i've been in croatia for quite a while where i got interested in transformations and mutations (in a wider sense).
transformation of political circumstances; in the last decade croatian society saw some major changes: from a former socialistic society to postwar status entering the age of globalization, free market, capitalization and joining the european union soon. a big issue is the question of land ownership and its current effect on society and cultural heritage. i have been looking at cases in one to one conversation where poeple were selling their land. it seems economic reasons are the main factor but in many cases skyrocketing landprizes make the people sell and leave their property, settle somewhere cheaper instead and live off the money. houseselling of land where families have lived for centuries (the average age of a house within old settlement area is 200) becomes an alternative way of making business. what happens is that people who were part of a long grown environment are shifting somewhere else. these developments are of new quality - triggered by external interests. these external interests become more a dominating force in the region of former yugoslavia. since my last visit it seems that relations to western europe are still not developed in a healthy way; there is an unreflected fascination and mystification with everything that is 'abroad'. objectively there has never been a time-window for the young generation to fully develop their "own thing" and find some form of identity within the eu and the sorrounding non eu states - apart from the nineties where there was an absence of communication with the rest of europe. at that time they were out of touch with worlds current events and things began to happen from the inside. the young people started to refer to itself and to the world they were immersed in. from this point the impact of western ideas how to consume what, interrupted the provisional autonomous state of "being" the youth just started to build up for themselves. however this impact delivered a philosophy of capitalism that was tailored to fill what must have looked like a big hole in the eyes of a businessman. while i was staying here i just couldn't get enough to physically engage with everything that remained somehow from functioning as a new platform for some star-bucks-spangled economic dreams. everybody here is now doing their best of being, talking, moving, selling, economizing like they have seen it in other countries on tv. the guy from my favourite coffee place was really happy when he told me that he's got music in his toilet now. he saw it in germany and what the germans have he must have too. after all the germans know how to make money and the guest like the chill-out trance while taking a dump. so if everybody is trying really hard to do their thing i thoght i'm gonna give it a try too and build my own value system from the scratch. i started out at places that were not claimed yet, because they are too hard to claim or of no use to a money focused mind. yet. maybe after my work's out there, some people will discover some really great spots where they could do some business. that would be even better : eventually i'm keen to see how these real and imaginary places to be "reclaimed" in capitalistic means. this seems to be an uncontrollable organic process somehow. it's like cell mutation. you don't know how fast it grows and what exactly makes it growing. there are a million little components that encourage cell mutation. the world is full of them and we're creating new substances every second of our being.
so guys, the 'outcome' of my engagement with these places will result in a multi channel video installation and i posted some stills of it that you can catch a glimpse. the format is wrong - it shoud be 16:9 but blogspot somehow doensn't seem to like that
:)
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