Year: 2016-…
Project Title: SUMMER STAGE (work-in-progress)
Place: Novi Sad, Serbia
Type: Site-specific art project
Collaborators: Veljko Šuša (graduate engineer of agriculture), Igor Đokić, Stanko Gagrčin, Aleksandar Dadić, photo / video
Hidden in the backyard of the Cultural Centre of Novi Sad, a Summer Stage keeps a rare gem – a preserved concrete wall used for projections since Yugoslavia time. A lucky coincidence of a rather complicated ownership left this space out of the Cultural Centre’s reconstruction in 2008. Yet, this reconstruction disabled the usage of the Summer Stage, while the time period of its lasting occurred simultaneously with the closure of all Novi Sad cinemas.
Due to all of these circumstances, the Summer Stage finally lost its primary function once the Cultural Centre reopened in 2011. In the meantime, the space transformed into a ruin of a sort, managing to survive in-between two times, a couple of plots, and a few of its users who continually colonized this space in some of its segments from time to time. In spite of a belief that built space loses meaning the moment a need for its designed function is lost, the Summer Stage, in all of its (dis)functions, still resists this conclusion.
This space witnesses about the potentialities of the unexpected, about numerous creative interpretations, unburdened with the assumptions made by clearly defined and regulated urban environment, about all of the narratives this space reflects through layers of its memory, but above all that, about the poetics and dynamics of its current life. During particular segments of its transformations, this life – literally – flourishes from concrete.
