Neda Kovinic, Silly girlfriends, installation at the gallery ULUS, Belgrade, Serbia, 2022.
Silly girlfriends
The space installation with objects and film screenings
with the performance at the opening
The concept, narration, choreography structure and the exhibition set up by Neda Kovinić
Collaborators dancers Simonida Žarković, Katarina Bućić, Joana Knežević, Nevena Radulović
Photo and video by ULUS production
Gallery ULUS, Belgrade, Serbia, November 2022.
The exhibition installation "Silly girlfriends" with the live performance at the opening is one of the possible images or stages in the development process of the "Silly girlfriends" project. The installation in the space stems from the material created during the exploration development of the interdisciplinary performance Silly girlfriends, which I worked on while preparing the audio statement for the Secondary Archives (Manifesto 14) and working on the performance for the International Biennial exhibition the Memorial of Nadežda Petrović in Čačak, Serbia. As this work of mine also deals with the principles of cooperation in collective artistic practices, emphasizing the feminist principles of collaborative work, I decided to present it at this stage within the program of the Sebian Association of Fine Artists, which itself is based on the same kind of practices.
The exhibition installation consists of the video screening, video in TV, the costumes used in the first performance at the gallery of Nadežda Petrović, with paintings of the Nadezda's women portrets, object used in the first performance, drawings and many documents and notes which are recycled into the sculpture installation, chair and tables which are creating space and layers for performers to do their actions, song and narrative excerpts.
Inside of the ambient made of the elements of previous research and performing the performance of Silly girlfriends is embodied in a new contextual way.
The previous singing, narration and choreography is slightly twisted, deconstructed giving more space to the vocal collaboration and listening to each others, also for more affect expression, dissonance and experimental improvisation.
The project Silly girlfriends included narration based on the notes of the discussion with my friends and collaborators about women friendship, feminist approach to the dramaturgy and methods of a development of a performance, about care, softness, entrancement, exchanging knowledge and skills. The narration also included quotation and referances to the practice of the Affidamento by Milan Women’s Bookstore; Nina Power, Pornography as a Privileged Mode of Work, Hana Arendt in the Adriana Cavarero article "Revolution in Happines" New York Times...
The performing of Silly Girlfriends produces and nurtures relationships and meanings that oppose permanent crises, alienation and destruction through the collectivity of performative practice, the relationships of care, trust and compassion, as well as through a landscape and procedural approach to dramaturgy and interdisciplinary.
The four female performers dance, speak and sing in the spacious interior and exterior of the Gallery. Separate actions occur simultaneously, in different places, so nobody has a complete vision of the whole and each viewer makes a personal, unique "collage" of this performance. Multiple perspectives get united through a shared affect manifested as a gesture made by the performers and carried through the space of both the Gallery and the cityscape. The title of the performance puts in the forefront the quality of the artist-collaborator relationship representing both the method and the content of this work. The girlfriends are collaborators in the performance, they entrust themselves, their skills, knowledge and feelings to each other and to the audience at the same time.
The word silly in the title of the work points to irrational, witty, imperfect and not-necessarily-productive as principles of resistance against the porn-capitalist society that encourages and recognizes only super-productive units. A small creative female group goes through entertainment, enjoyment, mutual listening, appreciation...
The narration spoken and sang in the performance Silly girlfriends
The narration spoken in the performance bring together material of the personal thoughts and the experiences on some of the feminist topics, the song I wrote listening to the observations and discussing the collaborates on the questions what does it mean for us to be a woman, a female artist and the quotations of theoretical observation by Nina Power, Hana Arendt and Ariana Cavarero, Affidamento Milano feminist Bookstore...
I will jump on the scene next to you.
From there I want to be.
Let’s dance together,
let’s touch each other,
let me make you laugh.
I don’t know if I am a woman first and then an artist or the other way around?
Being a woman is not my profession,
neither is being an artist.
I have no profession.
But I know how to breathe as an artist
and I want to breathe with you.
Breathing, loving, starting a revolution, dying.
Breathing, loving, starting a revolution, dying.
None of these things are a profession
but an act of being a being with other beings.
"I want to be a painter, not a woman, there are plenty of women."
Mom, if you really want me to be happy, then you will also expect me to be a painter, not a matchmaker!"
Nadezda said this at the beginning of the 20th century!
The division according to which a woman is either dedicated to a career or a mother arises from masculine patterns. Today, feminists are fighting that a woman can be both, or neither, if she so chooses!
I want to be a painter, actress, scientist, lover, mother, singer, show woman, politician, leader. And when I want it and in my own way. I want to be just lazy sometime, to do nothing, maybe think a little and write a book...
But look, don’t understand me wrong, I have nothing against love and partnerships. Let's hang out, try to hook me up, why not? But don't strangle me. Don't grab my neck. Why do you think that turns me on? Maybe it turns you on? You do what you want. But what do I want? Excuse me , madam, what does turn you on?
Feminist pornography emphasizes the importance of non-peek dramaturgy. It acts as a political gesture and a direct reaction to the usual pornography of the male gaze: short or non-existent introduction, action, ejaculation (cum shot, "money-shot").
“But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with
pneumatic shaven bodies pummeling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn’t always function and purr like a well-oiled machine?” Nina Power,“The Money Shot: Pornography and Capitalism,” in One-dimensional woman 0 Books, 2009, 56.
Difficulty of defining women in anything other than negative terms- feature seemingly inherent to thought, language and reality – as, for example, “not-men”, the “second sex” or:
Woman has never been able to define herself in any other way than in terms of the violence done to her.
Violence alone confers her being – whether it is domestic and social vilence or theoretical violence.
Who is my best female friend?
My comrade, my girlfriend?
Is this the one with whom I ran away from tear gas and policemen in the streets during the protest?
The one with whom I exchanged advice on what to bring to demonstrations and where to escape from the cops?
The one with whom I spent hours talking about where to get free vaginal swabs, how to get a referral to a gynecologist and where is the best place to get an ultrasound.
The one who lent me money. She encouraged me to look for a job.
She gave me books by Harms, Sartre, Heidegger, Kristeva, Ksenija Atanasijević, Dzudit Butler, Elena Ferrante, revealed to me Affidamento?
Entrusting yourself, your competencies, talents and desires to another woman, who is always different, so that new political spaces are opened - is that camaraderie? Entrusting yourself to diversity…
Yes, let us be happy – but publicly, politically, together! ,
Could we be happy together, not simply as the sum of individual happiness but because the very experience of being and acting together makes us happy? Not an inner realm into which men escape at will from the pressure of the world,” but something inherent in the “public space or marketplace which antiquity had known as the area where freedom appears and become visible to all.” (Hana Arendt, Adriana Cavarero, Revolution in Happines 2019. , article New York Times)