DATE: DeCeMber 8th, 9:30 pm.

Expanded cinema performance by Maja Milić & Alessandro Citterio

The performance centers on gesture as holder of subtle cultural memory and history, which could point to the body as an anthropological and sociological archive. Through physical habits, routines and automatisms rooted in the historical societal landscape, the body possesses information and expresses knowledge of deep cultural implication.

“Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis. The gesture is neither use value nor exchange value, neither biographic experience nor impersonal event: it is the other side of the commodity that lets the “crystals of this common social substance” sink into the situation.” (Giorgio Agamben)

The images are sourced from self-collected home movies (of autoethnographic origin) and deconstructed, trapping body movement or posture into short, unpredictable set of images, continuously re-arranged. The main guide is a sonic tape loop on 4 channels. The material, filmic as well as sonic, is used as open structures which can be manipulated and reacted to in real-time.

Maja Milić (b. 1985, Croatia) is a conceptual artist and experimental filmmaker with background in DJing and analog practices. Since 2010 a member of the artist-run analog film lab Klubvizija from Zagreb, currently of LaborBerlin and the artist radio reboot.fm. Her practice can be characterized as experimental autoethnography, which includes work with found footage, mainly the deconstruction and reconstruction of home movies, and the idea of using trivial elements of reality. Apart from her fluid film of variable length and structure, OTHER (2021-ongoing), such elements appear in her current work with sound improvisation, radiophonic experiments, expanded cinema performances, as well as in her conceptual publication with the same title OTHER (recently published with Atlas Projectos, Lisbon, and We make it, Berlin), all cryptically intertwined and in all of which she believes to be practicing film, too. Improvisation, intuition and unpredictability are crucial to her approach.