Your years-long work has been marked by projects related to people on the margins of our society, and the former have yielded successful feedbackthroughout the world. When exactly did you become interested for socially engaged art?

I studied Sculpture in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and Budapest. I was interested in space i.e. a kind of tactility that occurs in sculpting, and having completed my studies I decided to travel for a year in order to see my position in relation to the society in which I live, and to learn whether I truly want to engage in art. I was interested in exotic places and continents where one can learn a lot by reflecting own culture, and therefore my first choice were Jordan and Syria. I spent six months in Amman, where I started to engage in social problematics, in this case ecology. I also had my first solo exhibition over there, an ambience installation that showed the extraction of water from the beautiful oasis of Azraq that was slowly dying. That year, 1994, I remember as the beginning of my artistic activity.

Following Syria and Jordan, a one-year trip through Latin America ensued, during which I became interested in social justice. I travelled many countries such as Ecuador, Chile, Peru and Argentina, and truly felt the differences between them and their problematics. Although I had already had a strong desire to start a kind of social engagement related to art, I neither had enough financial resources, nor the possibilities to achieve it. I did not return to Latin America until 2013 when I went to Mexico, and exhibited – at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City – the work that concerned the indigenous people, poor workers, theologians of liberation, and the problematics of these fields that I had already felt during my first trip in 1995. If there exists a problem, situation, or a marginalised group, I never place myself into the position of someone’s advocate. I seek to create a form of dialogue, or to empower someone through my methodology in the artistic sense, which has always been and remained my principle of work.

In 2013, you published the book “Art for Social Changes” intended for the expert public, but also to everyone interested in social engagement. What was the process of writing the book like?

The book has been co-authored by art historian Irena Bekić who wrote the texts, visual communications designer Dejan Dragosavec Ruta with whom I have collaborated in most publications issued in the last few years, and myself. The book was conceived as a kind of manual for the works, methodologies and current problems in which I have been engaged in the last 20 years. During the conception of the book, we agreed that the introductory parts would cover older works from my beginnings in socially engaged art, followed by thematic works ranging from xenophobia and depression to illegalised works, and the ways in which these issues are processed through art.

You co-authored the exhibition “Begin the Best We Can” that was part of the long-term multidisciplinary research project “Creative Strategies.” How did the idea for such project develop?

The exhibition figures as the third part of said research; I started thinking about Creative Strategies as early as in 2009. It took me a year to conceive everything and to find financial resources for the implementation. In 2010, I started the first module that concerned the Mamutica building in Zagreb, followed by Mexico and the subject of self-organisation within unprivileged communities, and finally the “Toolkit for a Joint Action” the educational and activist platform. The projects are not mutually related, but through them I have been building methods and subjects that have linked them. In Mexico I studied the self-organised communities and their political potential, which I have continued in Croatia through the Toolkit project, based on our own example. This is a collective project that we conceived as a kind of platform i.e. modular toolkit that consists of many different educational materials compiled into four boxes. We are traveling through Croatia and the region with three boxes, the concept of which was co-authored, alongside myself, by the group Direct Democracy in Schools, New Syndicate in collaboration with the Platform for Workers’ Initiative and Democratisation (BRID), Mirna Horvat (author of the spatial design of the Toolkit), and Luka Juras (author of the graphic design of the Toolkit). The project has been created as part of the exhibition at the Nova Gallery in Zagreb in 2014, while Martina Kontošić and the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW have organised it.

You mentioned the collaboration with groups such as Direct Democracy in Schools, BRID, Women’s Front, The Right to the City… What were their roles in the implementation of the Toolkit?

The aforementioned groups have collaborated with me in conceiving the notions and texts, in selecting the books, articles, and the overall material for the project “Begin the Best We Can” or, as we call it, the Toolkit. The idea was for it to travel through Croatia and the region, with accompanying workshops on the subjects of liberation theology, direct democracy, engaged art, feminism, the right to the city, sustainable living, and syndicalism. In order to reach a dialogue of some kind, young people should first familiarise themselves with these notions; if they do not know the definition of engaged art or the difference between direct and parliamentary democracy, it is hard for us to talk about it. We have co-signed the Toolkit as a collective authorship and I find this extremely important. The role of the author and authorship is changing constantly in this kind of work, and one cannot have their own stamp on the project at all times. This is a living matter for which I like to say that I have initiated it; however, all of those who have some kind of comprehension, gesture and relationship towards society are welcome to collaborate in the project, spread it further, and overtake it at one point.

The project “Destigmatisation” in collaboration with patients of the Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče in Zagreb, lasted for three years. How did the idea on the video-installations on this subject come about, and which groups of patients participated?

The project consisted of three separate artworks: work with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, work with female patients diagnosed with depression, and the project with pillows made by the patients of Vrapče. It all started upon invitation of the artistic organisation KONTEJNER who, prior to their exhibition “Extravagant Bodies: Extravagant Minds” at the Jedinstvo Hall, contacted the Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče and invited artists, including myself, to collaborate with them. I decided to work with the department of resocialisation as I was interested in this thin line between their stay at Vrapče and the return to everyday life. How does one return to society, and what can one do in order to be reaccepted?  For six months, I attended group therapy for persons diagnosed with schizophrenia led by Professor Dubravka Stijačić, and together we made a video in which I am writing down on a board everything happening behind my back during the therapy. The patients at the hospital are extremely stigmatised and I did not want to expose their faces.

Another group of Dubravka Stijačić ensued, attended by women diagnosed with depression. Although this is considered a disorder rather than a mental illness, I was surprised to learn that the therapy is attended solely by women of my age. I decided to stay for additional six months, and to find out as to why the number of women diagnosed with depression is twice as high as that of men. Alongside asking questions related to depression in women, the video installation was conceived in a manner to create a kind of dialogue amongst people who bravely admitted to themselves that they do have a problem and started therapy, and those who visit the gallery space. By sitting on chairs in the gallery, the visitors have the opportunity to learn about the symptoms of depression, the therapy applied on the path to healing, and some of them may also admit to themselves that they suffer from the same disorder. I mainly exhibit this work alongside other works that address the question of the position of women, as was the case at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade where we organised roundtables and workshops – as part of the exhibition – related to various issues faced by women today.

Following the two video-installations, I sought to make stigmatisation even more visible without it being related to the gallery, and therefore I decided to conceive one moreproject. I was extremely lucky that the design team Kuna Zlatica expressed their willingness to participate in the project so, together with defectologist, social educator and psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić, head of creative workshopVlatka Prstačić and patients from the Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče, we conceived “Vrapče Pillows.” The project collaborators were also Hrvoje Bjelen (web design), Ivica Hrg (web programming), Irena Bekić (text), Ana Kovačić (coordination of one part of the project), and Sanja Baković (media campaign). I like to interpret the use of pillows as a kind of destigmatisation of this taboo, Vrapče itself, and mental illnesses. Many people took part in the project by taking along the pillows made in Vrapče, and uploading the images of said pillows in different situations to Facebook; the patients, on the other hand, were glad to see this as they had the feeling that the stigma has decreased, thus making them more accepted.

We are planning to make a physical variety of this project and reactivate the pillows this November at the Forum Gallery in Zagreb. We will invite the visitors to make pillows as the patients did; the pillows will be sold afterwards and the money will be returned to patients. The fact that they neither have the support of their community once they leave the hospital, nor is the system built well enough to help them reengage in society presents a huge problem for patients who struggle with mental illnesses and disorders. Therefore I seek to reinitiate dialogues and discussions, and I hope that this will yield positive repercussion.

In the project “women.index” you address the issue of the position of women. What were the final results of your research following the exhibitions?

The project was presented in Split, Naples, Belgrade and Ljubljana. It has been created on the basis of a principle that was performed identically in every town so that the final results could be compared. The question is always the same: How do I feel? The three categories according to which the questions intended for a specific town were tailored are the following: abused, satisfied and discriminated. It is important that the women’s attention is drawn towards the poster that is completely tailored so that the visual communication could be recognised, and that they infer as to what it means to be satisfied, abused or discriminated. In this type of projects, I always collaborate with a group of women collaborators from the town in which the posters have been set up, such as sociologists or feminists with whom I work on the tailoring of questions.

The poster also features a toll-free phone number that one calls and, following the automatic voice instructions, presses numbers one, two or three, depending on the respective category in which one has recognised themselves. The votes are being added up directly on the display – which, for example, was located in Belgrade on the Republic Square and at the gallery – and, depending on the call processing speed of the telephone company, one can see the number of women who pressed a certain category. It was important to me that the women think about how they feel while they read this poster, and to ask themselves as to why they feel this way, and whether they can do something about it. Their husbands, employers or friends may also notice the posters and ask themselves whether they, too, are abusers or discriminators as these categories are not conditioned by marriage. I want everyone to start thinking on this issue, including the issue of the treatment of women in the workplace. Discrimination and abuse are a reflection of the social situation rather than the weakness of women.

You have shown in a number of projects that art is a powerful medium through which it is possible to reach society. How would you describe the context of socially engaged art in Croatia today?

We have a slight issue with socially engaged art as it has become extremely popular on the international art scene a few years ago. A large number of artists have started to engage in it without being ethically conscious or having the sensibility for such form of art. This does not apply to projects such as the “Toolkit for a Joint Action” that engage in broader social practice rather than marginal groups of people in the direct sense. However, when one works with abused people, the LGBT population, the Mexican poor, Bosnian workers in Slovenia, asylum seekers in Austria, prisoners in Luxembourg or illegalised workers in Switzerland, one truly needs to be extremely considerate. I cannot judge as to what certain artists should be doing, but it is important to say at some point that not everything one creates in a certain technique or medium is good in itself merely for the subject one addresses. Just as there are works on the same subject of better or worse quality in painting and sculpture, there is also quality, ethical and deliberated engaged art, and the kind that is neither deliberated well enough, nor adequately implemented. When one works with living people instead of an abstract subject and the work in question is not good enough, the marginalised group is being additionally marginalised and exploited. This is a major issue, but many people – even those within the artistic system that exhibits said works – do not comprehend it.

You have had many solo and group exhibitions in the last 20 years, from Europe all the way to Hong Kong where you have presented your work most recently this year. Are you currently planning new projects?

I seek to finalise the project in South Africa, and this is something I am currently engaged in. This will be followed by the exhibitions in Riga in September, and the exhibition at the Forum Gallery related to the aforementioned “Vrapče Pillows.” We are finalising the cycle “Toolkit for a Joint Action” that will visit Zadar, Sinj and Pula respectively, and finally Rijeka. Furthermore, with a group of co-authors we are making films about islands i.e. the state of islandness that we initiated last year on the island of Lastovo, and this year we are planning to film the islands of Vis or Mljet. It needs to be noted that the authorship of the projects I am engaged in is not exclusively mine, but they are rather a product of a team of collaborators, authors and co-authors; I find this manner of collaboration extremely pleasing.

I would like to use this opportunity to announce a workshop that will take place in November of this year at my studio, and is related to social practice, interdisciplinarity, and the comprehension of such form of activism through art. These kinds of workshops are attended by people of various professions and fields of interest, from historians to dancers, and with them I plan the phases of the project from conception to implementation of social engagement within the community. This is yet another form of informal education in which I am engaged, and such method can certainly help the people who seek active participation within their respective communities.