"WILD GROWTH" BY LUKA BEKAVAC AND ANA KUZMANIĆ - BOOK LAUNCH FOR THE FIRST PUBLICATION IN THE MST BOOK SERIES

THE FIRST PUBLICATION IN THE TREŠNJEVKA NEIGHBORHOOD MUSEUM (MST) SERIES: "WILD GROWTH"

ANA KUZMANIĆ, LUKA BEKAVAC

BOOK LAUNCH:

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2024, AT 7 P.M.

NOVA BAZA, NOVA CESTA 66

PARTICIPANTS: authors Luka Bekavac and Ana Kuzmanić, designers Hrvoje Živčić and Zoran Đukić, web portal Kulturpunkt journalist and editor Hana Sirovica, and the series editor Ana Kutleša

We are pleased to present the first publication in BLOK’s newly launched bilingual book series, “Wild Growth” by Ana Kuzmanić and Luka Bekavac. The MST book series unites the written word – literature, essays, and their hybrids with visual arts, and it is a continuation of multiannual cultural art programs carried out within the Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum project, a non-institutional initiative of building a different, socially engaged museum, with its roots in the local community. In line with such a concept, instead of an art book envisaged as a luxury object, we bring you affordable editions that will invite a wide circle of readers to read and look at them. In order to make the content available outside our language, the series is bilingual, and the translation of the first publication is done by Brian Daniel Willems. The design of the whole series, as well as that of the first publication, which reflects meticulous care for each aesthetic decision, but also for high receptivity of the final product, is created by our permanent collaborators on the MST project, Zoran Đukić and Hrvoje Živčić.

“Wild Growth”, as the first publication, grew from the text “Terraforming of the neighborhood”, published by Luka Bekavac in the beginning of 2022 on the web portal Kulturpunkt, within the theme dedicated to the plant world. Not easily classifiable in terms of genre, the text focused on the online exhibition by Ana Kuzmanić, in which she presented, on the MST web page, the first phase of her research of the Trešnjevka self-seeding flora. She was then half way through a two-year process, during which she found over 100 different species of self-seeding plants in abandoned land sites, delayed construction sites, beside the railroad, and among the asphalt. A part of them belongs to the category of so-called native plant species, but the majority is considered invasive or foreign. In late 2022, in an exhibition at Nova BAZA, Kuzmanić presented a new series of collages featuring herbarium images of plants that grew on the land site of the former silk factory in Adžijina Street, documentary photographs she took at the location immediately after the demolition of the remains of the factory, combined with chosen artifacts from the virtual collection of the Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum. It is difficult to determine which is the background for what in collages, as well as in other details of the exhibition; the perspective has become distorted, moving from the human to the vegetal and even broader – the temporal one. The cycles ceased being one life, one event, one century, and instead has become a long duration of the vegetal world, which has no beginning and no end. The weed will survive – Luka Bekavac summarized it with these words in his “Wild Growth”, created on BLOK’s initiative, as a form of an extension of “Terraforming of the neighborhood”, discussing the re-opening of “Wild Growth”, a new phase of Ana’s collages, as well as his own text. The text triptych: The Longest Game”, ‘’Cheat Sheets, Old Notebooks”, and ‘’Instructions for use” that make up “”Wild Growth” are a detective story, and, at the same time, a study on collaging time and space, that has grown together with Ana Kuzmanić collages in such a way that it is difficult to determine which preceded what:

Before I even realize what exactly is depicted in these cut-up photographs – for example the Vidmar family broken by the leftovers of holy rope, the construction of the Prečko Community Center mixed with an Indian strawberry, the construction of the Parrot buildings interrupted by a yellow toadflax – I think, “this is my life,” this was my life, because my body recognizes this texture, this grain, these intensities of color (more dominant than in the first exhibition). I was not there, but I remember everything: the yards overgrown with weeds; the walls made of sooty brick; rundown playgrounds; the deep shadows of damp cellars; the neon and aluminum of local taverns; big factory walls; other people’s bodies (human and animal) at games, at work, in fights, at rest; muddy rivers as communal spaces; the open windows of other people’s apartments; the fluttering of washed laundry on shared roof terraces; empty parcels of land like exotic, sad prairies; new buildings like wrong pictures, bad news. I can feel all of this on myself, like fibers that remain intertwined with me, even if today they are absent or dead: they still live around here, somewhere, in the traces, in the body memory of that periodic system we shared. (L.B.)

ANA KUTLEŠA

PRICE OF THE PUBLICATION: 10 euro

PUBLISHER: BLOK

AUTHORS: Ana Kuzmanić i Luka Bekavac

PUBLICATION AND SERIES EDITOR: Ana Kutleša

DESIGN AND LAYOUT: Hrvoje Živčić and Zoran Đukić

TRANSLATION: Brian Daniel Willems

PROOFREADING: Jana Pamuković (hrvatski), Jelena Primorac (engleski)

TRANSLATION OF COLLAGE CAPTONS: Dunja Bakić

PRINTED BY: Sveučilišna tiskara, Zagreb

EDITION: 200 copies

PUBLISHING OF THE PUBLICATION "WILD GROWTH" AND THE MST BOOK SERIES IS FINANCIALLY SUPPORTED BY THE CITY OF ZAGREB, THE CITY OFFICE FOR CULTURE AND CIVIL SOCIETY. BLOK’S ANNUAL PROGRAM FOR 2024 IS SUPPORTED BY THE ''KULTURA NOVA'' FOUNDATION.