NTIZEZA | HEKLER
HEKLER and NTIZEZA came together in the hope of building solidarity bridges with artists and platforms in the Balkans, that share common feminist convictions and cultural parallelities, informed by our geographical, beyond eurocentric, histories.
Four Waters provided an intimate setting of a rural household, where we were able to co-create a temporary community. During the period of a week, we exchanged and archived our feminisms, applying grassroots ethics and in ways beyond the box of and institutional limitations. This time together, allowed us to establish and learn about solidarities that are regional and updated to the needs of our times.
Through an interplay that included discussions and critical thinking together, sharing meals and artistic practices, visiting landscapes, consulting locals towards different care practices, we were able to think around feminist politics of collaboration and ultimately build feminist bridges between our contexts.
To create long lasting networks we need to meet on the basis of exchange and learning together, we need to spend time together and imagine worlds by building them.
* a divination workshop by Sanem Su Avci, bringing together alternative epistemologies while grounding divination as a method of feminist care
* a collective video diary workshop, focusing on our interactions with non-human entities, (that served as archival material of our temporary community) by Anastasia Diavasti
* a feminist ritual around Greek/Serbian prayer beads by Christina Maridaki
* a cooking research session mixing family knowledge, internet glitches, cookbooks, intuition, and gut thinking by Jasmina Al-Qais
*Anti-Fear workshop by HEKLER | Nataša and Jelena Prljević, an evolving collective practice that brings privately held fears into the community with others’ fears through collective experiments – sharing, movement work, and drawing
*cyanotype workshop held by Miloš Bojović and Joshua Nierodzinski where participants were able to get familiar with the history and process
*each of us had a chance to share and discuss our works through screenings and presentations
*through collective work the NTIZEZA Collective contributed to the household
During our one-week residency we visited:
*Kadinjača, a memorial (spomenik) complex 14km away from Užice, designed by Miodrag Živković, commemorates fallen Partisan fighters from Posavina and Orašje and roughly 400 fighters from the Worker’s Battalion who perished at this spot fighting against German forces during the Battle of Kadinjača on November 29th, 1941. The site memorizes the end of the Republic of Užice, a short-lived liberated Yugoslav territory and the first territory to be liberated from the German forces in WWII in Europe, established by the Partisan Resistance movement.
*The Knitter’s Museum and Old Village Museum Sirogojno, the first established women’s cooperative for handmade natural wool clothing products and first open air museum in Serbia, established within the organization of the women-knitters, transferred and reconstructed in 1980 with the aim of protecting material and non-material cultural heritage of Zlatibor region. On our way back to Ljubanje we stopped by Stopića Cave, nested on the Trnava stream, and located between Trnava and Rožanstvo. This amazing tour and adventure was organized by Danijela Dedović who generously hosted us at her household in Trnava where we were greeted by her lovely family, beautiful garden, cows, and raspberry fields. So much love, dedication, and care in one place.
Sanem Su Avci is a historian, musician, and practices and teaches divination. Sanem is the founder and main coordinator of Magic Kitchen, the vegan co-op eatery in Exarheia, Athens, where she has been living the last 5 years.
Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a poet who writes for voice and paper, articulates and performs language with sound, food or care practices towards uncontainable forms of literature. She broadcasts temporarily or mobile on free and public radios. She currently lives in Berlin.
Anastasia Natasa Diavasti uses performance, curating, photography and video for both individual and collaborative projects. Natasa is looking for occasions to create and participate in interspecial, artistic, symbiotic experiments, found often in the seams of art and activism.
Christina Maridaki just joined our group, in place of Julie Bintje, who unfortunately due to day job commitments cannot be with us in this trip. Christina is a young Athens based artist, NTIZEZA had recently the pleasure to meet and collaborate with. Christina organised last September a workshop of feminist Cretan songs, “mantinades”, sticking the tongue out to the popular patriarchal songwriting tradition, carried out with a lot of fun and affection.
Marina Bak is an art student at the University of Hartford, CT, USA. Incorporating experimentation, written, and spoken text, Bak aims to address ongoing discussions about self-reflection, community, and labor.
Jelena Prljević is a visual artist whose practice explores the fields of drawing, moving images, and installation. Her work examines the logic of fear and the ways in which art, as a process and environment, invites its emotional, cognitive, and somatic processing. In 2018, in New York, she co-founded the collaborative art platform and transnational collective HEKLER, focusing on critical and experimental inquiry into the relationship between hospitality and conflict. In the summer of 2020, she initiated the construction of a meeting place called Četiri vode in Ljubanje, Serbia. There, she works, with the support of family and friends, on transforming and preserving old family houses and other structures within the household, to open these spaces for further gatherings, collective imaginings, and expanding collaborations.
Nataša Prljević is an artist, educator, and curator dedicated to collaborative and collective practices focused on social change, feminist organizing, transformative pedagogy, and justice. Beginning with collage and assemblage, she explores the transformative potential of polyphony that arises through a range of activations and media. In 2018, she initiated the HEKLER platform, a transnational platform that encourages critical and experimental inquiry into hospitality and conflict.
Miloš Bojović is a photographer and occasional writer. In his work, Miloš explores the relations of fear, anxiety, and possibilities of choice in the space of imagination. Experiments in the fields of image, sound, and text, he joins in video installations and film. He is a co-founder of ŽTMRLJ.PROD, a production house that explores topics inside the underground film, music videos, and stop-motion animation. Tightly collaborates with Jelena Prljević on various projects and ideas, where the Four Waters project is of the main interest. He writes different kinds of textual forms that are, so far, published in the online magazine Tag. He is based in Požega, Serbia.
Joshua Nierodzinski (b.1982) is an artist who merges painting and forensic photography to address personal and national histories. He is a co-founder of HEKLER, a transnational artist-run platform that fosters the critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict. Selected awards include the National Endowment for the Arts Grant and an artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, and the Wassaic Artist Residency. Joshua is a recent AIM Bronx Museum Fellow and currently lives and works in Mexico City.
NTIZEZA aims to increase the visibility of local artists and projects focusing on feminist agendas, encourage collaborative structures, empower and celebrate young professionals and promote engagement with established ones. The project was initiated in 2019 and is based at STOA FEXI project space, a collaborative and secure space in central Athens.
HEKLER is an artist-run transnational platform that fosters critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict. We merge artistic, curatorial, pedagogical, publishing and organizing strategies centering liberatory potential of collaborative and collective work.