PROJECT PROPOSAL FOR (PROTOTIP) VAJAT ART RESIDENCY
Belgrade / Serbia. 2016
“It is fashionable to see multinational corporations as constituting a kind of invisible government supplanting many of the functions of nation-states. In reality they are often weak and amorphous organizations. They display the loss of authority and the erosion of common values that afflicts practically all late modern institutions. The global market is not spawning corporations which assume the past functions of sovereign states. Rather, it has weakened and hollowed out both institutions”
John Gray.
The world of highly institutionalized and formal societies does not represent the future we imagine or that many expect; on the contrary, it constitutes the world of the past. The scope of the national state has been seriously affected by drastic and traumatic trends that are beyond its control. For instance, the world of the institutions has been over taken by an informal and chaotic realm in which new power relations are being constituted; relations that transcend the scope of the state, establishing interwoven connections as virtual and invisible.
With this idea in mind, the purpose of the project will be an exploration around the neighborhoods of Belgrade, in search of useless, and deteriorated satellite dishes (parabolic antennas) that are still anchored to the facades of buildings, with the aim of taking them down and subjecting them to a process of oxidation. The aim is to build a wall or a facade that embodies on the one hand the network of transnational relations that exists between individuals and their culture, and on the other hand to disconnect and disable that world which I called formal. It is important to emphasize that the deteriorated satellite dishes represent a two-fold reality: one is the connectivity to a virtual and infinite world where the political institutions and the power of the state fades away but, on the other hand, it represents the world of finitude, of the territory, where the dismantlement of political institutions seems inevitable.
Examples of naturally oxidated and deteriorated parabolic antennas in Belgrade.
