Hrvatski
Italiano
FrançaisShadow Casters (Bacači sjenki) is a multi-award-winning and internationally recognised artistic and production platform that has been developing interdisciplinary, intermedia and socially engaged artistic practices since 2001. Its work brings together film and audiovisual creation, theatre and the performing arts, video and new media, urban interventions, curatorial and programming practices, cultural activism, critical pedagogy, public history, and research into cultural, architectural and intangible heritage.
Rather than simply combining different disciplines, Shadow Casters creates hybrid artistic formats in which a performance may continue as a film, an urban walk may become a living archive, a workshop may evolve into a collective artwork, and a personal memory may open a space for public debate. Its projects often begin with a particular city, building, film frame, object, archival document or personal story, and then develop that initial trace into a network of performances, conversations, research processes, installations, films, publications and educational activities.
One of the most recognisable features of its work is its approach to the city as a stage, a medium, an archive and a space of collective action at the same time. Through site-specific, relational, sensory and participatory methods, Shadow Casters explores the visible and invisible layers of urban life: collective memory, everyday rituals, modernist and industrial heritage, sites of social conflict, silenced histories and unrealised futures. The audience is not merely a spectator of a finished artwork, but also a participant, witness, interlocutor, source of knowledge and, very often, a co-author.
Over twenty-five years of continuous artistic and public work, Shadow Casters has developed more than 500 collaborations with artists, cultural workers, filmmakers, researchers, educators, activists and professionals from over thirty countries. As initiators, producers, co-producers, lead partners and invited artists, they have presented their projects across all six inhabited continents—from Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, the United States and Canada, through Senegal, Morocco, Jordan and almost all of Europe, to Russia, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, China, Australia and New Zealand. Their ideas, methodologies and artworks have travelled from major European cultural centres to South America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, building long-term transnational relationships and unexpected encounters between different cultural, social and artistic experiences.
During this period, Shadow Casters has realised more than one hundred original artistic, educational, research-based, activist and interdisciplinary projects, as well as socially engaged cultural events. Its projects have been created and presented in theatres, cinemas, galleries, museums, schools and libraries, but also in apartments, factories, hotels, city streets, abandoned buildings and other places that acquire new meaning through their artistic transformation.
Within its audiovisual work, Shadow Casters develops and produces original documentary, fiction, docufiction, essayistic and hybrid films. Film is not treated as an isolated field, but as an essential part of a broader artistic and research system: a means of documenting urban change, activating archives, investigating personal and collective memory, and connecting art with communities. Projects such as the documentary film and long-term cultural advocacy process Vitić pleše (Vitić Dances), the sensory and participatory performance Ex-pozicija (Ex-position), and the urban research programmes Urboglifi / Urboteka (Urboglyphs / Urbotheque) demonstrate how cinematic, performative, architectural, heritage-related and social layers can develop within a single artistic process.
A particularly important field of activity is film, media, digital and information literacy, as well as professional development. Through year-round and multi-year programmes, Shadow Casters works with children, young people, teachers, cultural and film professionals, and older citizens. Programmes such as the Frooom! film school, the Samo nebo nam je granica (The Sky Is the Only Limit) workshops, the European film-literacy programme CinEd Croatia, and Između baštine i filma (Between Heritage and Film) combine film viewing, analysis and practical filmmaking with the development of critical thinking, self-awareness, cooperation, creativity, and an understanding of others and of difference.
The purpose of these programmes is not merely to teach technical skills or produce completed films. Film and other media are used as tools for personal empowerment, discovering and understanding one’s community, articulating individual experience, and critically reading the world. Participants are not treated as passive beneficiaries, but as authors, researchers, storytellers and custodians of knowledge about the environments in which they live. The methods developed through these programmes are transferred to teachers, schools, libraries, cultural centres and local organisations so that their effects may continue long after an individual project has ended.
The work of Shadow Casters encompasses a wide range of formats: films and audiovisual works, theatre and sensory performances, multimedia education, exhibitions, workshops, urban performances, artistic walks, intermedia installations, digital and physical archives, cultural publications, professional gatherings, and dynamic activist networks. A special place is occupied by projects concerned with cultural memory, the politics of remembrance, and the preservation of modernist, urban and intangible heritage, in which artistic work is combined with public advocacy, civic participation and the creation of new shared resources.
At the intersection of art, education, heritage and social innovation, Shadow Casters does not merely produce individual works of art. It creates situations of encounter, temporary and long-term communities of action, living archives, new methodologies, and spaces in which established relationships and familiar narratives may be viewed from a different perspective. It is precisely this ability to make an artistic work simultaneously an aesthetic event, a research process, an educational experience and a form of social intervention that makes Shadow Casters distinctive and relevant within both the Croatian and the international cultural landscape.
Shadow Casters creates art that does not end with the final frame, performance or exhibition, but continues to live in the people, spaces, relationships and communities it has set in motion.
Financijski izvještaj Udruge 2020.
Financijski izvještaj Udruge 2021.
