Monday, 6th May 2024 at 20.00 in Cirkulacija 2, Ajdovščina subway Ljubljana: the opening of discoursive multimedia installation

Urška Savič: Territories of returning

The immersive experience in the form of a spatial installation erases the boundaries between the personal and the collective and intervenes in the area of ​​science fiction. She is interested in the relationship between light and shadow, between print and cast, contact with the ground and floating above it. The intertwining of photography, the material world and sound are entangled in the concept of returning – back to the archive, returning to memories, returning to the forgotten, but also back to practice, doing, acting. The reverberation of the space questions a step to the side, forward, movements from here to there and back again, backward walking and free running. The installation is intended to encourage introspection, dialogue and engage in critical reflection on the ways of remembering and the constructions of the “memory palaces” of the modern individual.

Installation will be open from 14.00 to 18.00 – tuesday to friday
and bonus: 12.00 to 16.00 on saturday, 11th May 2024

The ideas have their origin in the author’s award-winning master’s thesis (Documentation of material – material documentation, ALUO, 2020), and in doing so she develops and upgrades the ideas presented – for the first time also in an independent practical implementation.
Urška Savič, Transforma (last image), 2015

The first part of a feature-length project in the making, Territories of returning – blanks in the memory, addresses the complex relationship between visual documentation and technology and discusses the role of documentation in various social structures, from bureaucratic, which serves administrative purposes, to technological, necessary to meet infrastructural needs, and personal documentation, which presents itself as a carrier and condition for an individual’s digital existence in the present. The subject covers a wide field and includes an investigation of the historical perspective of documentation, touching on the impact of technological progress and the ever-changing nature of archives, which, by assumption, remains culminative and closed. A methodology based on the accumulation of diverse material, its categorization and selection criteria is therefore crucial for her. The project includes research into the psychological, social and technological aspects of archiving and their impact on our understanding of the formation of history and memory, both individual and social. He questions the relationship between archives and power structures and investigates how the institutionalization of knowledge affects social hierarchies and shapes the individual’s experience in the world. The focus is on questioning the fundamental fear of losing memories and the human effort to archive to preserve those memories.

Urška Savič (1992) is a photographer, critic and journalist in the field of culture and creator of radio shows. She graduated in 2014 from Prague’s FAMU (Faculty of Film and Television of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), where she studied the topics of collage and photomontage, and her master’s degree from Ljubljana’s ALUO (2020), where in the Department of Sculpture she focused on excessive documentation and archival practice in contemporary art. Between 2015 and 2019, she was part of the Modri ​​kot collective at the Autonomous Rog Factory in Ljubljana. During the study exchange, she worked on the local scene in Porto, Portugal (2017-18), where she began interweaving her previously visual practice with sound and writing. Since 2017, she has been a member of the editorial staff for culture and humanities at Radio Študent, where in 2019 she started steering the radio’s artistic-theoretical research platform R A D A R, and in 2021 she also became a sound engineer. As a self-employed in culture, she collaborates with various publications, organizations and co-creates multimedia projects.

The finissage of the installation will take place on Friday, May 10, 2024 from 17:00 onwards, when the spatial installation will be further extended to a special charity event for the founding member of Cirkulacija 2 Boštjan Leskovšek, whose premature departure from our community was caused by Alzheimer’s disease. The donations will be used to cover the travel costs of visiting Boštjan as regularly as possible. The small synths of the big Boštjan, who in his time was a real collector of the most unusual ideas in this field, will also be exhibited! More information to follow.

Co-financing: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia

Foto: Nina Pernat