Art Quake

WORKSHOPS:

• INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP OF VISUAL ARTS Desire Square – reading, visualizing and performing the town
• DRAMA WORKSHOP Rituals of the New Age
• PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP Student Cultural Epicenter
• MUSIC WORKSHOP Jazz Mardi Gras

University of Arts
in Belgrade

SUMMER ART SCHOOL 2019
Kotor

July 7-14

Partner:
Cultural Center Nikola Đurković in Kotor

TOPIC

This year, the focus of the Summer Art School is the Old Town of Kotor in Montenegro. For more than two millennia, this fortress town at the foot of Mount Lovćen, at the very bottom of the Boka Kotorska Bay, has been one of the most beautiful natural ports in Europe. The massive ramparts surrounding the town give an additional emphasis to the constraint of its core. Passing the three gates of Kotor – Sea Gate, Gurdić Gate and River Gate – one enters into a maze of confusingly arranged and interlaced narrow streets and squares, with obvious traces of the Renaissance, Gothic and Baroque architecture. The town resembles an "open-air museum" with lavish palaces of famous seamen and traders – Bizanti, Pima, Grgurina, Buća, Beskuća – with spacious stone balconies, their coats-of-arms on facades, decorated interiors, floor mosaics and wells inside the yards. Its numerous churches - St. Luke, St. Maria, St. Paul, St. Nicholas, Our Lady of Health and the monumental Cathedral of St. Tryphon – represent priceless cultural and artistic monuments.
In this area, the cultures and religions of East and West had been colliding and permeating each other for centuries, which also, not disrespecting the right to diversity, resulted in some distinctive and unique solutions in architecture, music, literature, painting and sculpture. As a place of exceptional beauty, indigenous and unique cultural and artistic heritage, Kotor and its region were declared a natural and cultural-historical asset and included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site List in 1979. In the powerful earthquake that struck Montenegro that same year, the town of Kotor and its most significant cultural monuments – the Prince's Palace, Clock Tower and the Cathedral of St. Tryphon - suffered significant damage. Although the damage was repaired in the course of time and the monuments restored to their previous appearance, the destruction caused by the earthquake remains in the collective memory of the town of Kotor.
ArtQuake, the International Summer Art School, is inspired by the valuable cultural heritage of Kotor. In a way similar to an art expedition, the school will find and map new creative incentives both within and outside the walls of the Old Town, in a unique reserve of natural and artistic treasures. Through individual and interdisciplinary work, students will be able to express their personal artistic sensibility and, by means of contemporary artistic language, turn it into a modern concept. Contrary to the destructive forces of the earthquake, this project tends to encourage and promote artistic and creative shocks. ArtQuake is, therefore, a phenomenon that occurs within the artistic being itself, an earthquake of internal organs as a reaction to external stimulus, a tectonic trembling of the body facing the scene of unusual beauty.

WORKSHOPS

INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP OF VISUAL ARTS
Desire Square – reading, visualizing and performing the town

Svetlana Volic
Faculty of Fine Arts

The initial and key points for the discovery and reading of the town will be the numerous Kotor squares, whose names deposit its history and memory: Arms Square (Clock Piazza), St. Tryphon Square (Kotor Mutiny Square), Karampana Piazza (Karampana – a public fountain in Kotor), St. Luke Square (St. Nicholas Square, Scorpio Square, Brotherhood and Unity Square), Škaljari Piazza (Scala Santa Tavern Square, Salad Piazza), Flour Square, Square of Blessed Osanna (Wood Piazza), Museum Square (Boka Navy Square), Milk Piazza, Prison Piazza, Cinema Square (Town Library Square, St. Michael Piazza – Lapidarium, Gringo and Daniela Piazza, Disabled Home Square). The artistic method will apply the principle of psychogeographical research walks. Following the flows of their physical and mental movements through this field research, the participants will merge the discovered premises, carry out divergent conclusions and their own narratives. They will move around, let their eyes wonder, stop, watch, listen, touch, feel – experiencing not only the visible, but contemplating and visualizing the town. In order to familiarize the participants with the complex history and cultural heritage of the town and help them comprehend it, the School will arrange meetings with historians, artists, curators, writers, chroniclers, as well as visits to Kotor palaces, sacral buildings and organizations dealing with cultural heritage and reanimation of urban spaces.
The squares will also represent the main scenes of creative reactions and visual narratives. The participants will be encouraged to communicate with local residents and visitors through a range of research actions (conversations, surveys, interviews) and creative interactive events. Public spaces will also be the scene of the final exhibition in the form of installations, performances or video projections. Thus, for the duration of the workshop, Kotor squares will become areas of common interpretation of the history and culture of the town, as well as places of new cultural and social exchange. The workshop will provide students with the experience of working with specific cultural heritage and the "spirit of the place", and familiarize them with the process of working on projects that have memory spaces for the partner and opportunities for creative dialogue and artistic expression, made possible through the meeting with visible and imaginative premises of the space. The workshop aims to enable the performance of new cultural contents all over the public spaces of the town of Kotor, in the form of contemporary, experimental and interactive art events (exhibition of paintings, drawings and photographs, video installations, performances etc.).

DRAMA WORKSHOP

Rituals of the New Age

Snežana Trišić
Faculty of Dramatic Arts

The Drama Workshop will revise the phenomenon of rituals and the concept of ritual theater in contemporary theater practice and contemporary social context. In the first phase, we are going to introduce and reconstruct basic elements of the ritual theater through history, followed by specific rituals of the workshop participants, which may have to do with their heritage, the context they come from, or their completely intimate needs and habits. In the third phase we create rituals of the new age through words, actions, movements, songs, dances, animation of objects, as well as play. These rituals are based on the confessions of the workshop participants, their fears and hopes regarding the new age and everything it brings... e.g. natural disasters, wars, extreme stratification and misery, planet pollution, technology domination, dehumanization and the like, but also of what we celebrate in this new age. We are contemplating new rituals that include a new expression, but also a specific approach to work.
Through the ritual, the basic elements of the theater expression are analyzed and created: method, plot, conflict, relations, dramatic situation and event. We examine the influence, the effect and the power of ritual in the creation of the theater expression. We are committed to the creative process, interested in how the creative process develops both on the individual and collective level, how a small art form is created, an etude, in this case – a ritual. Which way can we influence the creative process? How do we encourage ourselves and others? How we get the idea and how it evolves.
Participants receive questions and tasks from which they begin to create their collective and individual etudes. In some cases, they can reach the topic on their own by answering a question or a confession, or they can get a task in the form of a given word or object with the purpose of making e.g. an event / conflict / love relationship, etc. From these etudes, they develop individual or independent rituals with the help of a workshop leader. Along with this process, we perform daily concentration and repetition exercises, as well as exercises of liberation and fantasy expansion.
Rituals of the new age should help us illuminate this new era and our position in it. Is this the age that is now and / or the one yet to come? Where is the man in this new age, what is he afraid of, who are the terrible (un)known forces he is scared of and what is he hoping for? Are we able, and which way are we able to change this new age? By what songs and prayers, movements and sounds? How would rituals look today? What are actually rituals of the new age and what does it have to do with us? Do we recognize some rituals of the new age in the world around us? What are their elements? What is their purpose? How can we change them? Can we create new ones and how?
The aim of the workshop is to enable participants to awake, learn, master and perfect the basic elements and specific techniques of creating a theater expression through the process of creating a new age ritual.

PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP

Student Cultural Epicenter

Vladimir Perić
Faculty of Applied Arts

The workshop includes various areas of creativity – photography, photographic procedures of digital editing, design, calligraphy and typography, as well as painting techniques such as collage. These involve photographing in the field, finding, identifying and documenting natural and artificial forms that associate alphabet characters (examples of starting points that can serve as signs – cracks, damages, anomalies and waste materials in natural and urban environments, etc.). After the accumulation and selection phase, participants will be motivated to creatively use the characters in new visual and textual units. The obtained solutions can be individual photographs, photographic series, typographic designer units, collages, etc.
The workshop will give students the opportunity to master the process of observation, research and re-examination of the environment, as well as the process of artistic upgrading of the elements they have found. The workshop will also be an incentive for students to articulate their project independently, creating a synthesis of their own artistic expression and knowledge gained during the workshop.

MUSIC WORKSHOP

Jazz Mardi Gras

Dragan Ćalina
Faculty of Music

The jazz workshop is inspired by the carnival tradition of Kotor, which represents a festival of multiculturalism and celebrations in honor of the town itself. The themes of the Kotor Carnival have always been of the widest range – from comic and absurd to high and socially engaged. The Carnival is the state of mind of this town, one of the most intriguing cultural manifestations and its way of life.
Exploring the history of jazz music, the workshop will connect the musical concepts of the unrestrained carnival festival of Mardi Gras with the traditions of the town music of Kotor. The students will be studying and analyzing various styles of jazz music through the principle of the standard repertoire processing.
Before taking part in the workshop, the participants will be provided with ready-made arrangements for the compositions they are to process. They will be introduced to the principles of collective improvisation through the analysis of harmony, rhythmic diversity and form. Through the association of jazz ensembles with the everyday life in the town squares, students will be able to feel the spirit of the town and integrate it into their musical interpretations.

Programme_Summer_Art_School19.pdf
application_formSAS-2019.docx