Your shit – your responsibility, another ‘action’, was the final anti-war slogan, produced and distributed in 1999/2000, nowadays still useful in different contexts.” your shit, your responsibilityĪfter the war, ŠKART continued with implementing their “slight skills”, offering some help in the beginning but hoping for new projects to grow independent and self-developing. Survival Coupons, for instance, was a project in we made useless objects like ‘coupon for orgasm’, ‘coupon for revolution’, and ‘coupon for miracle’ – it was a gentle way to infuriate people about all the normal things the war took away from their lives. But through our graphic work we tried to make room for everything that was silenced because of the war. Animals are suffering, plants are suffering. War destroys the environment, the infrastructure, the landscape. It is everywhere and it affects all levels of life. Prota: “War has so many different aspects. These skills included raising awareness that war is more than people killing each other on battlefields. Prota: “For me it was the only way to join the resistance and fight with my own skills”. In the beginning of 1990s, during the war in Yugoslavia, ŠKART joined “brave resistance groups” like Women in Black, B92 and the Center for Cultural Decontamination, offering their skills as graphic designers by producing images and paroles. It defines ŠKARTs understanding of how to make impact: actions as modest gestures, doing what you can, acknowledging your limitations. Forging bonds with groups working in different areas, offering different skills, producing different types of knowledge, and so on, allowed ŠKART to experiment freely, jumping from one medium to another, each time “slightly implementing our own skills”. From its early days, ŠKART has been all about collaborations. The ‘never enough by yourself’ condition of any human necessitates working together. Otherwise, we are never ready to go anywhere and start anything.” Prota: “we need to appreciate what we have and who we are. To fully appreciate that by yourself, you are never clever enough, never skilled enough and never equipped enough.” For ŠKART, feelings of insecurity and discomfort are the basis for action. Human mistakes, human failures inspire us. The absence of grand gestures follows from ŠKARTs view of what it means to be human. ŠKARTs actions can change on daily basis, switching direction when and where needed. Prota: “It is about being slightly conscious of things that need to be done”. Not through big words and long-term plans. The evasive nature of ŠKARTs “actions”, as Prota refers to them, follows directly from how ŠKART engages with the world. Prota: “it is outside our interest, still.” The work of ŠKART has always been, as Prota calls it, “unplanned, unstructured, and even unlisted.” As a consequence, the art collective that Dragan Protić (Prota) and Djordje Balmazović (Žole) founded together in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade still has no proper biography, Facebook-page, or website. It’s not easy to prepare for the interview. And so, the mask stays for the entire interview, leaving the maskless feel naked somehow. Putting on a mask helps you tell stories, Prota asserts matter-of-factish. Prota looks surprised, slightly upset even that the interviewers are wearing just their faces while he himself has put on his chicken mask. The interview takes place online, through Zoom. #5: Prota / ŠKART : architecture of human relations How the urgency of climate change, ecology and biodiversity informs their attitude towards the social impact of their artistic work. How the artists learn to ‘stay with the trouble’. We want to build an understanding of how these practices (may) evolve in the face of the current challenges. With The Interview Series we tap into their embodied, concrete artistic practices. Therefore, as part of the Learning to Impact Work Package of the ACT project, we research the many faces of impact. We must learn about the sorts of impact art can make, about the role and place of impact in art practices, and about how art practices themselves are impacted, for instance by Covid-19. Since ACT is about making a change, we need to talk about impact.
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