Skopje, 26 April 2024 (MIA) — "The Red School" exhibition by Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić (1949–2023) will open the ninth CRIC Festival of Critical Culture at Jadro Cultural Center at 7:30 pm.

Maja Bojadzhievska and Petar Milat from the Zagreb Multimedia Institute will speak at the opening, which will be followed by a Milat's guided tour of the exhibit on Saturday at 6:30 pm.

According to organizers, "The Red School" will run through May 9, when the festival will host a launch for four books by Ugrešić.

Ugrešić's exhibition was inspired by her finding an old textbook at the start of the war in Yugoslavia, which led to her collecting textbooks and using them for the exhibit as a form of "appropriation art, intervention art, soc-art."

"I am not an 'artist' by any means, and everything in the exhibition is recycling, a process of defamiliarization or ostranenie, which I try to achieve through small interventions," she has said about the exhibit.

"When I say all of it is recycling, I mostly mean the material I use. There is not a single sentence of mine, not a single drawing of mine (because I am not an artist). This, from today's perspective, is archaeological material, and few people deal with that kind of archeology," Ugrešić has said.

The Croatian writer has also described the exhibit as featuring an "obsessive (mis)use of the five-pointed star and the hammer and sickle."

"Since the day Croatia was declared an independent state, and exactly thirty years have passed since then, the Croatian mental and visual field has gradually been occupied by swastikas, black as cockroaches, in all sizes," she has said.

"The five-pointed stars strewn across my 'tchotckes' are some kind of a compulsive gesture of a loser. Although the 'red star' was not my ideological badge, nor was its presence dominant in my childhood, nevertheless, judging by my works, it has become present. The Red Star is neither defense nor protection, nor a political strategy. It is that silent but constant alarm. Beeper. The Red Star is here to ask the question: Did all those swastika cockroaches really flood us?"

Dubravka Ugrešić (1949 – 2023) was a Yugoslav-Croatian and Dutch writer. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she was based in Amsterdam from 1996. She wrote "A Pose for Prose" (1978), "Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life" (1981), "Life Is a Fairy Tale" (1983), "Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream" (1994), "The Culture of Lies" (1998), "Thank You for Not Reading" (2003) and other books.

"The Red School" was organized in partnership with the Zagreb Multimedia Institute within the "Peripheral Visions" project co-financed by the European Union's Creative Europe program.

The exhibit was also supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Government's Office for Cooperation with NGOs, and the City of Zagreb.

CRIC 09 is held under the slogan "Desire Machines: Art as (R)evolution." The festival is organized by Kontrapunkt with the support of AICS Tirana within the "Culture and Creativity for the Western Balkans" project funded by the European Union. mr/