Artist
Petra Slobodnjak
DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7
For 15 years I lived in a rented apartment in Pešča, a neighborhood in Zagreb. After buying my own place I left a building which became very precious to me. I moved in as a freshman student and over time I became part of a new community, perhaps even a new family. What began as common human interaction to ease the feeling of isolation, since I’ve been working from home for some years now, became a long-term process of befriending individuals of various lifestyles, religious beliefs and political ideologies. My story of living in the building is an eclectic collage of spontaneous events, interiors and idiosyncratic individuals between which developed an unexpected closeness. These photographs and texts are a tiny segment of a grander, intimate production of communal living that included laughter, tears, exhaustion, forgiveness, trust, support, embracing differences, creating a feeling of home and lessons needed (and learned) for personal growth. They are an attempt to portray all the wonderful, living color of Planinska 7.
Organ Vida’s FUTURES selection for 2024 is based on a group of photographers and visual artists working in the broader regional context of former Yugoslavia. Their artistic practices cover a variety of visual approaches which document, but also speculate about, everyday life and the different possibilities of intimate storytelling. For Eva Bevec, everyday is captured in the homely setting full of absurdity and curiosity. David Bakarić Mihaljević documents his personal, everyday life narrated as a generational perspective on growing up in the imaginary space where digital and fictional worlds collide. In Lucija Rosc’s practice, everyday family life is fictionalised, further questioning the role of memory through the playful staging of reality. Petra Slobodnjak is a participant-observer of the communal living experience which translates the spontaneity of shared everyday life situations. And Pavle Banović offers a diary format of everyday life spent in New York, where their camera gaze intertwines with other protagonists they encounter along the way.
