Collaboration with ethnologist and urban anthropologist Valentina Gulin Zrnić on edition of Wall Displays (long-term project by Shadow Casters)
http://urbanadivljina.wordpress.com/
The project 8 Fragments of Urban Wilderness has been realized as site-specific fieldwork in Zagreb and as an exhibition in public space.
Site-specific fieldwork and research have opened up particular issues such as:
– potential of urban wilderness to inform urban planning and landscape design
– fast evolving vegetation communities and multiple meanings of urban (wild) plants (protected – invasive – medical – polluted)
– unstructured aesthetics of (wild) greenery in the city
– the impact of spontaneous uses of/in urban space and potential of informal („wild”) practices to create urban environment
– artificial wilderness: commercialization of natural and wild life (trees in pots)
– ambivalence of long-lasting practice of informal urban gardening (so called „wild gardens”)
The working process and the elaboration of particular themes have consisted of the methods of decontextualization, recycling, sampling, hybridization, blending visual, textual and oral material (photography from the sites, archival pictures, novels, newspaper material, historical literature, interviews).
The public space exhibition included 8 (site-specific) posters situated in info-windows throughout the city (December 2014 – March 2015). Posters combined collaged visual material, short texts/provocative questions and/or interactive tools (signage to particular site of wilderness, magnifiers etc.). The aim has been to attract attention of passers-by, of people in transit and to stimulate a turn in the perception of urban landscape by noting ambivalent phenomena which could be seen critically and negatively, but also affirmatively in their imaginative and ecological potential.
The art project was realized as part of the ongoing urban research on urban hyper-textuality by the multimedia art association Shadowcasters.
tonka malekovic 