WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE FOR THE LAST FIREFLY?

THE LANDSCAPES OF THE COMMON

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Video installation at Podroom Gallery,  Belgrade Cultural Center, July 2020.

 

The world as we know it is dying in front of our eyes, ears. Colors, noises, smells and sounds are dying. Due to the light pollution stars recede from our sight, fireflies vanish, coral reefs are threatened, forests are on fire, list of extinct species grows longer. Another virus appears killing people. This novel virus didn’t just threaten the body but also modes of communication, behavior, movement, worry, care and love. Every time we back off from the hug, we move away a little bit from ourselves. Every time I smile behind the mask, I feel a little bit more lonesome. While we work for our daily fee, or even just out of love, through linked natural, animal and human resources for the accumulation of the capital for the few, everything else vanishes. Drawing upon Pasolini’s 1975 essay The Disappearance of the fireflies Neda Kovinić, using her dance and visual practice, warns us of the rhythm of the world that gobbles everything in its path leaving nothing in its wake. Referring to Pasolini’s metaphorical division of the political scene in Italy,on the one before and the one after vanishing of the fireflies, she talks about the world after man. Exhibition What would you give for the last firefly?approaches the dance in three ways: dance as the mode of questioning production of art, improvised dance in the urban context and dance as ecological practice. In that way artist offers us layered view of the causal relations in the context in which she lives and works. Besides assessing her position though gesture, she also invites others to join, to intervene into given context through joint practice. Simultaneously, that process also questions anthropo-scene, by investigation possibilities for formation of different relations between performers, audience, performance space. Whether that scene is a forest, architecture of socialist modernism and new high-rise in the urban landscape certain conversation is enacted formed via enthusiasm and participation. Having in mind harmful effects of love-what-you-do ideology that is forefront of the exploitation, both of humans and other resources, and not denying striving for self-expression, Neda poses a question about what is behind the enthusiasm? What drives the creative process, especially vis-a-vis helplessness of artists in the face of the state and the market ? Forming temporary collectives, addressing host of causes and effects of the state of things, through corporeal presence in ambient that are refereed to, artist points at and tries to avoid pitfalls of the system that is able to appropriate and commodify everything. That is why she chooses non-efficiency and toys with it as to build defenses and push against enforced market and institutional frame. Using and combining movement, sounds, drawings, text, architecture, natural and urbane surroundings and by chronicling both intimate and public, Neda Kovinić moves through the field of contradictions of differing context and ambient, discovers and explores, questions, shares them with performers, audience in situ and/or in front of their screens after post-production is finished and work emerges in a new form. Contextually, so-called social distancing caused by ongoing pandemic forces upon us logical and necessary question – how it is possible to dance under these conditions? How to retain intimacy and commonality when distancing and alienation is being forced more and more aggressively. What are the measures and tensions announcing new catastrophes that will be caused by multi-decade continued and violent resource exploitation? How do we move through streams of contradictory information on the future of health, corporeality, closeness, production of art or any other productivity?

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Mirjana Dragosavljević, art historian and curator,

member of the editorial board of the web portal Mašina.rs

and part of the Service for contemporary dance – Stanica