Re-Collecting Cities / Re-Collecting Time

Re-Collecting Cities / Re-Collecting Time is a multiyear Shadow Casters project (which started in 2006.); programmatically innovative, formally intermediate, and substantially related to the urban heritage and the intangible artistic and political heritage of the City of Zagreb, other Croatian cities in the context of Zagreb and cities that are selected thematically. R-C/R-T is a project that deals with finding, archiving, studying and exhibiting work and project documentation of artistic performances in public spaces on the one hand and protests or public gatherings on the other, all in the city of Zagreb (atypical exhibition, music and stage spaces) since 1945. until today. It is exclusively about a temporary presence in these premises or actions whose presence was not intended at the time of performance to permanently “inhabit” the said space. Focusing on the ephemerality of work, the project goes beyond mere presentation, focusing on the study of the broader context of artistic and political activity in public spaces. The project strives to capture all the ephemeral events, which mainly leave immaterial traces in the cultural, social and political history of a city.

By its nature, the project is ongoing. It is a recapitalization of everyday life; an archive of possibilities and inability to confront or harmonize with the city. It is the invocation of the moments of the embodiment of utopia; ghost hunting, lost space gestures. It is a construction of symbolic image of urban time-space in which the urboglyphs are simultaneously intertwined.

The city is like a bowl into which events are poured and they, like a liquid, take the form of said bowl. Compromise is immanent to the city and a basic precondition for its existence; the starting points of compromise are harmony on the one hand and conflict on the other. From these extremes flow all artistic and political initiatives – all the sublimation of the unknown and the transformation into the known.

R-C/R-T is a collection of creative and political events, artistic battles and performing duels on the turbulent surface of the city. It is the search for those synchronous, inconsistent accumulations of time-space that give everyday life metaphysical excess. It is that excess of beauty and tension that connects things and people, the facades and inscriptions of shops, the contents of houses and the sky that flows above all, as a reminder of times in which the friction of everyday life was transcended, sometimes because of its intolerance and sometimes due to its mildness.

The aim of this project is to shift our view of our own situation in matters of culture, cultural policy, cultural capital, new audiences, active involvement of citizens in the production and participation of culture and artistic creation. Therefore, it is an idea of a targeted recapitalization of culture in the direction of creating an active cultural-market-tourism capital from which it can live or at least partially sustain its needs and its wider community.

The program is innovative because it captures the synchronistically, situationally and spatially juxtaposing events that took place in specific areas of the city. It connects traditional new media in an innovative way and it evolves processually through interaction and collaboration, not just with users, but also with the protagonists of individual events. In its digital edition, it is inspired by the Place Matters project from New York, which is co-founded and initiated by the Shadow Casters. This kind of study and recording of city spaces through events aims to reflect on the further development of these spaces, both substantively (what contents?) and formally (how to transform the default space?)

In addition to the research, the project is emanated through Wall Displays (which today acts as a separate project), workshops (with children and young people and adults – Whisper of the Walls – and with professionals and interdisciplinary researchers – Shadowing the City), symposia (presenting urban projects and initiatives) and publishing (Shadowing the City/ Belgrade; Shadowing the City/ Zagreb).

The URBOTEKA project (platform of RCRT) deals with architecture and the city on film, starting from the premise that this “space” is completely documentary in feature films and as such testifies to the development and changes of the city and its architecture, revealing the laws and qualities of such “memory”.

Through this observation and recording of the city we teach young people (and young professional artists) to get to know their city, to write their own trajectories in already existing urban choreographies and to discover the multilayeredness of such a “text” with us. We think that through this project, young people can more strongly feel their presence and purpose in the urban space as part of some historical continuity and development. Preserving and understanding our own intangible heritage is a precondition for understanding the continuity or discontinuity of the world around us.

All artistic heritage produced over the last 100 years by urban artists from Zagreb, Croatia, as well as the entire world, is taken into account. In the same period, we note the temporary political dynamics in these areas as an important contrast and juxtaposed content: protests, demonstrations, political assassinations, secret meetings and gatherings.

Over time, the archive of the project will be digitized and placed on an interactive Internet interface accessible to all: citizens and professionals from Croatia and the world. In addition to the artistic component, this project also has a strong educational component that shows the importance of urban continuity, the design and preservation of urban furniture and inventory, and the resource capacity of individual sites as places of artistic and cultural characteristics that can be an important resource of the local community. The project also instructs professionals to interdisciplinary reflections on urban space and the possibilities of designing coexistence both as proposals and as processes in community art projects.

Support to the project: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, European Cultural Foundation, Zagreb City office for culture; Erste Bank and many others. A multimedia urban project by the Shadow Casters and BLOK (Local Bases for Refreshment of Culture) was realized in collaboration with the Center for Dramatic Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The project is being implemented within the Zagreb Cultural Capital Europe 3000 platform. Collaboration was established with several Croatian and International NGOs (BLOK, CDU, ARL, REX/ B92, BOOKSA), as well as city (Nova Gallery) and state institutions.
Other project partners and collaborations: Student Cultural Centre – Zagreb; Zagreb Cultural Capital of Europe 3000 (initiated by “Kulturstiftung des Bundes” & by Kontakt); UHA (Croatian Association of Architects); HAZU (Croatian Science and Arts Academy); DAZ (State Archive – Zagreb); City Museum Zagreb; City Library Zagreb; National Library; D-A-Z (Association of Zagreb Architects); City Museum Ljubljana; etc.