A Resilients' workshop on Otok Rab, Croatia September 9-16.

(participants: Robert Brečević, Geska Helena Brečević, …)

The Pollinators are a part of a growing network of cultural practitioners, with their core in the Resilients project. 'Resilients' are people of all ages preparing for uncertain futures, by experimenting with resilient forms living & working as a form of artistic practice.

In order to prepare for their 2012 green-powered pilgrimage tour, the Pollinators are gathering for the MAKING AND REMAKING OF SAINTS AND VENERATIVE PLACES workshop on Rab. The workshop includes a public program, and we invite students, cultural workers and the interested public to take part in the open program.

With the emergence of modern archaeology and anthropology providing new kinds of interpretation for the meanings and origins of saintly places on the one hand, and the projects of modernity and religious reform aiming the purification and reinterpretation of rites and sites on the other hand, saintly places and their origins have become subjects of conflicting interpretations and contested practices.

Modernity here enters the place as disciplinary and exclusionary force in service of a civilising project aiming to either eradicate or to marginalise popular communal and religious traditions that do not seem to fit the project of authoritarian top-down progress. Rather than erasing the sites and landscapes of saint veneration and religious imagination, however, the projects of modernity and reform have initiated a process of profound changes in the ways in which locality in its different levels is being perceived and enacted. In a way, the policing of the modern meaning of local attainments also leads to a re-strengthening, re-structuring and re-inventing of venerative practices.

Performing Pictures has spent the last two years working with issues of venerative practices and new forms of venerative artifacts, and as a final aim of the pilgrim route, we wish to examine issues relating to the historical continuity and transformation of sacred places, the changing configurations of the sacred and social order in the structures of villages, cities and pilgrimage sites and saintly places and their histories as sites of contestation over cultural and national identity.  

During the weeklong workshop, we are building a kinetic chapel – a chapel featuring an animated saint. The chapel will probably be the first of its kind running on solar-energy. The animation is a specially developed stop-motion technique using sequences of film negatives exposed through a large-format pinhole camera. Anyone interested in taking part in the chapel building workshop is welcome to join in between 10 am and 2 pm during the period of 10-15 September. (Palit, iznad skladišta Rab-komerc). The workshop is held in Croatian and English.

INAUGURATION AND OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE KINETIC CHAPEL Palit, Thursday 15th of September at 18.00 (iznad skladišta Rab-komerc)

Kampor, Monday 12th of September 16.00

Ivo Barić, historian, professor and author on several books about the history of Rab, will make a guided tour and lecture on the Italian concentration camp on Rab. The camp was established in July 1942 and it soon became known for its appalling conditions, which caused the deaths of numerous inmates. The tour is held in Croatian with English translation.

Kino Rab, Saturday 10th of September 16.00-18.00

What is a map? What is a journey? What is a sacred place? What is a pilgrim? These are some of the initial questions the Pollinators are asking while preparing their 2012 green-powered bike odyssé through Europe. In a 2 hour long open film program we seek inspiration in relation to these questions.

The Pollinators workshop is initiated by Performing Pictures, with the kind support of Stockholms Stads Kulturförvaltning, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013.

workshop program: http://www.performingpictures.se

project notes: The Peregrini

part of resilients