“Some kind of family odyssey”

Duration: as long as I can stand, 2004

Performed: August 28^th, 2004
Exhibition: V Cetinje Biennale, Cetinje, Montenegro
Curator: René Block and Natasa Ilic

Here the idea was to show how perverted family roles can become...

I performed in the former prison called „Bogdanov kraj“ and decided to build my installation in the courtyard once used as the only moment the prisoners could see the sky. The public was allowed to enter the top of the prison. They were standing in the position where years before prison guards were controlling the inmates. I had two pedestals and monitors connected to two VHS players placed in the extreme opposites of the courtyard. I was running from VHS player to VHS player, rewinding a fifteen second image of my mother and father. The distance between the two monitors was about twenty meters. The monitor showing my mother was facing the monitor showing my father. I was the pulse, so to say, the person who would theoretically keep the virtual relationship between the two alive. As long as I would run fast enough to rewind the VHS tapes in time for them to still project the images of my parents, their relationship and lives would continue.

The more time passed and the more I got tired... This meant that I started losing in rythm. I eventually couldn't run fast enough to rewind them on time and they started disappering for longer periods of time, until I was too exhausted and quit... And so they faded into the typical image we see on our TVs when there is a lack of image: fuzzy snow. Symbolically they died and it made me feel terrible. For a moment I thought I had lost them for good and that it was my fault that their relationship was over... I guess that is what most children feel if their parents don't have a good relationship to eachother. And then we assume the role of the ones who have to try all to keep them together.

That is some kind of family odyssey.

Here also a text written by Emanuela Nobile Mino about this specific performance:

The artist’s performances and installations analyze family structures. He moves by highlighting the limits within which this union is effectively real and those in which it is purely of a structural nature. The modality of his own intimacy, contradictions and conflicts are presented, which makes the personal history suddenly become collective, as the themes that are related to the family and

to the emotional sphere always have some kind of connection in the life of every person. His mother almost always represents the central point of his performances; in fact, she is often the protagonist of the video installation that rests on his back and with which he is usually in interaction. The project conceived for the Cetinje Biennial V consists of a looped action in which the artist throws his body into an exhausting run from one monitor to the other (which stand aproximetly 30 meters apart) in order “to keep alive” the extremely short two video portraits (15’’ duration each) that the artist made of his father and mother in scenes from their everyday. The role of a floating pendulum assumed by the artist effectively embodies the position of the child, who is often, and paradoxically, assigned the task of maintaining the family equilibrium in terms of happiness, satisfaction and the long-term relationship between the parents and in

the whole family nucleus. During the entire performance, the artist runs from one point to the other until he drains all his forces and energies and stops. The aim of the work is to demonstrate the absurdity of the kind of strong inner cultural mechanisms that belong to emotional relationships (and in a perverse way to the family structure), and which often appear to be mutually accepted and co-validated on both the part of the parents and of the children, creating an unhealthy circle of dependency and an unreal state of things.