Siniša Ilić

Without a Proposition for a Concrete Solution

video and space installation, 2016

video 25’

Camera: Jelena Maksimović and Lara Kostić

Editing and sound: Jelena Maksimović

Lithographs by Siniša Ilić

Print making: Dragan Coha

The postcard used in the video is from a private archive.

The text is part of a conversation with Maša Kostić.

Without a Proposition for a Concrete Solution is structured as a spatial installation and a video that considers the concepts of friendship and solidarity in three chapters. I propose the context of the Non-Aligned Movement and the complex political landscapes of the second half of the 20th century as the historical prism through which to observe these topics. The starting point of the work is a hand-painted postcard from a private archive, dating back to the 1970s and written in broken Serbo-Croatian. The postcard was addressed to my father as a gesture of friendship by an Egyptian friend/colleague. Through the first chapter, this postcard and its written message bring us back to the time of non-aligned politics and the relations that the movement promoted and created. The concept of the world as the image of a political map, often used in the politics of representation in the Non-Aligned Movement, is established and deconstructed before the viewer throughout the entire work. The second chapter consists of conversation notes with a friend. The conversation is not heard but is present in the form of textual tableaux that enter the film’s structure, and in its contents we can find toponyms such as Amsterdam and Sweden, topics like class and immigration, as well as the organization of life under capitalism. This conversation, located in an apartment somewhere in Western Europe, reconstructs the potentials of freedom in the past, at the same time considering a society balanced on the thin line between community (the common) and situations of control and micro-violence. The last chapter of the video is a metaphorical and alienated image of the mechanical mass production of images, representing conflicts and pressures as social matrices in whose cracks we might find the space for encounter. The spatial installation shapes the way we observe the video and other elements in the space. This unbalanced ambience of questionable functionality simulates a fictionalized historical cabinet and museum at the same time. It is a space in which the ideas and narratives of the work are unstable, where they open up for interpretation, looking for delicate connections and relations that open spaces up for shared time, knowledge and emotions.