The Monuments I Chapter 6 I Before the Concert
16.12. 2022
Kühlhaus Berlin - 5th floor
site-specific installation and performance
“We have been here before,” is how I would usually start. Maybe to get in the right mood. To get you in the right mood. In a way, I keep on writing the same thing, the same situation. I keep on going back to this room with people. Not just any kind of room, usually it becomes “this room,” the one where I’ll place my next thing. My next work of art. When I step into this imaginary room, before I decide on the actual venue, I become more aware of the one in which I find myself right now - my studio. Winter is creeping in outside and through the bricks, as days cut short and night clouds down fast. I hear distant voices of familiar souls downstairs as I wonder if they might evolve into a fight, but just then a train passes by, so I close my eyes.
The color of my shut eyes was the first abstract painting I ever made. Mid-summer, on a small island in Dalmatia, after a lunch of fish and white wine, we kissed, then I glazed the painting I was working on, and the image made me giggle with content, so I opted that the best way to crown the moment of pure bliss was to throw myself into the sea. As I did, jumping into the blue water, I did so with my eyes closed. It all pinnacled into this vibrant light blue dot. As I surfaced and opened my eyes, it was still there, but changed color and at one point I saw three suns. A real one, and two glowing oranges in front of my eyes.
As I close my eyes right now, I see it all again. It often happens, through different triggers: a smell, your soft skin, the vertigo of music and everything that goes along with it. Like that day, when the city edges burned with violet flames and again I giggled, thinking the image was of my doing, as it appeared in front of my eyes.
“Are we really” asks that familiar voice next to me.
“What?” I respond.
“Are we really here again?”
At the end of the year, and after the success of the first five chapters, JAŠA has prepared Chapter 6. “Before the Concert” defines and occupies the metaphorical and actual space in-between. The space and moment between "before this" and "after that," a space of suspense and potential.
The Monuments’ individual Chapters are connected through a developing conceptual narrative. JAŠA’s conceptual stance is embedded within individual events as an “attitude” towards the use of space and time. "Have you ever wanted to enter a sculpture?" becomes a fact, a statement, not just a rhetorical question. A work of art shapes and generates reality, even though it is ephemeral. Temporarily built from fleeting intersections, it is completely tangible and sensual.
The Monuments is not an art project that wants to fix all the wrongs of this world and draw out new structures for living. It is an art project which is a self-aware structure organized in a communal way. It is about building ways to survive and thrive in whatever conditions the protagonists find themselves.
Each chapter of The Monuments consists of various narrative parallel and contrasting threads that contemplate closeness, urgency and self-realization through reaction and presence. A live artwork can react directly to the socio-politics of the moment, therefore the initial plan serves as a foundation upon which individual chapters are built. The process of embedding the ephemeral in materials can be seen as the most futile action of expression. At the same time, such a process can result in a work of art that creates its own attitude, rather than following, obeying or reflecting on one. Experiencing an architectural monument or an artwork is naturally finite, since we engage fully only for a short period of time. Material ownership does not define the exclusiveness of the experience of the artwork. What remains is a slot of memory of the work. Bits and pieces of this experience spread out through different layers and tissues in one’s memory. The premise of The Monuments is to structure itself through the simultaneous expansion and contraction of site-specific and performance interventions that define individual chapters over the course of the project that started in December 2021 and will last until December 2023.
project by JAŠA
Sound with Zlatko Širol
Performance concept with Mattias Gimigliano
Lighting with Luka Gyoha
Technical support Denis Metting
Text editing by Noah Charney
Cover photo with Primož Korošec
Supported by Kühlhaus Berlin
Enabled by The Monuments Patrons Club, Herman & Partnerji
Special thanks to Saša Šavel, Andrea Wenzler, Dieter Siegel, Lion Siegel, Griša Šoba & Franci Zavrl
Produced by WE.ARE Institute
Co-produced by Skica Berlin