Connecting Cultures presenta per la prima volta a Milano Individual Utopias, un lavoro artistico di Lala Raščić, nato a seguito dell’esperienza del progetto internazionale Art and Survival – promosso nel 2007 da Connecting Cultures e in partnership con la Fondazione Triennale di Milano – svoltosi in Bosnia-Herzegovina a dieci anni dalla fine della guerra civile.
Cosa sono le individual utopias? Quanto è legittimo l’intervento umanitario nella risoluzione dei conflitti? Quali problematiche, desideri e bisogni questi interventi riescono realmente a cogliere, e quali incomprensioni fra chi aiuta e chi è aiutato in un contesto di aiuti internazionali? Un progetto artistico può essere uno strumento per captare la complessità di queste incomprensioni, di cogliere quegli elementi sottili e intraducibili che si annidano negli interstizi della comunicazione?
Questi e altri interrogativi si pone lo spettatore nell’assistere alla performance dell’artista bosniaca Lala Raščić.
La presentazione del progetto Individual Utopias – che vede la collaborazione fra Connecting Cultures e l’associazione O’- vuole essere per il pubblico un’occasione per conoscere un progetto artistico inedito ma anche un momento di approfondimento e riflessione interdisciplinare sul tema dell’utilizzo dei linguaggi artistici per interpretare la contemporaneità.
Nucleo principale del progetto è uno script per ‘audiodramma’ che, nella forma di un dialogo divertente ed ironico, affronta il tema controverso dei progetti umanitari, pieni di ideali e buone intenzioni, ma anche di problematicità e contraddizioni. Il delicato rapporto arte-diritti umani è affrontato attraverso mezzi espressivi eterogenei: la performance, il video, il libro d’artista, il disegno, le sperimentazioni sonore; ma soprattutto attraverso la forza di una visione personale, trasversale, satirica e, per questo, profondamente critica.
Il testo – che prende forma in un vero e proprio libro d’artista – e la performance sono il nucleo principale, le due anime del progetto di Lala Raščić; e saranno presentate in momenti differenti presso le due associazioni.
La Raščić ha fatto proprio il mezzo espressivo della performance-dramma, dando prova di una versatilità e di una poliedricità espressiva notevoli. La capacità di trasformarsi, di annullarsi di fronte ai propri personaggi fa delle sue performance parte essenziale del suo fare artistico. L’attitudine all’utilizzo di media diversi ha portato la Raščić ad affiancarsi a musicisti sperimentali come Vuneny, gruppo d’avanguardia della scena musicale di Mostar.
Nedim Cisic e Andrijan Zovko sono attivi con i loro progetti di sperimentazione musicale dal 2003, hanno prodotto tre album e calcato i palcoscenici di tutta Europa.
La collaborazione fra la performer e i musicisti dà vita ad un’interessante interazione di linguaggi, rafforzando l’intento poetico del progetto Individual Utopias.

scarica il comunicato stampa
scarica la scheda di Individual Utopias

un progetto di       

in collaborazione con

What are individual utopias? How can the humanitarian intervention be legitimate in the resolution of the conflicts? How can these typologies of intervention gather existing problems, desires, needs? How much is an artistic project able to gather some complexity of these incomprehensions and how much of that thin and untranslatable elements it is able to tell?
These and other questions are faced in the artist book and in the performance of the Bosnian artist Lala Raščić.
Originate from the workshop on PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) – part of the project Art and Survival – realized in Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina) in October 2007 by Connecting Cultures together with Cesare Pietroiusti, the project of Lala aims to a personal reflection at the value of the humanitarian interventions, of the contradictory reactions been born by the exchanges among the realities that take care of the uneasiness and the people that try to resolve and understand it.
Text and performance are therefore the principal nucleus of the project of Lala Raščić that takes form in a real artist book.
This limited edition volume is published in English and Bosnian and it comprehend a screenplay or script for an audio-drama and a series of portraits of the all the “actors” of this satirical play, those people that have actively taken part to the project Art and Survival in Mostar.
Licensed under a Creative Common Licence, the script – for artist’s precise choise – can be used in any form by who desires it (for theatre, cinema, or performance).

ARTBOOK June 2008
translations: Lala Raščić, Senada Kreso
proofing: Timothy Weeks, Silvija Dervišefendić
design: Laboratorium
print: Bauer grupa
print run: 500

Produced by Connecting Cultures, Milan

The text and drawings in this book are licensed under the Creative Commons license, unless otherwise indicated.
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Croatia License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncsa/3.0/hr/

The study day Art and Survival | Focus on Bosnia-Herzegovina will reconsider the state of the art in a post conflict country such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the artistic project Art and Survival is taking place. The study day is intended as a moment for reflection and better understanding of the potential of art practices in the difficult and complex equation of human and economic development in countries afflicted by diffuse war and the separation of communities. Even more frequently the destabilisation of societies in Europe and elsewhere, leads not to wars between nations but to an escalation of internal conflicts, often ethnically defined, resulting in the denial of the most elementary human rights. What are the very real, unspoken, human and economic consequences of this alarming trend visible in many parts of the world?
Through the Art project Art and Survival, Connecting Cultures applies the language of art in an empathic approach on several levels in order to combat the stigma relating to mental health and the widespread anxieties deriving from the social and psychological consequences of widespread violence.
All the phases of the project, with special attention to the workshop experience with Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti and three joung Bosnian artists (Sandra Dukic, Arman Kulasic, Lala Rascic), have been filmed by a team of professional filmakers of the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art. With them Connecting Cultures will produce a documentary on PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) – showed during the study day: an illness which takes a particularly heavy toll in post conflict countries, particularly devastating for the possibilities of reconstruction of an everyday normality within those societies.

Tuesday 20th November at 6.30 pm, the Video Review entitled Bosnian Selection! will be inaugurated. Nine artists from Bosnia-Herzegovina have been selected in collaboration with the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art in an organic overview of the video works produced during the past ten years in the post-war society. The works of these artists, some emerging, others already well known on the international scenario, will be visible every day until 2nd December at the Triennale Bovisa and on the maxi screen outside from 6.00 pm until midnight. The selection will also include a short intense documentary of the workshop and the relationship with the patients in the two Mostar Mental Health Centres in October 2007.

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supported by
Harvard Medical School, Project 1 Billion | USA
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina-Federal Ministry of Health of Bosnia-Herzegovina  | BiH