initiated design projects. She is devoted to a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to design, by working within Oaza* collective. After finishing School of Design at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb in 2007, she obtained an MA degree in Experience Design at the Konstfack—University, College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 2011. At the moment she is taking part in Doctoral studies—Architecture and Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb.
* After a significant number of collaborations in the field of design, six freelance artists and designers—N. Bačun, I. Borovnjak, R. Bratović, T. Ivezić, M. Kolar and M. Poljanec—established the Oaza—an all-female collective in 2013. Since then, OAZA has been continuously involved in art and design research-based projects in the domain of the independent cultural sector, self-initiated design projects (curatorial practices, art and design research, social design, strategic and conceptual design, publishing, design education). For more information visit www.o-a-z-a.com and www.oazabooks.com
Director’s Statement
I was second to last Tito's Pioneer generation, a child raised on a Yugoslav socialist myth, a collective unconsciousness, still part of a transition generation in search for one of many possible truths. I would like to understand more clearly the uncertain collective memory we all live with, even now in a (post-)Yugoslav context, through the lens of specific cinematography of Yugoslav Black Wave, and its relation to our physical and mental landscape(s). By blurring the boundaries between architectural and urban investigation and cinematic experimentation, involving the essay film as a tool for creative exploring.
There are no hypotheses without imagination, no laboratory experiments without fictive presuppositions about reality. In short, fiction precedes fact, which makes search for certainty or any possible truth more difficult.
Absolute truths do not exist, the real voyage of discovery, as Proust noticed, might not be in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.