RE-COLLECTING CITIES / RE-COLLECTING TIME

This project, a multi-annual venture of “Shadow Casters/Bacači Sjenki” in collaboration with several Croatian and International NG organisations (BLOK, CDU, ARL, REX/B92, BOOKSA) and city (Nova Gallery) and state institutions, deals with detecting, archiving, studying and exhibiting the documentation on artistic actions in public space as well protests and public gatherings (founded in Zagreb) from the 1900s to this day.

The project strives to capture all the ephemeral events, which left mainly immaterial traces in the cultural, social and political history of that city.

The red thread of the project is tracing documentation (film, video and sound recordings, photographic and written documents, testimonies, material traces etc.) by contacting authors, participants and witnesses.

Yet, besides being a documentation process, «Re-Collecting City, Re-Collecting Time» also offers the artistic reflection of the phenomena it documents, in this phase, through two media.

One is the so-called «open offices»: three or more times a year, the project is hosted by various public spaces (galleries, bookstores, cultural clubs…) for a week during which a series of events unfolds, including exhibitions and screenings of collected material, round table discussions on topics relevant for the project and interviews with those who come to testify on the events.

Another medium are the street display boxes (Wall Displays) of the temporarily closed Croatian Cinematheque cinema venue that are currently at the project’s disposal, where each month a new theme is explored through presenting collages of various visual and written materials – a sort of new-day «wall newspaper». In most cases, the presented past events are connected to the actual city locations of the display boxes.

As a special program within the project, an international workshop conference was organized in 2009. called SHADOWING THE CITY with more than forty professionals, thinkers and practitioners from different fields (arts, inter-media, architecture, anthropology, cultural polities, etc.) from sixteen countries. In 2012. the transcript of this program will be available on-line and as a hardcover version.

In 2019., «Re-collecting City, Re-collecting Time» will produce the interactive web page with all the events documented in last fourteen years of the project activities.

This project is supported by Ministry for Culture of Croatian Republic, Zagreb City Council for Culture and European Cultural Foundation.

Re-collecting city/Re-collecting time was also supported:
as a project within the collaboration platform Zagreb Cultural Capital of Europe 3000, within a collaborative project Relations: project relations initiated by “Kulturstiftung des Bundes” & by Kontakt, The Arts and Civil Society Program of Erste Bank Group in Central Europe, by the National Foundation for Civil society.

Other project partners and collaborations: Student Cultural Centre – Zagreb; Zagreb – Culture capital 3000; UHA (Croatian association of architects); HAZU (Croatian Scienze and Arts Academy); DAZ (State Archive – Zagreb); City Museum Zagreb; City Library Zagreb; National Library; D-A-Z (Association of Zagreb Architects); City Museum Ljubljana; etc.