ŠKART (Đorđe Balmazović, Dragan Protić)

1990, Belgrade, Serbia

Our Miracle, 2016

installation

Our Miracle

In 1947, Gvido Tartalja wrote the “Song of Construction”. It is very optimistic and celebrates socialist achievements, and was often sung by volunteer worker youth brigades and at school events. Its most significant stanza is written on the wall, with the last two lines having the most impact: Dreams will be like daytime wakefulness / and all wakeful life like a dream.

What indomitable faith!

We wanted to transfer this belief in a bright and better future for all into our own time, and so we created a picture book. You can see the drawings exhibited here.

(The picture book Our Miracle was published on the occasion of the Collective Creativity exhibition in 2005 at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, and was produced by WHW.)

“Why are you asking when nobody’s asking?”: bed-theater stories

This work was inspired by photos from the 1950s taken in a children’s orthopedic hospital in Rijeka, Croatia, where the children, unable to move, staged group puppet shows with each of them playing one scene in his or her bed.

We asked our friends across Yugoslavia to recount some childhood memories, which we then used to write small puppet shows.

All the statements or stories speak about growing up in the socialist regime.

(Billboards with the stories were displayed at the Plameni pozdravi: reprezentativni portret djetinjstva u socialističkoj Jugoslaviji [Flaming Regards: A Representative Portrait of Childhood in Socialist Yugoslavia] exhibition, which opened in February 2015 at the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade.)