Since 2012, as part of its grants and residency programmes, Bitamine it has been organising an annual selection process for an artist for the development and execution of a research and artistic production project. The interest of the programme lies in generating a result that stimulates reflection and the integration of the different perspectives that are produced in/from the margins.

The aim of this programme is to encourage research and the production of artistic projects related to the problems of the margin, promoting the mobility of artists and the development of projects, with a special focus on the legacy consisting of this publication that summarises the results of the research carried out during the residency.

BAR 2023 #10 – Karla Crnčević

In this edition, the jury composed by Oskia Ugarte (HUARTE Arte Garaikide Zentroa), Natxo Rodríguez Arkaute (Arte Ederren Fakultatea UPV-EHU) and Bitamine has selected the project by Karla Crnčević (1989. Yugoslavia, Croatia) to be part of the BAR 2023 programme.

Within her most recent work, Karla has been investigating the concept of margin and border from the analysis of archival documents. These documents, due to their formal conception, the selection of data chosen, the historical and territorial context in which they are printed and a host of characteristics that accompany these records (type of paper, images, prints, colours, etc.) propose a series of narratives, real or imaginary, that are constantly in dialogue with the most current, and even future, layers of our most pressing problems.

Karla’s work during these months of residency and post-residency reflection proposes a revision of the language we use to identify what is happening around us and how it mutates according to the historical-political context in which it occurs. The political margins that delimit the categories of beings, actions and territories highlight the polysemic character that they can acquire depending on the origin from which their definition is formulated.

The proposal, through a methodological process based on artistic practices and technical procedures such as the creation of her own herbarium, materializes her research with various fieldwork techniques such as interviews, visits to archives, related readings and participant observation. The pieces that Karla obtains in the course of her research invite us to travel through it in a poetic but above all nostalgic and endearing way and to weigh up the way in which we classify things, beings and their acts in relation to our socio-cultural representation of each idea.

I hope that this chapter in Karla’s trajectory, which fortunately I have been able to be part of, will serve as a stimulus both for the readers and for herself. We invite you to enjoy the reflections, texts and images that are concentrated throughout this publication.

AUTHOR

I am dramaturge and film worker. My practice mainly relates to moving images, but I believe research, watching and reading are very important elements of interacting and (re)creating so my creating always starts from learning from events around me and naming them. 

I studied writing, filmmaking, and film theory, during and after studies I worked in film production field – there I developed interest to research differences between working in collectives and by myself, as well as consciousness about importance of working conditions. I learned that film can be a factory or a jewellery box. 

I form part of activist network Za K.R.U.H. (For Bread) that is dealing with making our working conditions and fees for work in arts and culture better. Also, I am often writing for few online magazines, dealing with conditions of (cultural) work in capitalism. 

Kino UNSEEN is initiative I started together with my colleges in the south of Croatia to revitalise cinema spaces destroyed during the war or privatised just after. Cinema as a space and event played important role in my formative periods, so I wanted to insist on it as important reason for gathering and talking about different topics. 

My passion is experimenting with different languages of cinema, dealing with memory, translating discourses, care work and feminism. 

I’m interested in image of low resolution, image that is disappearing, holes and gaps in collective memory, unexpected movements of camera that could bring new gaze, in invention of new languages that could be first steps for imagining new futures. But before all of that I believe in solidarity like base for any engaged and collective work.