Expanded book: Other @ MaMa - Multimedia Institute, Zagreb (2023-10-06) / Gypt Sessions #3 (2023-11-12)

The presentation of the conceptual work / book Other by Maja Milić takes place without a focus on the book itself. The artist expands the book’s central concept into experimental-filmic-performative practices, sound interventions and radiophonic mediations, after which invited artists intervene in and respond to her work in an improvised, intermedial collective performance.

The book Other is part of the author’s research at the intersection of experimental autoethnography, semiology and artistic practices. This research began in film, with a specific focus on found footage and private home movies, and has expanded, among other things, into sound/radiophonic experiments and expanded film performance, through which the author also understands herself to be practising film. The works are cryptically interwoven and predominantly deconstruct trivial (docu-)elements of reality. They deal with the question of otherness (human, temporal, spatial, internal, but also medial) and rest on the idea that every form of otherness is necessarily a reflection of otherness within ourselves.

The author uses the concept of the ethnographic Other to define that part within us which inadvertently bases our beliefs, habits and modes of action on culture and on a social mentality/myth that is taken so much for granted that it has become estranged from our own “selves”. It is that part of us for which we do not know why it acts as it does, because it takes our actions as the norm. When observed, even the most banal situations become strange, or a container of socio-cultural substance. Banality is a minority in the sense that it is the least frequently observed source of understanding—something that cannot be learned, only lived. It is less about what someone does, and more about how it is performed.

https://mi2.hr/2023/09/expanded-book-other/

Maja Milić »Other« (ATLAS Projectos & we make it), 2023.
Croatian & English, 98 pages
5-color Risography
Edition: 150

- - - -

Outside the venue: Nenad Laktasic - Gramatizacija device that is sensitive to movement and reads the text of Maja's book coded through "grammatization"

Ivor Glavas introduction

PART 1: film + sound performance by Maja Milic

Live sound (light sensitive pedal, guitar, pedals, microphonic soundbox, walkman, etc)

Multiprojections of loops with a cluster of super8 projectors on the left side

16mm dual projection

Only on radio (audience in space cannot hear): Luana Lojic is trying to read the text off the projection which disappears fast. She was given the task last minute and didnt know the text before.

PART 2: screening of film Other by Maja Milic

PART 3: impro collective performance / intervention

Rotating projector by Hrvoje Spudic

Impro speech (reading from personal notebook/diary in public as a way of dealing with his dyslexia) by Ivor Glavas

Impro live sound with guitar + pedals by Maja Milic

Mia Krakan's light cube

PART 4: video work by Vladimir Vulevic + Andrea Lausevic reenacting the book's dialog

- - - -

Artists:

Luana Lojic, Ivor Glavas, Hrvoje Spudic, Mia Krakan, Andrea Lausevic, Vladimir Vulevic, Nenad Laktasic