This summer we invited dear friends and collaborators – artists, poets, writers, architects, cultural workers into a convivial feminist experimental space at Four Waters. We were happy to greet unexpected guests from afar, weaving friendships from different points of life. 

As a part of cyanotype workshop led by Dunja Karanović  we developed a collective zine, a small artbook named Strategies of Withdrawal based on the contribution by Mia Ćuk. As our practices and politics of resistance to capitalism, its repression on our bodies, sense of self/community, and imagination grow and intertwine, our gathering joyfully holds that title. 

Summer School praxis is aligned with practices of refusal, as suggested by Fred Moten (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study) among others. “It is a commitment to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity.” As well as to practice giving ourselves permission to slow down, experiment, and rest collectively.

Participants: 

Aleksandar Bošković teaches at the Department of Slavic Studies at Columbia University. He is a researcher of Russian and Eastern European modernist literature, Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav studies, with a focus on comparative literature, critical theory and visual studies. His specialization is avant-garde literature and experimental artistic practices, which he explores through the prism of comparative media. He is the author of the monograph Poetic Humor in the Works of Vasko Popa (2008), and co-editor of The Fine Feats of the ‘Five Cockerels’ Gang (with Ainsley Morse, 2022) and Zenithism 1921-1927: A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (with Steven Teref, 2023).

Milica Grbić (Master of Interior Architecture) was born in Belgrade. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Belgrade, where she completed basic studies in architecture and master studies in interior architecture. Her practice is focused on creating spaces where functionality, aesthetics and empathy intertwine. He believes that everyone deserves a living and working space that is accessible, both economically and physically, thereby contributing to a sense of dignity in everyday life.

Jovana Đajić Gavrilović is a professor of literature, cultural worker and educator. She has been a member of the open collective and transnational platform HEKLER since its foundation.

Dunja Karanović (1996) is a visual artist and journalist based in Belgrade, Serbia. In her practice, she explores ways of bridging cultural policy, theory, and practice through interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches that foster radical friendship and collective care. Her research is focused on mainstreaming care in cultural institutions and reimagining them as slower, softer, and more inclusive spaces. She holds an MA degree from the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Management at the University of Arts in Belgrade and an MFA from the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, PRC. She works as a journalist for LICEULICE magazine and is a member of the Femix collective. She is passionate about feminist art histories, embroidery, the small, and the marginal.  IG: @dunja_karanovic

Bojana Ranković, based between San Francisco and Belgrade, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on themes of belonging, displacement, and the construct of home. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in printmaking, where she received the prestigious Bronze Roller Award. Her work has been exhibited across diverse spaces, including Times Square’s ZAZ10 Gallery, American Bookbinders Museum, the Museum of History of Yugoslavia, and numerous galleries in both the U.S. and Serbia. Through traditional printmaking and painting techniques as well as more modern approaches like photography and video, her art reflects layers of identity and memory, creating accessible and transformative experiences as acts of love.

Mia Ćuk (1988) is an artist who frequently assumes curatorial, editorial and organizational roles as parts of her artistic practice. Working both in theory and in practice, her research encompasses the notions of urban histories and intimate topographies, domesticity and time, anonymous archives and personal collections, records of surfaces and sentiments— which she articulates as site specific experiences, ephemeral installations, book-objects and texts. She is the co-founder of Footnote- Centre for Image and Text, an artist-run studio, a community space and a residency programme in Belgrade dedicated to experimentation, research and production in the field of arts and self-publishing.

Sanja Vasić was born in 1993 in Belgrade. Her artistic practice encompasses transdisciplinary approaches and various media such as video, photography, installations, performance, and writing, with a particular focus on poetic narratives that often serve as the starting point of her work. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the CCC (Critical Curatorial Cybermedia) program at HEAD – Genève (2019) and a Master’s degree in Textiles from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, where she received the Iva Vrinjanin Fund Award for the best master’s work in the field of textiles. She has participated in events such as Artweekend Belgrade (2024, 2021), the Youth Biennial (2023), and MAR – Mitrovica Art Residency (2023) in Kosovo, as well as artist residencies at the independent theater TU (Théâtre de l’Usine) in Geneva, where she was also a co-author of a program focused on a series of collective poetry performances.Since 2024, she has been a member of ULUS in the Expanded Media section.  IG: @san.java_

Organizers:

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. 

Jelena Prljević is a visual artist whose practice explores the field of drawing, moving image, and installation. Her work explores the logic of fear, and ways in which art as a process and environment can invite its cognitive, emotional and somatic processing. In 2018, in NYC, she co-founded HEKLER, an artist-run transnational platform that fosters critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict. In Summer 2020, she initiated building of the Four Waters Meeting Point in village Ljubanje, Serbia where she, with the support of her family and friends, where she works on the transformation and preservation of the old family cottages and other household units with the intention to celebrate hospitality, imagination and further collaborations.

Nataša Prljević is an interdisciplinary artist, culture worker and organizer. She is dedicated to collaborative and collective practices related to social change, feminist organizing, transformative pedagogy, and justice. Starting with collages and assemblages, she studies the transformative potential of polyphony emerging through a range of activations and media. She is the co-founder of the HEKLER platform and collective that fosters critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict, and a member of the Four Water Meeting initiative.

HEKLER is an artist-run platform and transnational community of artists, cultural workers and activists that foster critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict. We merge artistic, pedagogical, publishing and organizing strategies centering liberatory potential of collaborative and collective work. We celebrate collective rehearsal which weaves together transnational positionalities and radical imagination towards a life-affirming future.