Surrealism — Nadrealizam

Yugoslavia — Serbia

The collective activity of the Belgrade Surrealists began in the inspiring atmosphere brought on by two Surrealist manifestos by André Breton. The first joint edition the almanac Nemoguće-L′impossible was published in 1930 in Belgrade, with the manifesto signed by thirteen founding members of the movement.The members of the Belgrade Surrealist movement published their contributions or acted as editors in avant-garde publications, they released the official periodicals of the movement, and in addition to textual contributions and various forms of extensions to the traditional creative process, their publications also included pieces made through visual experimentation, published novels, collections of poetry, essays, etc. In the period before the rise of Surrealism as an organised movement, between 1922 and 1930, several periodical publications were released with contributions from, or edited by, future Surrealists bringing texts that were in one way or another related to Surrealism.      
In the journal Putevi, published from 1922 in Belgrade, the collaborators were Marko Ristić, Dušan Matić, Aleksandar Vučo, Milan Dedinac, and others. The new series of this journal was started in 1923, with Marko Ristić and Miloš Crnjanski co-editing its triple issue in 1924. Among other material, this journal published three excerpts from an essay by André Breton, that had appeared for the first time in Littérature, selected and translated by Marko Ristić. In Svedočanstva, Marko Ristić published his article “Nadrealizam” (Surrealism), which was the first paper produced in our culture to address this phenomenon, and it appeared immediately after the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton.      

In the exhibition held in 1969 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, entitled Nadrealizam―Socijalna umetnost 1929-1950 (Surrealism―Social Art 1929-1950), the work of the Belgrade Surrealists was reconstructed, studied and exhibited as a whole for the first time. The activities of the Belgrade Surrealists were contextualised in the major exhibition of global Surrealism, Der Surrealismus 1922-1942, organised by Patrick Waldberg, a historian of Surrealism, held in 1972 in Munich and Paris. Within this project almost all the members of the Belgrade Surrealist circle were represented with a total of 43 works. In that way these creations were exhibited at the European level as well, and were duly integrated into the broader context of this phenomenon. At home, the last presentation of the Serbian Surrealism was the exhibition Nemoguće, umetnost nadrealizma (The Impossible: the Art of Surrealism), curated by Milanka Todić (PhD), and realised in 2002 at the Museum of Applied Arts in Belgrade.

Main source: http://nadrealizam.rs/en/editions/editions-nemoguce-l-impossible

The Problem of Space Travel

Did we successfully solve the problem of space travel or have we just caused new ones?

Herman Potočnik Noordung was born on December 22, 1892, in the city of Pola, which was in those days a part of Austria-Hungary (nowadays Pula, Republic of Croatia). In 1929 his book The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor was published in Berlin.

A careful study of its contents compared to the works of his predecessors and contemporaries emphasizes new insight in Potočnik’s expertise, which was his unique contribution to the development of theoretical cosmonautics. The new element in his ponderings is that he directed cosmonautics to the research and conquest of our own planet. The other pioneers of cosmonautics saw the main goal of this branch of science in the expansion of humanity “throughout space,” traveling to other celestial bodies and building colonies away from Earth. Potočnik, at least in the beginning phases, wanted to use space technology completely for the good of our own planet. Rocket aviation, which would enable traveling on Earth with almost cosmic velocities and the multifunctional station in Earth’s orbit, which would observe every event on the planet and direct life on it – those were the first two cornerstones that Potočnik felt had to be conquered in the development of cosmonautics. Nobody before him had defined this condition so clearly and precisely.

Tsiolkovsky’s book Dreams of the Earth and Sky, published in 1895 highly influenced Potočnik’s work on the idea of space stations. Tsiolkovsky did not limit himself only to space stations as a development phase when planet inhabitants colonize the expanses of outer space. He set the space station in a time when intelligent civilizations will be able to cause a metamorphosis of space. According to him, space stations will, sooner or later, completely replace planets with gravity and with a limited amount of warmth and light from the sun. They will become their artificial analogies, and thus retain all the advantages of a planetary environment, but without its drawbacks.

The Problem of Space TravelDownload

Arte Povera

The Politics of Labor in Postwar Italian Art

Magazzino Italian Art Foundation
March 19 – April 30, 2022

Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo, 2003

Arte povera means literally ‘poor art’ but the word poor here refers to the movement’s signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, bronze, or carved marble. Materials used by the artists included soil, rags and twigs. In using such throwaway materials they aimed to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system.
This lecture series will examine the idea of artistic labor as it was (re)conceived in the postwar period. Contributors will reflect on the political, social, and cultural factors that led artists to challenge traditional methods of production and systems of value. The lectures will cover artistic developments in Italy from the late forties through the nineties, examining both precursors to and major figures within Arte Povera. The series’ theme of labor is purposefully broad and lectures will cover a wide range of issues, including the impact of Leftist politics on arts production, the exploitation of domestic labor and its visual reconfiguration by female artists, and changing conceptions of physical and material artistic practices in postwar Italy. 
Leading artists were Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio.

https://www.magazzino.art/events/politics-labor-postwar-italian-art

War – Bob Marley

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned –
Everywhere is war –
Me say war.
That until there no longer
First class and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes –
Me say war.
That until the basic human rights
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to race –
Dis a war.
That until that day
The dream of lasting peace,
World citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never attained –
Now everywhere is war – war.
And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
that hold our brothers in Angola,
In Mozambique,
South Africa
Sub-human bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed –
Well, everywhere is war –
Me say war.
War in the east,
War in the west,
War up north,
War down south –
War – war –
Rumours of war.
And until that day,
The African continent
Will not know peace,
We Africans will fight – we find it necessary –
And we know we shall win
As we are confident
In the victory
Of good over evil –
Good over evil, yeah!
Good over evil –
Good over evil, yeah!
Good over evil –
Good over evil, yeah!

We Ourselves – The Politics of Us

The first person plural

‘We’ is an ectoplasmic form found in the majority of human languages. It is capable of embracing everything that lies between myself and the rest of the world.Through ‘we’, many subjects situate themselves, limit themselves, negotiate their similarities and differences, and engage in politics.
Tristan Garcia

9781474475266_We_Ourselves_-_The_first_person_plural_-_Tristan_GarciaDownload

Andromeda: Science Fiction Almanac

An old Yugoslav collection of science fiction works – in Serbo-Croatian – published by Galaksija (Galaxy) magazine as the Andromeda almanac in 1977. It included A report from the Cosmos by Ljubiša Jocić and an excerpt from 2018 A.D. or the King Kong Blues by Sam Lundwall which are below (in English). It’s worth preserving and sharing it.

A report from the Cosmos – Ljubiša Jocić
we sailed among free electrons and protons
electronic rotation is just being established somewhere
and not in the same direction we came across rare
hydrogen fields and entered the plasma once again
i can’t report what kind of malfunction happened on the ship
because the specialist for electronic devices
had no soul like the other members of the crew and
i can’t contact them
i find myself after the ship disintegrated
in the state of my surroundings
and after the catastrophe my affective life
remained untouched i’m using the spirituality of the electrons
and i’m reporting this stop milky way galaxy 23 – 26
Translated by Gorica Orsholits

Excerpt from 2018 A. D. or the King Kong Blues – Sam Lundwall
“Alright, alright,” said the presenter, “you can’t always win but anyone can try. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, let’s move on the next part of our program THIS IS MY LIFE, our spectacular show where four different families try to appeal to your compassion by telling you about their deplorable situations. Those of you who have a voting button on your television can choose the family whose story moves you the most. The prize, as always, goes to the family with the most votes. Welcome to SM5X, the television station which always offers you…”

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Aesthetic Dissent with Wandering Spirits and Wild Ghosts

A copy of Guidelines for Revolution in Hell (2020)

The process of inventing a new visual language is also a revolution, a revolution of sensibility, in a sense as important as the armed seizure of power and thus the change of the world. Walter Benjamin, a German theorist from the world of the living, said that the Nazis had aestheticized politics, and in order to counteract this, the avant-garde had to politicize the aesthetic. The wandering ghosts, as the new vanguard class, are the natural subjects for the birth of a new art, and while issuing political dissent, they should also strive to produce aesthetic dissent. This new aesthetic value must come from a pluralistic narrative. The ideology propagated by the underworld is highly dependent on a single narrative chain and value system, i.e. the opportunity to be reincarnated depends on karma, reincarnation and the judgment and verdict of the bureaucratic system headed by the King of Hell. Such a unipolar narrative is a source of oppression, and it also dissolves the possibility of resistance by the spirits. The spirits should realize that the ideology of the underworld presents itself as the only possible value, and thus inhibits us from imagining more alternative values. Those alternative values are not unimaginable, but they must be beyond the reach of the existing order, and they are what the spirits living under the oppression of the existing order need to try to imagine. After all, the necessary foundation of all revolutions is imagination itself.

Source: http://www.leapleapleap.com/2021/07/guidelines-for-revolution-in-hell/