Travel in the Box II

Written by lalarascic

First version of the project was produced as a Horsecross comission for Threshold Artspace, Perth, 2007 (LINK TO PROJECT).

For the festival City of Women I have produced a new version of the project.

I have invited poets and poetesses from Bosnia and Herzegovina to callaborate with me and react with a poem to two true stories. The stories are of Henry “Box” Brown (1849) and Charles McKinley (2005) who shipped themselves in a box in hopes of arriving at a better place.
These are the poems I collected in a limited edition artist book and that I read as a peformance Travel in the Box that premiered on 13.10.2009 in Gallery P74, Ljubljana. CLICK HERE TO READ POEMS

At the act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing towards preservation, one must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. -Peggy Phelan

In the manner of dadaist performance Lala RaπËiÊ reads poetry in the wooden box, while performativity is enhanced by video installation. As we read Peggy Phelan, it gets clear that both, performance as well as poetry see the world through the eyes of metaphor and metonymy, in order to feel the essence of existence and find the way to change things, with the help of nonlinear narrative code, such as similarities, associations and co-ideas.

This performance is, amongst others, requestioning the syntagm of poet as a reader or what doest it mean to read, be read, read in intimacy, read out loud, with or without public. What happens as soon as text becomes the medium for visual expression or performance? One holds true, it can take the viewer to the place where the poetry, and the performance are coming from, a place of intense internal understanding and multiple potentials. Dunja Kukovec, 2009.

Travel in the Box, 2009
project, video performance, multi – channel video installation, artist book

In collaboration with:
Mehmed Begić
Andreja Dugandžić
Ivona Jukić
Dunja Kukovec
Marko Tomaš

video solutions by:
Ivan Slipčević

photo documenetation:
Nada Zgank