Ana Dubljević , Igor Koruga, Marko Milić , Jovana Rakić Kiselčić, Dušan Broćić , Ljiljana Tasić: Temporaries (2012)

Temporaries was an artistic project launched in 2011 by six contemporary dance and performance artists associated with Station in Belgrade. The project aimed to explore and challenge the concept of a "local dance community" amid Serbia's unstable social and political climate, characterized by a conservative government, a lack of cultural policy, minimal funding, and inadequate spaces for artistic work. The artists sought to establish residencies and performance opportunities to ensure the continuity of their work, not by forming a collective but by collaborating individually. The project's outcome was a durational performance bearing the same name. The audience participated in a picnic with an artistic-cultural program, divided into two non-communicating groups. Each group was further split into smaller units on picnic blankets, adhering to the same rules as their larger group. One group played a charades-style game to guess terms related to social and artistic conditions (e.g., solidarity, precarity) performed by six artists. Successful guesses earned individual high-quality picnic items (e.g., champagne, chocolate cake), which could not be shared. The other group received shared goods and collectively decided how to connect the guessed terms with the performative materials - performed by six artists, within the artistic-cultural program. Materials and principles could be connected in various ways – depending on the group decision. This setup implicated the audience in shaping the event's dynamics, blurring the lines between representational and social aspects of performance. The event’s direction varied, reflecting a dynamic interplay between aesthetic and social dimensions creating an antagonistic playground where everything that appears, which is to be seen and heard on the (public) stage becomes a potential agent of the social. The exhibited photo marks the map of educational and professional backgrounds from each of the six artists, and the crossovers among them during their individual and collective careers.