Translacija | Traslación 2.1

Rdeče niti #TV dražba [Red Threads #TV Auction]

Translacija | Traslación is a platform for production, exhibition and research on performance art created by artists Tatiana Kocmur and Francisco Tomsich. Its first edition was produced in Ljubljana, Slovenia, between March and June 2018 and included a series of public activities (performance art events, publications, exhibitions) and the exhibition of preliminary results of the first application of Rdeče niti, a model of artistic research focused on narratives and memories around historical performances (Rdeče niti #Where is the line?, Rampa/Lab, Kapelica Gallery, 31. 5.–8. 6. 2018).

Performance art in the sense we understand it here happens once. It is made in a concrete place, has a specific duration and it is witnessed by a certain group of persons. The privileged material is the artist’s own body, and no documentation or registry can substitute the traces of its presence. For the participants and spectators of a performance, being there and then means a very distinct experience which constitutes their own bodies in the form of memories and remembrances. These memories and remembrances are able of being articulated as stories, discourses and images, and they can be represented in different ways. We are interested in how individuals and groups remember, articulate and tell stories about what happened in a particular performance art event from the past.

We chose Martina Bastarda's performance TV dražba (TV Pika, Ljubljana, 8.4.2003) as our second study case. The work was done on 8th April, 2003, at the studios of the TV channel TV Pika in Ljubljana and it was directly witnessed by a bunch of technicians and, with some little delay, by an unknown number of TV viewers. The artist, then a student at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and Design and a TV worker, appropriated, manipulated and parodied an already existing program of live art auctions developed by the gallery owner Mario Varga. Studying and collecting stories about TV dražba is an open door to Slovenian TV history, technological aspects of art production, artist’s concerns with and in the market, language standards issues and many more.

Many different kinds of narratives have arisen from our research, which is not finished and maybe cannot have an end. What we would like to show in the Project Room SCCA are the preliminary results of a work made along many months without any kind of financial support. It included conventional methodologies (organizing interviews, visiting archives, deciphering photos and texts) as well as some not-so-common operations which make us follow unexpected paths (metaphorically and not).

This project and this exhibition was supported by numerous persons and relied on the generous help of many people. We cannot forget to mention here: Martina Bastarda, Barbara Borčić, Kocmur family, Sanja Moravec, Dušan Dovč, Henrike Von Dewitz, Liza Šimenc, Peter Cerovšek, Boštjan Čadež and all the persons who accepted to be interviewed by us and let us show their testimonies here.

Tatiana Kocmur & Francisco Tomsich

(Source: About the project Red Threads #TV Auction at SCCA-Ljubljana, 2019)