Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman: The MOLAT Retreat

A group of artists, selected on the basis of their proposed plans for numerous non-activities, will go to the southern Croatian island of Molat in September, where any ‘planning, thinking about future projects, deadlines, applications, or exhibitions’ will be understood as undesirable, even ‘extremely undesirable’. At first glance, the gesture of withdrawal or retreat does not seem like anything special, because in an economic model that categorically demarcates free time from working time, it still carries a strong connotation of vacation. It becomes interesting when we ask in what way it represents the essence (impossibility) of withdrawal by calling for its investigation.

The authors’ stubborn insistence on the fact that absolutely nothing is allowed at the retreat acquires a performative dimension, as it is essentially a kind of compulsion to take a vacation, a humorous subversion of the symbolic work/leisure balance, which exposes some fundamental antinomy or paradox of our age, expressed, among other things, in the feeling of discomfort that arises when someone tells us not to do anything. The situation is even more difficult for artists since, as if taking imagination seriously isn’t enigmatic enough, they (in the era of mass media, constant technological progress, and chronic distractions) are often forced to become their own managers, organisers, and sponsors.

The essence of the retreat, conceptualised by Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman, is perhaps the recognition and integration of a different kind of temporality and spatiality, established with the awareness and feeling that silence is not actually completely silent, and emptiness is not completely empty, if we include other beings in the human map, who, by necessity, reside in symbiotic constellations of movement and stillness, and thus subvert our static demarcation. Numerous scientific, experiential, and artistic projects are dedicated to learning about this fluidity of life and the sounds that arise when different plant species communicate, which connects scientists (primarily biotechnologists) and artists from all over the world in the context of the conceptual processing of contemporary art.