AMERIKA

Expanded Documentary Cinema

Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 2005

In collaboration with Marcella Bonich, Nori Boni Zorovich, Miriam Busanic, Margaret Zgombic and Ljubica Zic



The AMERIKA exhibition project was conceived in collaboration with five elderly women of Croatian origin living in Astoria, Queens, NY. It is a multimedia exhibition based on five somewhat incredible but true and very much typical female life stories. They retell the narrative of the “new world” while deconstructing the American dream.

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During my 2002/2003 residency in PS1 in Queens, I became involved with the Croatian community in Astoria, volunteering at the Croatian Sunday school, with an intention to develop a community-based art project there. The change in my perception of America, inspired by my surroundings, was rather immense. I conducted extensive research into the local Croatian community and its history and met several women who were willing to participate in my project which was to revisit the story of the New World through their own life-stories. We agreed on wanting to demystify Amerika. Therefore, several key notions were implemented to structure the stories and the collected documentary material, and these are: freedom, hunger, labor, money, family, democracy, communism, capitalism, personal beliefs, the American dream, and the old home.[1]

The project protagonists, the five women mostly belong to the first generation of immigrants and the working class; these are immigrants who came from impoverished circumstances and are originally from the Adriatic islands. During the early 1960s the northern Adriatic coast of Croatia experienced extensive emigration. As Yugoslav communist authorities began issuing passports to its citizens, the coastal population migrated on to Italy where camps were set up to accommodate the influx of people and from which they left on ships usually headed to the U.S. These massive migrations occurred against the historical background of the Cold War.

The exhibition provided an insight into the actual life of an immigrant working class person as opposed to the standard clichés of the U.S. as a land of milk and honey. Part of the intention was to strengthen the identity of and to empower the Croatian community in Astoria. The exhibition was to be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, which contributed to the empowerment of the community as well as to the valuation placed upon it by the outside world. The self-empowerment of the five women was self-evident as the three of them took part in setting up the show in Zagreb with great joy and pleasure, experiencing an important highlight of their older years. My wish was not only to provide a point around which the community members could grasp and reflect upon the community identity, values and issues, but also to stimulate communication within the community in Queens. Then for the needs of the project, and together with the five women, we offered a meeting place in Astoria where everyone was invited to take part. The film, video and photographic material shown in the exhibition was to be a starting point of a community archive, which was however realized only partially.

The exhibition’s subtitle reads “expanded documentary cinema”. It is here for the first time that I used this term for the exhibition format described below. The reference point is the term “expanded cinema” coined by Gene Youngblood in 1970 as he researched and reflected upon the developments in what was later call media art. Whereas Youngblood refers mostly to technological and spatial expansions of the moving image, and repercussions thereof for our perception, by adding “documentary” I wanted to refer to the real social space that is being documented by my work. Today however (2020), I would tent to add another reference to “community” in the subtitle, although “community cinema”, being designation of the cultural and political movement in Latin America, would not be appropriate for an art exhibition format taking place in somewhat elitist institutions.

As its narration line developed polyphonically through several rooms, the exhibition AMERIKA showed over 10 hours of video material expanded by audio, space and object installations, by slideshows, documents, family photographs, found objects, found artworks, text-based artifacts, written testimonies, and educational program. This variety of materials was necessary in order to deal with the complex relations between individual fates and their social conditioning as well as to tackle all the individual key notions mentioned before (hunger, freedom, labor, money…). The concept of expanded documentary cinema was put into effect with the vigorous creative involvement of the participants, who were active in producing and collecting the documentary material. Creating this exhibition was an exercise in documenting reality, in multimedia and multivocal storytelling, realized through juxtaposing different kinds of presence in the exhibition hall i.e. different media and types of narration. Visitors could either spend half an hour walking through to get a basic sense of the stories told, or spend several hours watching videos, reading the wall texts and searching the archive. However, except with respect to the medium, in its content and social function, this work, I believe, does not differ greatly from genre scene painting of the 19th century, as it depicts ordinary people (women) engaged in common but also somehow heroic activities. The exhibition indeed can also be understood as unfolding various strategies of visual anthropology/ethnography and related museum displays. I have to admit that there is also a strong feminist aspect to the project which I consciously chose not to push in foreground.

The perception of the exhibition in Croatia was dominated by an outspoken interest from the several cultural anthropologists (IEF Institute Zagreb) who wanted to archive the material for the purposes of their research into migrations. Croatian Heritage Foundation - Center for Croatian Diaspora, a state agency, approached me with a proposal to adopt the exhibition into a permanent display, a project that never moved forward due to shortage of funds.

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[1] The expressions ’old home’ like ’old countryside’ are used by members of the community to mean Croatian native land and homeland.

RELATED 
Text by Maja and Reuben Fowkes 2005

CREDITS 
Curatorial team Museum of Contemporary Art - MSU Zagreb: Nada Beros, Tihomir Milovac. Publication: texts by Nada Beros, Tihomir Milovac, Barbara Steiner, MSU Zagreb, 2005. Project production supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Cultural Office to the City of Zagreb, FACE Croatia - Heathcote Art Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding. Exhibition supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Cultural Office to the City of Zagreb. Photos: Kristina Leko.

GENRE&FORMATS
Project: participatory-documentary art project; community project; project with specific social groups; multimedia exhibition (expanded documentary cinema). Artwork/s and artifacts: multimedia installations including video, audio and space installations, photographs, text-based works, documents, drawings, objects.

 

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