AT   In your work relational speech with the public/audience is also a part of the aesthetic, of the linguistic structure. Would you like to start from your reflexive field of a relational-stylistic nature?
AK   Engagement in the social subjects, widening communicational models and cooperation with experts from different fields determines my artistic practice. I am sensitive to the range of nuances within social justice and I often base my works on previous research. I endeavour, together with the audience and associates, to reveal the traps, the contradictions and declarative tolerance of the society we are part of. In most of my works, the essence is in developing forms of dialog and offering a different, subtle but still clear, model (tool) for activation within the problem the work is focused on. The accent is less on the result, and more on the process and quality of participation of audience and associates in the project.

AT   In an analysis of your work Radmila Iva Janković has established, recalling Beuys, the re-elaboration of social sculpture via which you create "synergy with the community" . Dialogue, encounter, plurality, the many. But also participation, permeating one another. How much are these figures engraved into your artistic work?
AK   I'm interested in relationships between people in concrete social contexts. I try to move the dominant matrices within some (everyday) mechanisms, making use of recognisable forms (billboards on the roadside, commercial breaks on the radio, newspaper adverts, Internet games). I have no feeling that I can build a new world, new attitudes, just perhaps put existing relationships into a changed situation, with the key bearers of the change being the participants themselves. By activating them I hope to achieve a change from within. One example for this was the political art intervention "1CHF=1VOICE" (2007/2008, Zurich), in which I call upon the Sans-Papiers (those who live and work without legal papers in Switzerland) by donating one franc to help in the renovation of the Swiss Parliament in Berne. Or, the socially engaged project "Bosnians Out!" (2008, Ljubljana), in which together with three construction workers from Bosnia we developed and put up posters around the centre of Ljubljana, speaking about the discrimination they face living and working in Slovenia, in contrast with the fact that by their work they make a contribution to Slovene society.
During the process of creating multidisciplinary works, I involve experts from various scholarly and scientific disciplines, particularly in Internet works, which are more conceived as "tools for knowledge" and less as directly engaged works. One example is the extended project "Distributive Justice" (2001-2012, http://www.distributive-justice.com) which is also presented at the exhibition in the MADRE Museum. This is the result of a wider field I'm wishing to encompass with the project. Working together with philosophers, sociologists or urban anthropologists, I can get a lot deeper into a topic, make use of different methodologies in the approach, illuminate a topic from different angles of vision. I think that it provides much more complex, precise and broader image than the one any of us as an individual could elaborate from its own angle. Except that, working with other people is very inspiring, like different layers that touches, pervade, but also preserve their autonomy within the project.

AT   One of the basic aspects of your works is opened up with manoeuvres of what is called ubiquitous computing. This is shown by some of the different interactive projects - Letter, Women.Index, and Distributive Justice are just a few of them - created in the last few years. What importance, and how much, does ubiquity have in your work? Is it used for a re-appropriation of pubic space?
AK   The mechanisms in my projects that I build around individual neuralgic points in society, are often complex in the process of production, but are easily recognisable and understandable for the viewer. Perhaps it is easiest to explain using a concrete project, "On the State of the Nation" (2008, Zagreb), which I developed for more than a year with a large network of participants, aiming to normalise the position of the Others (in this concrete situation in the Croatian context). Since the research we carried out was within a project about social distance, it turned out that the image of the Others in this country is created by church, family, school and the media. I chose the media as the most suitable for working with in a project restricted by time and budget. Together with the groups we identified as Others (Roma, homosexuals and Chinese) we organised workshops for students of journalism, sociology and anthropology; round tables about the issue of the ethics of the media and a non-discriminating relation towards writing about the Others; and, the most important element of the project, together in the gallery space we would make virus news for the dominant media. This was an attempt at normalising the position of the socially most distanced groups in Croatia within the main media space. The hardest part of the job was to push the virus news to the mainstream media (for example to publish in the Vox Populi part of the daily papers the opinions of Roma and Chinese about the town planning changes in the centre of the city, as well as the opinions of the dominant population; another example was to release the statement of a man in a radio program about a theatrical performance that he had ceased going to the theatre when he had broken up with his boy friend; in the Croatian wavebands, this is still not accepted as normality). From this concrete example we can see that the tactic that I use is infiltration, insertion into the existing public space... more like a virus than some big visible change.

AT   What does play represent in your work? Is it an illusion via which illusion itself is knocked down or just an essential process in the construction of an educational threshold?
AK   Perhaps both. On the one hand, playing, you become aware of the dilemmas that some topics start up. Let us say ethical issues related to genetic engineering in the works "Closed Reality - Embryo" (1999/2000, http://embryo.inet.hr), a game in which two players create an embryo between them; or "Cyborg Shop" (2007, http://www.cyborg.com.hr) in which you play while improving your physical performance.
But at the same time, play is a good way for visitors in an indirect way to be unobtrusively educated about, let's say, the theoretical underpinning of the distribution of goods in society (the "Distributive Justice" project). This is shown by the fact that several universities contacted me for permission to use the games from the project in the first year of study, on the whole in philosophy and political studies.

AT   I would like to round off our little talk by asking you the same question that you posed from the world of art to the world of everyday life: Are you optimistic about the future?
AK   Of course I am optimistic about the future, or I wouldn't be doing projects that in a subtle and covert way work on making relationships among us more aware... but to be optimistic in today's situation does not mean being unrealistic. After all, the work "Reconstruction" (2007, Dvorac Tikves), exhibited at this show, tells of the possible nearness of war, which breaks out unexpectedly... the person I am talking to in the video explains that people thought Tudjman and Milosevic, at the meeting of April 15, 1991, which we are reconstructing, were trying to calm down the situation and arrive at a solution without conflict, but the war, the consequences of which you know yourself, broke out not quite a fortnight after that meeting.

(English translation: Graham McMaster)
Antonello Tolve, Napoli 2011