Soft power, performance and video and space installation, Kunstraum 34, performers: Nevena Radulovic, Simonida Zarkovic, Nada Kovinic, Lukatoyboy, Ana Dragic, 2023.
Soft power
Installation with the film screening with the dance and sound performance
project by Neda Kovinic
performers: Nevena Radulovic, Simonida Zarkovic, Ana Dragic and Lukatoyboy
Trips series, Kunstraum 34, Stuttgart, September, 2023.
Soft power is a performance resulting from my current research into the legacy of FKK culture (Freikörperkultur) in the former Yugoslavia, as well from the notions of »naturist paradise« and »social nudity« and their entanglements with contemporaneous political, economic and ecological thinking.
The origins of Yugoslav naturism stretch back to the 1950s, when the Adriatic coast attracted small groups of German naturists in search of unspoiled nature. These early nudists were primarily seeking an escape from radical conservatism in their own countries. Many nudist resorts at the Adriatic Coast have survived to this day, although accelerating capitalist expansion has brought new challenges. Visiting active historical textile-free places while placing sensory perception at the forefront constitutes an embodied mapping of political changes and, simultaneously, a way of re-kindling our connections with the natural world. The skin is perceived as a porous boundary between the internal and external forces of nature.
The performance at Kunstraum 34 merges sound material from the field, narration and body gestures and actions abstracted from direct experiences and sensory memories.
The performance is developed in a collaboration with the dancers and sound artists Nevena Radulovic, Simonida Zarkovic, Lukatoyboy and Ana Dragic.
Film Soft Power is based on the field research, featuring Ana Dragic and Igor Zenzerovic.
Installation in the space made of stones from the Adriatic coast, send, water, pine tree needles
Towels, bags and shirts are made with unique printed drawings, archival photos, words and texts personal, and historical and theoretical excerpts
Concept, narrative, choreography, by Neda Kovinic
Dance interpretation, sound contribution by all in the group
Sounds are based on recordings from field, archivel interviews and sound improvisation by Lukatoyboy and Nevena Radulovic
A cooperation between Kunstraum 34 and Akademie Schloss Solitude
Film screened as a part of the installation at Kunstarum 34, featuring performances in the field research in Croatia with Ana Dragic, Igor Zenzerovic, Hrvoje Bogojevic and Neda Kovinic including visual archival material from Croatia on the legacy of FKK in former Yugoslavia, 2023. Directed, recorded and edited by Nada Kovinic, over the course of Akademie Schloss Solitude residency
Short film of the performance Soft Power at Kunstraum 34, recorded and edited by Florian Siegert, Germany 2023.
The narration spoken in the performance Soft Power
the collage of the personal thoughts and rephrased excerpts from many writers regarding the topic
written by Neda Kovinic
For Yugoslavia's socialist government, accepting millions of naturists
who wanted a relaxed space to get back to nature
was a useful show of cold war SOFT POWER.
Can we expand the notion of soft power nowadays?
What does nudity mean?
The thought of going naked can instill within us a great sense of fear and vulnerability.
Exposing vulnerabilities, sexual identities, colonial histories, strangeness, silliness?
What does nakedness mean in different situations?
Prisoners are forced to get naked.
People who are violently tortured are often stripped first.
Women abused or raped are forced to get naked.
Unclothing the patient for treatment.
Naturists strip the clothes to expose to the sun, and blend with the environment.
Lovers consensually undress to develop intimacy.
Nudity is the state of having no clothes on and it may not necessarily be in a sexual context. The progress and development of human civilization goes in line with our changing attitudes towards nudity. Anthropologists logically presume that humans originally lived naked, without clothing, as their natural state. What was it that as we progressed — nudity started to be seen as something obscene and vulgar?
As civilization was encroached upon indigenous populations, the concept of nudity was severely damaged or destroyed by the invading virus of a technologically superior society. The native populations almost invariably succumbed to the customs, clothing and diseases. Clothing started to be seen as a symbol of civilization and nudity became synonymous to barbarism.
Nudism raises questions of intimacy. Social nudity is tackling the questions of public and private.
Intimates in lat. means to make known, to announce, to impress, innermost, deepest…So it is formed around a logic of inner and outer around some idea of disclosure, sharing, getting to know something that is deep. It can imply a movement toward being familiar with one another, attuned to one another, attached to one another. We let the guard down. Let ourselves be changed and inhabited by the other.
This act also always carries its possibility of an impending danger. Intimacy doesn’t just carry the promise of pleasure and connection; it also carries the possibility of being undone as a singular being.
The thought of going naked can instill within us a great sense of fear and vulnerability.
The intimate is a private, local realm until it is penetrated by external forces. Capitalist forces invade intimate life.The separation of public and private spheres constitutes modernity.
On nudist beaches, I’ve been meeting queer, gay, lesbians, family people, and different generations. A narrative about gays having sex publicly in naturist beaches and parks or in gay saunas, is widespread.
Along the lines of the tradition of using men's public toilets for male-male sex, having in mind their historical gender segregation, it might be that nudists places from the Adriatic coast to Germany represent places where gay are deliberately performing their historical battle for homosexual rights.
In the end of the pandemic I traveled to Croatia to look for more secluded places in nature, like FKK beaches. I had been looking for them in online maps – but when I went there in places, I found closed or repurposed beaches, with a lot of plastic playgrounds, concrete floors, and consumer entertainment facilities. Just small rocky territories are left for the marginalized culture of naturists. Checking other places, I faced a similar situation. But in Istria a few big and historically relevant campuses are still preserved.
In the eighties I had been tgoing with my parents for their vacation to Croatia coast. They were main-stream tourists, sunbathing in swimsuits, but a bit further in naturist’s beaches I could see nudists. Tourists coming from the West at that time were those who would sunbathe textile-free. As a child I had taken this approach as a hint of the otherness.
It is often claimed here that naturism is primarily a GDR phenomenon, but this is very oblivious to history. On the one hand, the Nazis celebrated the naked body in art and sculpture, but on the other hand they were very prudish and hostile to eroticism, considering it as decadent and degenerate.
In the Nazi era the nudist movement was forbidden until 1941. After 1945, numerous nudist clubs were founded in West Germany. In the GDR skinny dipping was particularly widespread.
Since 1989, the number of nudist beaches in both east and west has been declining.
Have you heard that Angela Merkel is a nudist?
Have you seen people having sex in the bushes in naturist beaches and parks?
Oh in Germany, gay saunas for sure are not just for bathing.
I don’t know, I don‘t like going there, there are mostly old people or some maniacs.
I am coming from a country with such a strong culture of fit bodies, which creates a big expectation toward body appearance.
In Britain there are nudist cycling tours, it must be painful for genitals, can you imagine?
The origins of nudism are traced back to 6th century BC with Pythagoras combining sports and spirituality in his educational system aimed to bring the body and mind of his fellows together.
Hippocrates in the 5th century BC announced a teaching with the ancient hydrotherapy and the treatment of illnesses.
In his philosophy course, Hegel associates with the cult of reason being very important to ancient Greece, which he calls the “Religion of Art”, and its splendid statue nudities. The notion of the dignity of the body comes out, powerfully strengthened.
A dialectical movement writer, poet and scientist Goethe initially close to Nature-Philosophy, bathed naked in the rivers and affirmed: “The true Man is the nude Man”.
However, most of the works devoted to the history of naturism close the debate by affirming that Germany is at the origin of the naturist movement and the development of the “Freikörperkultur” (free body culture).
Soft bodies and heavy rocks!
Crashing into stones. Becoming a stone. My body is blending with rocks. Rocks are reshaping the body.
Feet are blending with stones. Sharpness in the feet.
Stepping in rocks. Sharp stones. Sea urchins.
I was told that becoming a genuine nudist is undergone through an initiation by accidental sting from sea urchin.
Burning, like a penetration of a fiery needle into the foot. Feeling and accepting the painful blending with an urchin‘s spike.
Imagine the skin as a porous boundary between the internal and external forces of nature.
The ecological society to come, then, must be a bit broken, lame, twisted, ironic, silly, sad.
Silliness, imperfection, vulnerability…
Being with spirits of stones
The poetry of plants, objects.
Sea sound as a metaphysical reconnection with a nature
Histories naked skin encounters
With urchins, fish, friends, lovers, ideologies...
The skin is a porous boundary between the internal and external forces...