Kunst+Pädagogik

7.5.2025 um 15:00
Seminarraum KunstWerk, Alpenstraße 75

We drive away. The same road winds through a scattered mountain village toward a hill that faces Forest. We get out of the car again. The hill becomes a viewing platform from which we observe Forest. She seems more solid when regarded from a distance, presenting herself as an immense man-made structure. Forest is both known and new to me. I was here before, when I was a child. There was no Forest then. The hills were crowded with young people carrying pine seedlings. They planted and tended the seedlings. State-organized (re)forestation actions took place every summer from 1978 until 1988 throughout the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The first location visit to Pešter took place from August 22 to 30, 2023 as part of my artistic research and development of the film entitled It Rains Differently. I was joined by Hannes Boeck (DOP), Bojan Palikuća (sound designer), Tanja Šljivar (dramaturg), and Mirjana Dragosavljević (art historian and activist) to work on a portrait of the forest as a fictional character.

The film is a meditation on collective labor, on an imaginary that fulfills itself through the form of Forest, who is in constant creation and thus manages to persist throughout all the changes. Forest – a transnational, political, social, and cultural collective body.

Written by Dušica Dražić

^{*In Serbo-Croatian, the grammatical gender of “forest” (šuma) is feminine.}

^{DUŠICA DRAŽIĆ researches the interrelationship of place and its users, rethinks them at the level of cultural continuity, symbolic irregularities and individual actions. She is interested in methods of knowledge production concerning social, political and aesthetic changes. Dušica’s artistic and curatorial hybrid practice contributes to production of public space. Public space that is not a safe space, but rather contested, charged and challenging, open for negotiation.}