Lala Rascic

After four months in New orleans all I haveto show for is is this one minute video made for the City One Minutes project.

Tony Cambell and Matt Vis read a first sketch of the script for a project that I have begun working on. The script is called “The Damned Dam”, it is set in the near future, in Bosnia. It is based on a true story of a spoof broadcast on Radio Lukavac in 2000. The radio show was about the dam on river Spreca breaking. At the time the show alarmed the locals of Lukavac and they even closed some schools and factories. In the script the damn breaks for real and the characters, Tarik and Merima are trying to warn the people by playing them the old radio broadcast.
The video is shot in New Orleans Lower Garden District, on the corner of Camp and Thalia streets, on what is left of an old movie theater that burned down some years ago. The lot has been for sale for some time. The debris of the building has long been cleaned up and the only indicator of that it was once a theater are the masonry steps of the former entrance that now resemble a mini stage with an auditorium on the street corner. The empty lot being a common sight of the New Orleans urban landscape. The storyline also relates to New Orleans - as it tells of a place that is under constant threat of a flood while  the video gives a portrait of a quiet street corner in the utilized as a stage for a performative act - reminding of the site’s former function. Even though it was hard to jam the hole narrative into the short one minute format, I hope that one senses the storyline that tells of urgency in the face of a pending catastrophe.

Camera and Editing: Lala Rascic
Performers: Generic Art Solutions (Matt Vis, Tony Campbell)
Thank you: Daryn De Luco

Let us suppose that everyone has his private madness. Knowledge without truth would be the labour or the attention of an intense singualrity analogous to this “private” madness - for everything private is madness to the extent at least that we seek, though it, to communicate.

Maurice Blanchot - The Writing of the Disaster

I have no Idea if I have met the objectives I have set before myself upon my arrival in Vienna. One thing I can say for sure is that I have set upon an open ended journey…The show is on 09.12. I am preparing a new performance.

So, went to see a pretty good show yesterday “A Question of Evidence” at Thyssen-Bornemisza. Apart form being interesting just because  it maps and talks of difficult issues in East Asian countries like Burma, India, Tibet , China (issues that are being totally overseen and forgotten because all our media are ga-ga for Obama) I loved how all the works in the show worked with the document. I loved how most of the works actually fabricated narrative by usage of documentary footage and artefact. The show did need a  level of concentration and patience just to go thru all the text and context written in small letters on the wall. Wish those text providing context were a bit more easier to see, well, it was an opening.

Why am I writing this? Well, the biggest problem I have encountered in this new process of mine is talking about myself, displaying subjectivity. I feel somehow that in light of social circumstances, current events, foreign affairs, etc., my inner world really is a second-tier issue. I am so afraid to talk about my own world - directly - that I have chose to hide behind a paravan for the performance I plan to deliver.  I started reading R.Barthes’ “Camera Lucida”, I much appreciate his theory of photography based on a totally personal and emotional and individual perspective - how he relates to the photograph of his dead mother. All the work yesterday - based on “evidence” also - a display of multiple perspectives that are -in fact - subjective. I am a bit reassurred that what I am pursuing is no totally worthless.

In any case content is one thing - form is the other. Issues of form now are how to make theater out of the personal and make it funny and interesting and entertaining in the process.

I will be publishing more about that project here on the blog.

Most recently I performed my Individual Utopias on the 2008 edition of the exhibition-festival City of Women, Natural Relations in SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana, 24.06.

Met a great crowd of women, enjoyed the show. The space of the gallery had the sound bouncing all around me, so I am not sure how clear my words were to the audience, but anyway I have recieved some really good reactions.

While spending days with David and Vanda at their Motovun home we did have some disussions how art should communicate to the general public.  I am presonally always for a more populist approach, even if I rarely manage to suceed in appealing to a wide and varied public.

I just hope now that Individual Utopias is a work that can communicate and relate to a really broad audience, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who can see this piece as an illustration of their reality.