Artists building ‘čardak’ at the railway station in Rijeka
23.11.2019
MMSU / Krešimirova 26c, 51000 Rijeka

On 23rd of November 2019 at the railway station in Rijeka the specific cultural programme took place – performance and site-specific meeting with the public, At čardak (Pri čardaku).

It is performed by architect, feminist, university lecturer and researcher Armina Pilav; film worker Karla Crnčević and intermedia artist Servet Cihangiroğlu. Activists from Ljubljana, active in the group called Second Home in Exile, and employees of Radio Rojc from Pula joined the performance. The topic was – migration.

Armina Pilav, Karla Crnčević and Servet Cihangiroğlu were staying in Rijeka at an art residency organized by the X-OP Association, which is, together with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, a partner in the EU project Risk Change. They were working on the development of a project entitled no-connection: notes on the transformation of violence which aims to explore local migration narratives. In Rijeka, artists were documenting and intervening in traces of migration from different time periods, identifying individual and collective migration paths as well as the process of creating temporary spaces for the lives of people on the move. Therefore, their performance, which is the first public presentation of the results they have achieved , is called Pri čardaku – čardak is taken here as a symbol of a volatile way of living and inhabiting changing spaces through travel, but also marks the observation post as they were mostly on border edge; near rivers, at the crossroads, at the edge of cities and strategic points.

“In conflicting geographies, the temporary čardak is transformed into countless checkpoints between Israel and Palestine, into drones flying over the borders of Mexico and the United States to control and stop migration, into night thermal cameras on several borders of the Balkan route to stop migration to Europian Union… The formation of our čardak, which serves to accommodate others as well as their knowledge of unsustainable living, is an attempt to create a changing society aware of transit geographies that, while occupying them, opposes the fascist idea of belonging to a nation-state and the continuous production of violence and war. By all available means evading weapons, the military industry, oppressive laws on migration, capitalism and the patriarchal exploitation of the environment and people”, the artists stated.

They were temporarily building their čardak at the Rijeka railway station, a migration point which, they say, is also an important place of remembrance for the fighters of the National Liberation War from the Second World War.

The touring residency program will take place from the end of November 2019 to March 2020. It consists of three residencies – Rijeka is the first followed by Novi Sad and Maltese Żejtun – where selected artists conduct site-specific research in cooperation with partner institutions, researchers, interdisciplinary artists, architects, curators and other professionals, and with a lay audience whose knowledge of the context of the site can help create knowledge, learning and understanding of specific topics in relation to the conceptual framework of the Risk Change project. The project takes a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach and uses a variety of artistic and academic methods that are complemented by activist strategies.

More on:
https://riskchangeproject.wordpress.com/2019/11/25/artists-building-cardak-on-the-railway-station-in-rijeka/
https://mmsu.hr/dogadaji/umjetnici-na-zeljeznickom-kolodvoru-postavljaju-cardak/