30yrs1d

Theo Prodromidis in collaboration with Espi Tomičić i Lucija Klarić featuring Jafar Hamadani, Miran Kramar, Severina Lajtman, Manuel Tairovska and Erin Vlahovića.

Curator/producer: Ana Kovačić

30yrs1d started as an exploration of the processes for the production of citizenship in the last 30 years and the methods, successes and failures on how we collectively decide who acquires it and how we can support someone to claim it.

Taking into account the struggles for organising the state of individual and collective autonomy, in the context of local and global events of 1991 and until this very day, we decided to form a group of people mostly born after 1991, but without prejudice to other age groups. Our group dealt with issues of belonging and language enriched by the shifts and claims that derive from encountering different moments of “movement” with a focus on experiences relating to migration and/or gender and sexuality.

Using improvisation and simple recognition formulas such as favourite songs, the group came up with a common matter and language through which talked about identities, mutual similarities and differences, feelings of belonging and claiming society and the city. Working on verses via process of combination, synthesis and elimination, we reached a collective creation of texts in forms of poems, interviews and testimonies and finally verses of a song.

This corpus thus contained both an individual expression – the verses and texts the group produced, but also what the group could recognise as their own reality and imagination – by choosing the parts that seemed important to manifest a common desire. The group also invited writer and artist Tomislav Medak for a workshop on the theme of rhythm and community through an exploration of ideas, propositions and actions as aural and textual tools for protests that included soundscapes, noise and songs. Another invitation was accepted by designer Sven Sorić to help transform texts into designs and physical objects and longings into colours by sharing a silkscreen printing workshop with the group. From that matrix of themes, motives, concepts and feelings, the process led to the verses for a radio jingle that occupies the public domain and a printed campaign that accompanies it, set as formal goals of this stage of the process while that attempts to grow as a temporary autonomous collectivity shaping autonomous individuals and vice versa.

In these first days of July 2021, the group invites the city of Zagreb and online audiences to a visual presentation of the current state, presented through performative actions and their traces in the city, culminating as a performance and an installation at GMK.