LIE and THEFT as PRACTICE
Lie & Theft as Practice (2020)
Lie & Theft as Practice continues over the year of 2020 during which the processes will be split in four working phases.
Over the course of 2019 the group of 10 artistic collaborators was fabricated and certain practices were conducted within this construction. Overall idea was to build neutral space in which each of the participants coming from various artistic and/or not backgrounds, will be in position to get to know and connect with one another.
Creation of the online platform www.lieandtheftaspractice.art as an ongoing exchange served to share the outcomes of the individual and later on, the results of the collective tasks with the outside audiences. During the same year artistic collaborators had a possibility to work with some of the international artists working in the fields of performance, choreography, dance and visual arts. These collaborations were in the formats of three Workshops each resulting with the foreseen public showings bringing together the accumulated synergies from these stages.
In the year of 2020 focus is shifting on bringing the practices outside the studio space, on the streets of Belgrade, aligning try-outs, experiments and site-specific interventions with urban landscape. This way participants of the project under the creative direction of Darko Dragičević will bring in closer relation the co-existence of diverse social set-ups always in relation to their own researches under the umbrella of the overall topic. This way we will try to scrutinize how these structures affect one another and what kind of necessary, even urgent answers can be imlemented in order to acivate and resist the constructs of the neoliberal systems that all seem to be equally leading to the non-existence of the values relevant all of the living species to further sustain, and finally survive.
We want to make a mark questioning how can art be more activist, how it can be greater than the familiar spaces of comfort zones allowing both indivudual and micro-communities to have more voices paralelly opening up the spaces of emergencies and vulnerabilitis? We believe that actual socio-political constructs must be brought into question; they need to re-emerge in order to have a chance to adopt themselves to the new environments.
In the year 2020 Lie & Theft as Practice will be divided in two parts. First part will have its main focus on the site-specific interventions while the second part will shift onto selections from the archived materials which will finally be presented in the book catalogue under the same title Lie & Theft as Practice, second in the series of practices following the tracks of its first edition Failure as Practice published in 2019.
This new publication, as the previous one, will be followed by multi-disciplinary contents raging from performances, exhibitions and public talks in Serbia and abroad.
Concept: Darko Dragičević, Zorica Milisavljević
Artistic Director: Darko Dragičević
Project Manager: Zorica Milisavljević
Project Director: Frank Baumann
Artistic Collaborators: Stevan Beljić, Miloš Janjić, Katarina Kostandinović, Lana Pavkov, Dušan Savić, Ana Vuković
Lie & Theft as Practice is a project of the Goethe-Institut Serbia within the Next Generation platform.
Darko Dragičević
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Lie & Theft as Practice (2019)
Our society is continuously challenged with multiple turmoil. Planet is revolting, people are migrating, more and more animal species are closer to their extinction. Yet, we feel that the ways in which we are consuming the life of everyday, even producing any kind of labor, is highly informed and based on one owns truth. But what really lies beneath the post-capitalist machinery is the world entirely constructed on restrictions and manipulations of what could be called our collective knowledge. Role of individual is permanently lost in the pool of replicas and re-inventions within the context of neoliberal system. Belonging is the crucial point, we chose and merge with the others and this way we construct zones of comfort known as micro communities. In global terms all these communities, that all of us belong to!, imagine to rely on questions of truth, trust and beliefs. But what really constructs these beliefs is something beyond, sometimes ungraspable. Human is becoming more and more aware of the constructs of our own identities questioning their background, their values. We often understand that there is no way out from the system that’s been created and that is existing. We are faced with the facts that our reality is mostly based on Lies and Theft. These two terms have direct associations with something that is negative but we believe that what we trust is truth is also finding its roots in something that has been borrowed or said differently. That’s why, we want to examine the transformative powers of these two terms into the new modes of individual and collective thinking as we believe there is a lot to be recognized, questioned and placed in practice..
Lie & Theft as Practice will be one-year process stretching over the next year of 2019. This process will be continuously shared, as practice, with its participants but also within the various formats of presentations that will be shared with the audiences outside this group.
Our aim is to analytically approach the topic of Lie & Theft as Practice implementing them in various socio-political and cultural contexts.
Concept: Darko Dragičević, Zorica Milisavljević
Artistic Direction: Darko Dragičević
Project Manager: Zorica Milisavljević, Goethe-Institut
Responsible/Director of the Goethe-Institut: Frank Baumann
Artistic Collaborators: Stevan Beljić, Maja Bosnić, Miloš Janjić, Katarina Kostandinović, Darija Medić, Lana Pavkov, Dušan Savić, Ana Vuković
Lie & Theft as Practice is a project of the Goethe-Institut Serbia within the Next Generation platform.
Darko Dragičević