TREŠNJEVKA’S WOMEN PLAYERS – NOTES FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD SPORTS HISTORY
Exhibition:
April 24 – June 8, 2024 (closed on Labor Day and on Thursday, May 30)
Nova BAZA, Nova cesta 66
Opening:
April 24 at 7 p.m.
Every link in sports industry today confirms and perpetuates inequality: small local sport clubs are barely making it, while corporations leading European football leagues seem omnipotent; individual sponsorships are being polished, while school and neighborhood playgrounds are being neglected. In this process of scoring it in the field of power and hierarchy, certain sports have always remained "on the bench", as well as those who played them – women players, sport workers, and amateur players.
The intention of our exhibition is to resurrect, remember, and give recognition to the important names of Trešnjevka’s women sport, smaller and bigger clubs, less popular or very popular sports, professional and amateur players, as well as invisible labor in sports collectives happening behind the scenes, in the period from the 20s until the end of the 80s of the 20th century. We have directed our view toward sportswomen who were winning world and European championships, despite systemic suppression of their participation in sport, as well as toward women workers who washed and sewed kits for those who had an opportunity to step out of the domestic sphere and the neighborhood. We were eager to know how elementary school female students described their matches in their P.E. class; we imagined what women sport workers looked like, having found only few sentences on them in the archives. In Trešnjevka, as in many other places in the world, women sport workers par excellence were often easily forgotten, women players of the teams that made the neighborhood famous, such as the basketball club Monting, not to mention those who were invisible, working behind the scenes.
Our Trešnjevka women players are thus laundrywomen and cooks, hazena players who organized factory workers and refused to join the fascists, winners of European and world championships with an empty stomach, school teachers, and students with a ball in their hands. They show us that it is worth fighting for – and through – people’s sport. Working on this exhibition also showed us that there is still a lot of space that needs to be open and stories that need to be explored. In one exhibition, we could only cover a morsel of women’s sport world of Trešnjevka, but it was enough to show a whole universe of injustice and exclusion, comradeship and resistance.
Ivana Perić, Ana Kutleša i Dunja Kučinac
OPEN: Tuesday – Friday: 4 p.m. – 8 p.m., Saturday: 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.
FREE ENTRANCE!
During the exhibition, three panels will be temporarily mounted at RSC Jarun, featuring the first gymnastics coach in Croatia Ivana Hirschmann, hazena (women’s handball) and football player Zdenka Kunštek, and Trešnjevka football club background worker Julka Prpić. Through this intervention in public space, we would like to give more visibility to women who have, in different ways, contributed to the development of sports nationally. In close proximity to the Alley of Best Croatian Athletes, the only relatively large city area dedicated to commemorating athletes, we question who and how remains remembered in sports history.
Authors of the exibition: Ivana Perić, Ana Kutleša and Dunja Kučinac
Author of illustrations and comics: Ena Jurov
Partner: Trešnjevka Cultural Centre
Design: Petra Milički
Visual identity of Trešnjevka neighbourhood Museum: Hrvoje Živčić i Zoran Đukić
Technical realization: William Linn
Light desing: Luka Matić
Production assistant: Maja Blažević
Original exibits: Croatian Sports Museum, Andreja Gregorina, Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum
When preparing the exhibition, we used materials from the following public institutions: Croatian Sports Museum, Croatian School Museum, Zagreb City Museum, virtual collection of the Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum, and various journals.
Part of the information was obtained through interviews with persons related to sports in Trešnjevka and women’s sports in various ways: athlete and sports worker Milan Orešković, bowling coach Marko Kujundžić, sports journalist Mićo Dušanović, basketball players Mira Bjedov and Jasna Pepeunik, Zagreb Weightlifting Club Metalac coach Branko Zemunik.
A special thanks goes to Andreja Gregorina and Mićo Dušanović for making available to us materials from their private archives, and well as to curator Marijan Sutlović from the Croatian Sports Museum for his help during preparation of the exhibition. Furthermore, we would like to thank Srđan Kovačević, Relja Knežević, Štefka Batinić, and Sanja Nekić from the Croatian School Museum.
The exhibition is part of the “Trešnjevka neighborhood museum – living heritage” project, and it is financially supported by the City of Zagreb. Project is supported by Women's Fund of the SOLIDARNA Foundation through the Program for the Development of Civil Society. Baza’s annual program is supported by the "Kultura nova" foundation.
