Iva Nerina Sibila: TASK the Collection (2019)

The publication of “TASK the Collection", an exploration and archival research transformed into a book edited by Iva Nerina Sibila.

TASK is an interactive magazine-project dedicated to dance. Its primary interests are research, exploration, performance, education, as well as documentaristic and visual/graphic aspects. Martina Granić, a dancer and graphic designer, who designed “placard newspapers” at a graphic design studio in 2011, is a founder of the concept of this project. The main conceptual axis of her project was the categorization of a creative process, communication methodologies/technologiesfor readers/artists and a simultaneousorganization of documentation/archive.  

In its existing format, this project was initiated in 2011 as a result of a collaboration with Sonja Pregrad and as a result of an initiative by the PC TALA/Platforma HR – a Contemporary Dance Festival, and Tamara Curić and Larisa Lipovac Navojec as directors that recognized the potential of this concept as anew activator of the dance scene. The basic idea of creating a broader project arose from the idea of organizing a platform for documenting systematics of (dance) creations, publishing, archiving and analysing these materials, as well as exchanging methodologies, collaborating, and exploring authorship through its fragmentation, transposition and reframing.

So-far, the TASK issues were printed as individual mini-magazines and the focus was placed on the production of dance performances that were built on their templates. 

About publication from editor Iva Nerina Sibila:

The idea of ​​a publication containing all written TASK's has existed since the early stages of this project, from the moment it became clear that the form of TASK's as an innovatively designed wall newspaper containing a short choreographic instruction was insufficient for the accessibility and readability of the resulting texts.

Created as a design exercise by student Martina Granić at the time, and elaborated and nurtured in production through the Platform HR Festival of the TALA Dance Center, TASK has become a recognizable term in the jargon of the Croatian dance scene, a term that implies a specific transmission of choreographic information, and which, although it functions in some elusive zone between score and task, game and performance, festival and discussion, is clear to a wide range of interlocutors. Statement I'm doing TASK! For years now, within the dance community, it has not raised any essential question, but affirmatively further sub-questions coded for outsiders - Dialogic or break-a-leg?

Osvrtask or Ghostask?
Again…?

The publication called TASK – collection consists of an archive of texts created through this project: all written TASKs, parts of interviews that followed the authors, author's notes, numerous comments of the reactor, as well as a partial archive of specific transformations - TASK 15 and OSVRTASK, which became the carriers of new directorates. The opening texts are detailed interviews with Martina Granić, the initiator and author of the project, and the production team consisting of Sonja Pregrad, Tamara Curić and Larisa Lipovac Navojec. Thematically and in design, it continues the publication Models of Community, Strategies of Visibility – 15 Years of the Tala Dance Center Platform, published in 2014.