Spaces of love, independent exhibition of the Montenegrin artist Irene Lagator Pejović, features a diverse selection from her recent works. Both thematically and spatially, these research papers cover the topics of inflation, work and knowledge. The exhibition is part of the Awarded at the Memorial program and is organized as part of the 150th anniversary of his birth Nadezhda Petrović. He will speak at the opening of the exhibition Branislav Dimitrijevic i Mirjana Šijačić-Nikolić, and the curators are Patricia Rilko (who is also the author of this conversation) i Julka Marinković. Today's opening of the Expanse of Love Exhibition in the "Nadežda Petrović" Art Gallery in Čačak takes place on the day of commemoration of the Nazi bombing of the National Library of Serbia on April 6, 1941, when over 600.000 books, manuscripts and documents perished.
The exhibition begins with your work Beyond Memory (2007), which was awarded at the 24th Nadežda Petrović Memorial Transforming Memory. Image policies. Could you elaborate on that, since this paper questions not only the relationship between art and economy, but also the life of Nadežda Petrović, her artistic heritage and, most importantly, her very progressive artistic and activist attitude.
- As this work questions several layers of meaning - aspects of the memory of the work and character of Nadežda Petrović, contemporary history, art and economy - the exhibition refers to the specifics and contexts of the Yugoslav self-governing and post-Yugoslav transition space. It is important to emphasize that, as a modernist artist, Nadežda Petrović was very interested in questioning the dominant themes of representation in art and in society. She also devoted herself to redefining the methodologies of creation both in art and in critical writing about art, but also to dealing with everyday issues that press artistic life. Those processes and experiences brought her activities into the socio-political sphere where she expressed her thoughts about art as the most direct interpreter and educator of society. Her artistic and activist attitude is still very vital and highly respected today.
She was the first woman to be depicted on a banknote (value of 200 dinars) as an individual, as an artist, but also as a volunteer nurse during the First World War. At the beginning of 2007, immediately after the dissolution of the FRY, I heard an announcement on the radio informing the citizens that every current banknote could be replaced by the end of 2012 with a new one that would have the name of the new state written on it. This meant that the banknote on which a real female figure was shown for the first time and not an allegory, was at the same time part of the last series of banknotes that will bear the word Yugoslavia...
After the invitation to participate in the 24th Memorial of Nadežda Petrović, I decided to work with those, still valid banknotes whose fate and content will change in a few years. I devised the specific act of borrowing a certain number of banknotes from the National Bank, along with my proposal to return them to the bank in the form of a work of art for its permanent museum display. I was interested in the strategy of intervention of the language of contemporary art in a museum structure that is not intended for it.
For the title of the exhibition Space of Love, as one of the reference points, you take the eponymous Collection of Awarded and Commended Student Works at the SUBNOR Literary Competitions in Sombor 1978-1984, published in 1985 on the theme of NOP in Yugoslavia, greater equality and solidarity, the bridge of man to man in the name of freedom. For example, one of those texts was written by Mirjana Šijačić, a student of grade VIII. She shares with us her thoughts on what she would do if she were Ronald Reagan, and fearlessly imagines a time without conflicts, wars and borders. Not only the text, but in a way the previous practice of Mirjana Šijačić directed your further research and one of the works presented in the exhibition. Can you share with us the process of this research?
- Modular installation I would put all powerful weapons in museums that no one visits which can be walked through, displays pages from a hundred-year-old metallography albums published by the Düsseldorf metallographic institute. I received them as a gift from a scientist who wished to remain anonymous. I extract them from their original context as pages used in control procedures for the predictability of mutual reactions between metals and alloys, which are processes also used in the military industry. I give them a different purpose: to create spaces for a critical interpretation of the industries of destruction.
The name of the installation comes from the heart of the protest text of that young schoolgirl from the 1980s, which she named If I were Ronald Reagan, published in the collection of Spaces of Love. She would put all the powerful weapons in museums that no one visits. Her strong sense of morality and sincere need to repair what has been damaged is a voice from the past whose relevance is more than urgent in the present. And it is precisely this sense of urgency that creates knowledge against the noise of the gun, its voice as collective, embodied and therefore made visible in this module installation. In it we find ourselves as in a kind of living archive of alternative knowledge that repeats itself and expands, just as an echo travels and reappears in the landscape, not damaging it but complementing it. By interpreting her school text in the context of current crises, we see that she points to the cultural, financial and technological conditions that lead to the reign of unreason, treating the causes and consequences of the latter.
If the echo is a necessary response, then the audience informed of the data exhibited in a kind of emergency room is given the role of transmitter of the echo of Mirjana's voice as a child. Her voice, which autonomously opposes the war narrative, raises awareness of the possibility of a multitude of heterogeneous voices in our common struggle against the destruction of the Planet and the rationale of unreason (John Roberts). Where else could we begin to undo political unreason if not in art and imagination, as radical spaces of critical attitude.
The research took me to the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Belgrade, where I got to know the scientific approach prof. Dr. Mirjane Šijačić-Nikolić as well as her colleagues prof. Dr. Snežane Belanović-Simić. The process led to a work of art Means that can contribute to the phytoremediation of polluted areas, a text installation that makes visible facts about vegetation suitable for phytoremediation - the ability of certain plants to extract heavy metals from soil and polluted areas.
If art is perhaps more useful than biology for understanding nature (Emmanuel Coccia), then these inscriptions can be understood as an urgent constitution that serves our present and protects our future from ourselves, the inhabitants who have become the Earth's most unpleasant and tiresome inhabitants (Stefano Mancuso). Since the biotope and the habitat of the living world form an inseparable whole, and art is always a reflection of reality, in today's global crisis, the conclusion is imposed that a common future is possible only in conditions of peaceful coexistence, our recalibration with bioculture, and our care for soil, water, air, climate, as well as for each other.
We know that art deals with different uses of means of representation in its classical and modern program. The former represented reality using means such as color, surface, point, line... while the latter denies the representation of the world and focuses exclusively on the means of representation themselves (Peter Weibel). If we look back at least to the previous century, and through the prism of the still-present pandemic, we will see fragility and suffering for the majority, and progress and inventions for the minority. It becomes obvious that, during various ideological crises, culture has been instrumentalized to the point of impotence. That is why this installation seeks to act here and now, using different means and listening to what the plants have to tell us about our current dissonant, dangerous and drastically altered reality that we have shaped in such a way that we ourselves can barely survive in it.
Almost every work in the exhibition is constructed in relation to multiple voices - or, like banknotes, a selection of books or wool threads, to question certain individual statements. You focus on seriality, repetition and archiving, and less on the dominance of the author's voice. Can you tell us more about this methodology?
- Interested in community, the voice of many people, a common feeling towards the natural environment and the not-only-human world, I focus on quotes from everyday social life and turn them into critical, poetic and ethical-aesthetic language. I develop my art of unlimited responsibility that questions the visible, goes beyond that questioning and encourages us not only to become aware of a problem, but also to understand the complexity of the relationships that create it. The art of unlimited responsibility works with the meaning of the critical-theoretical line of contemporary art, which, through discussion, description and proposal for the recovery of modernity, participates in the production of answers to the character of superficiality and the amnesia into which a society falls.
Can you draw us a critical map of each room and explain how you decided to present the research and the complexity of the information you shaped and how you would encourage the audience to navigate through it?
- The exhibition is developed through historicization through three connected units. They refer to the relations between the process of inflation, work and knowledge, creating critical and poetic questions about the possibilities of their inversion into the inflation of knowledge of work. The exhibition becomes an archive of the awakening of emancipation, advancing the making visible into an alternative and symbiotic social action.
I am interested in the medium of the exhibition as one that can play the function of light in times of social and political crisis. That's why we can understand this exhibition as an eco-social system for sustaining life and political interdependence of different worlds. In the room called Inflation, we can critically read the relationship between money, fiscalization and consumption. In the second room, which refers to the work process, I approach the cultural sector critically, showing and offering models of autonomous action so that these impulses are reflected in the third room. That room shows us different types and uses of knowledge and tells us about the constant need for critical awareness of the place that language, as well as translation processes between social sectors, occupy in shaping our daily lives.
The worker's university, depicted in the aesthetics of a free library, seems to open polemical questions - on the one hand, it is collectivized, accessible knowledge, and on the other hand, it shows how power can instrumentalize knowledge.
- The collection of "Workers' University" brochures has several units and circuits such as: astronautics, astronomy, automation, marriage and family, business economics, electronics, ethics, philosophy, industrial psychology, the basics of scientific socialism, literature, the international labor and trade union movement, science and religion, raising and raising children, labor productivity, psychology, worker self-management, distribution, sociology, art, the constitution of the SFRY... I started buying them from families who sold off their libraries during the period of pandemic isolation.
In cooperation with the "Nadežda Petrović" Art Gallery, I collected a significant number of original copies from the collections of several libraries of the former Yugoslav republics, as well as from private archives. Titles were simultaneously published in both letters, Cyrillic and Latin. This coincides with the proclaimed commitment to equality and solidarity in a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-confessional society such as Yugoslavia. However, research can also point us to the fact that these booklets have been withdrawn from many library collections today due to lack of relevance. Therefore, the installation Radnički university shows that numerous preoccupations of the self-governing system and attempts to organize everyday life are equally relevant today.
Exposed copies are available for visitors to read. However, one part is out of reach. The titles placed in that zone of this interactive installation are a reminder of the stopped, abandoned and unfulfilled dreams of a social utopia.
What method do you use to engage the labor force audience in terms of pointing out the urgency of alternative economies or environmental urgency?
- It would be most adequate to describe it using the two installations represented in the exhibition. Installation Networks, nodes, horizons, is a composition of many colorful threads hand-wound into a small ball. One end is attached to the nets, while the other end is free and intended for interaction with visitors. By pulling out individual threads towards the depth of the space, visitors participate in the process of unwinding the ball, establishing a physical connection with the work and the material, changing it, and making visible its background - the network. The participation of the audience in creating the visibility of the idea of a colorful and inclusive horizon activates the thought of the wider and narrower context in which the work is created: today's global environmental, social and political unrest, but also the cultural context of everyday life. What is on display here is our work together. It becomes a lived experience and a document of testimony that our development and action on the planet depend on our collective responsibility.
The work also initiates thinking about collaborative forms of creation by pointing us to the potential of seeing the intricacies and complexities of the present moment, in the hope that making things visible as they are can initiate strategies of togetherness and solidarity during ongoing health, economic, natural and political crises.
After the exhibition closes, in cooperation with the host institution, I will hire hired workers to put the threads back into the ball and together with me prepare the installation for the next exhibition. With that, I am developing a real model of an alternative economy for the unemployed. I implemented the first such support model after the exhibition Art in action. At the crossroads between utopia and (in)dependence, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSUM), in Ljubljana, in 2023, which will continue even after the current exhibition Spaces of love.
Another installation related to the above problems is Means that can contribute to the phytoremediation of polluted areas. Here I start from the intersection of language, art and science in order to point out, in terms of ecological urgency, the facts about the ability of certain plants to extract heavy metals from the soil and polluted areas, but more importantly, pointing out the paradoxes that lead to conditions that need to be treated . The first thing you see on the wall is a set of words that look like poetry. And then the audience discovers that what are supposed to be lyrics are basically a list of species names and chemical signatures of the heavy metals that species extracts from the soil and air, as well as scientific references. This installation sheds light on a different model of community, in which the role of art is to communicate principles of care and greater reciprocity in a world of united species.
Bonus video:
