Hrvatski
Italiano
FrançaisFollowing a twenty-year practice of engaging with the city, its material and immaterial heritage, reading spaces, and educating citizens about the resourcefulness of shared spaces, Shadow Casters have been conducting a project called “Urboglyphs: Multiplying the City” for several months.
“Urboglyphs” is a research program conducted in the form of lectures, workshops, and film screenings held on weekends at the Matko Laginja Local Committee, Ribnjak Youth Center, Prince Zdeslav Park, Eugen Kvaternik Square, King Petar Krešimir IV Square, Croatian Nobles Square, and several micro-locations in the lower town on Laginjina and Martićeva streets, in agreement with co-owners. The aim of this project is to work with neighborhood residents to rediscover their urban identity based on the awareness of the context of coexistence and community and the resource potential of the given space.
During the project, we decided to set up Open Offices at several locations for five days each, where we think about the city and its changing identities with the citizens in situ.
The third Open Office of the “Urboglyphs: Multiplying the City” project will be held on April 23rd at the Croatian Nobles Square.
In this Open Office, we talk with citizens about recording and observing the work to understand its possible changes and resourcefulness. During this Open Office, citizens will receive training in film shooting, and anyone who wishes can create a short one-minute documentary film of the surrounding area of the Open Office following a few simple rules. This extremely dynamic square will reveal all the possibilities and impossibilities of the city’s shared space.
Through the Open Offices, we test and improve the entire “Urboglyphs” program directly with citizens, organize and promote the project, and collect stories that we will incorporate into future thematic events and other project events. These offices thus become “mobile interpretive centers” of the neighborhood and a meeting place. The goal of setting up open offices is to raise awareness of the neighborhood’s everyday life as resourcefully valuable and useful for contemplating the betterment of the local community. We will do this by collecting urboglyphs, symbolic and spatial accumulations, signs, and meanings created by inscribing events into the place itself. By gathering statements and testimonies from both accidental and intentional passersby, we jointly explore the city’s character and discover its resourcefulness.
Project support: City of Zagreb
Support for Shadow Casters: National Foundation for Civil Society Development, Kultura Nova Foundation, Croatian Audiovisual Centre
