“It’s All About Money”

Participant professional workshop for personal enrichment: Performances of the “workshop” on September 25th and 26th at Pogon in Zagreb at 8:00 PM. Tickets: 45 HRK.

The work in progress project “It’s All About Money” explores the relationships between social and material values on one hand, and money on the other, all from the perspective of personal narratives, real financial flows, the ongoing financial crisis, and the ambivalent role of money in societal exchange.

The banking and financial “revolution” on the global market provided the conceptual framework for the project, which in real time tracks parallel financial operations, investments, and their environmental consequences, impacts on individuals’ lives, states, governmental systems, economic sectors, and economies. Current research fields include countries such as Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, and others. Throughout the project’s research phase, testimonies about personal experiences with money are continuously collected, covering aspects from investments, acquisition, enrichment, inheritance, impoverishment, bad financial luck, to renunciation of material goods and financial or general disinterest. Cities like Trieste, Zagreb, Koper, and Bitola serve as research sites for gathering testimonies, discussions with experts (bankers, lawyers, philosophers, programmers, cryptologists, hackers, educators), work with children and youth in schools, exhibitions, participatory theatrical performances, and scenes for an emerging documentary film.

The initial impetus for the project “Quello che conta sono i soldi” was provided by the Trieste-based artistic association Mamarogi. The Permanent Slovenian Theater, the retirement home ITIS in Trieste, and Booksa in Zagreb were the first to open their doors to the project. POGON – Zagreb Center for Independent Culture and Youth is the third location where this unconventional performance and/or participatory professional workshop continues.

Director and artistic leader of the project: Boris Bakal – intermedia artist, writer, director, and performer (HR). Co-authors, dramaturges, and performers: Adriano Girardi – actor and performer (IT), Manuel Buttus – actor and performer (IT), Daša Grgić – choreographer and dancer (IT/SLO), Elena Husu – actress and director (IT/SLO).

Co-authors of the project concept: Maurizio Zacchignia (IT), Mariagrazia Plos (IT), Roberta Colllacino (IT), and Adriano Girardi (IT).
Project collaborators: Matteo Sabattini – videomaker (IT), Guido Chiarotti – philosopher of economics, playwright, and physicist (IT), Massimo Racozzi – designer (IT), Svemir Vranko (HR), Nenad Romić (HR), and others.

Shadow Casters (Zagreb, Croatia) are a multi-award-winning and acclaimed international artistic and production platform for interdisciplinary collaboration, creation, and contemplation of intermedia art, successfully intertwining international collaboration, theatrical performances, urban intermedia projects, activism, pedagogical work, video art, and curatorial practice into comprehensive artistic endeavors.

As a leading partner in numerous small and large projects across 4 continents, in its 17 years of work and public engagement, Shadow Casters have realized over 150 collaborations with professionals from more than 30 countries and have implemented over 50 educational, theatrical, and film projects and events. Their projects stimulate discussions about the nature and contradictions of the globalization process, addressing social, political, and cultural issues by revealing acute problems within local communities: politics of public spaces, consequences of transitional processes, status and forms of intimacy, as well as systematic production of amnesia and discontinuity.

They also thoroughly investigate the past and present of sensitive urban locations and related topics of collective and individual memory, bringing their performances to places and sites newly included in contemporary artistic discourse for the first time.

The cultural association Mamarogi was founded in Trieste in 2015 and has been synergistically developing projects with other similar artistic entities, both nationally and internationally, since its inception. It develops projects with strong social components such as “Social Comedy” (2016) in collaboration with ICS, the Italian Consortium for Solidarity – Refugee Office, whose dramatic text received the second prize at the Fortunedautore 2016 competition. By restoring theater to its indispensable socio-cultural function, it addresses various positions of women in society with the project “Effe Come,” and starting from the Holocaust theme, it speaks about various discriminations in the children’s performance “Auschwitz. A Story of Wind” (“Auschwitz. Una Storia di Vento”). The association also conducts intensive creative and theatrical workshops for various age groups, especially for vulnerable and marginalized groups. In 2017, it began a project addressing cyberbullying through a theater-film workshop for high schools, resulting in the short film “The Last Live Report” (“L’ultima diretta”).

Support for the project in Italy: Friuli-Venezia Giulia region;
Support for Shadow Casters’ projects in Croatia: Kultura Nova Foundation, City of Zagreb – Department of Culture, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia

Please accept our apology for the incorrect event dates in the printed POGON program for September 2018.