3 channel installation with round projection on the floor
The 3 channel installation consists of two main elements. The first is of meditative content where we see plankton and tiny underwater creatures filmed by a twelve-year-old boy Vanja from Split. He has been catching them for the last two years and studying them under a microscope. Fascinating footage shows a magnified world of small creatures that create our oxygen.
In the second part of the project the main protagonists are the musicians Amira Medunjanin and Alen and Nenad Sinkauz, who create a new song for our sea. Exceptional musicians are recorded in an empty hall, emphasizing the voice and the emptiness of space and darkness in which it echoes, reminding us of the blackness of the sea’s abyss.
In this new work, Poljak suggests that we change the old myths and write new ones in which the Sea will be the main creator and creator of life. As tradition and belief have been transmitted through song and story since ancient times, for the same reason a new song/song story is created that carries new strength and energy and in which the Sea becomes the God of creation.
Since ancient times, in the nomadic life of our ancestors, there was a shaman who, when the group found a place to live, would go to the top of the hill, place a sign for Perun and thus change the energy of the place to live, making it better and safer. What we need today, and what this speculative project is about, is the possibility of changing energy or trying to heal the sea.
In short, we need a contemporary shaman who will sing and create a new history and a new myth in which we will all believe together. The boy Vanja and Amira Medunjanin may not be shamans, but we can speculate that they are. Faith and beliefs are a very fragile and manipulative category – as we know from our recent history.
This project explores different fields of activity from philosophical to scientific, from utopia and mythology to music and its role in history and the present. At the heart of the project is an ecological idea, but it deviates from activism and does not contain literal ecological messages, but approaches the topic from a completely different angle, poetic and utopian.
The sea globally serves as a place for waste, and the noise pollution created by humans with ships, vessels and other machines is life-threatening for its tenants. Due to the aforementioned reasons, as well as the ubiquitous climate issue and the specific relationship that the artist has with the sea in the sense that the sea is present in almost all of her works, with this new project Renata Poljak explores the utopian idea that we can heal the sea (both from dead migrants and from the notion of the Mediterranean as the tombs of the Mediterranean), or at least to make him willing by raising him to the level of a being closer to us, so that later he would be looked after as best as possible.
Speculation is the basic principle on which Renata Poljak’s new project rests, and it relies on intangible references and oral tradition in order to create a different kind of mythology and thus assume that global changes can happen in the future. The project does not have a clear narrative basis or sequence because it does not strive for a clear narrative, but the environmental theme is treated globally and on an energy level.
