You are cordially invited to the performance by Marko Batista and Žiga Palčar entitled Stories of a Changing Landscape – A Composition in Two Parts (Part I), which will take place on Wednesday, 16 November 2022, at 8 p.m. at KIBLA PORTAL and which will accompany the opening of the international festival of art, technology and science KIBLIX 2022 in collaboration with KID KIBLA.  The performance is the first part of the project Stories of a Changing Landscape, produced by Marko Batista, Žiga Palčar and Lina Rica in the X-OP Association. The second part of this audio-visual story, performed by Marko Batista and Lina Rica, will take place on Saturday, 3 December 2022 at 8 p.m., also at KIBLA PORTAL. 

Poster

The project Stories of a Changing Landscape – A Composition in Two Parts encourages in the viewer a reflection of space and time. The performance by Marko Batista and Žiga Palčar intertwines the industrial history of Maribor with the story of the once Slovenian hinterland of Trieste, where the marble industry was present. The genesis of change thus becomes the motor, the common denominator of the temporal structure of the landscape and of life itself in an age of constant change. Over time, the industry has left strong traces in the physical and psycho-geographical landscape of the environments. Throughout the process, the artists’ work makes use of audio and visual field recordings of the landscape, which they make themselves. The audio-visual textures thus become metaphors of constant change, and the artists use new media to fuse them into a multi-layered experimental story of a changing landscape that has shaped many lives and the image of the (urban) environment or the natural landscape of a place.

The second chapter of the audio-visual narrative will be performed in December by Lina Rica and Marko Batista, who will build on the spatial dimension of the first part of the performance, marked by the temporal dimension of the historical events of the pre- and post-transitional time knot, with the poetics of the notions of temporality on a universal level. In terms of subject matter, the artists will deal with four temporalities and the perception of the changing of time: the past, the present, the future, and the eternal. The notion of temporality is of utmost importance, as the diverse treatment of time within the various sciences and disciplines indicates how elusive the concept is for all individual and social aspects of humanity. “While human intuition, embedded in classical physics, imagines a reality in which things are always and definitively one way or the other, quantum mechanics describes a reality in which things are sometimes partly one way and partly another. Things only become definite when the appropriate observational intervention forces them to abandon quantum possibilities and choose a particular outcome.” (Greene 2005).

Marko Batista is a Ljubljana-based intermedia artist, experimenter of sound and the digital video image, and performer of computer-generated matrices. He graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana under the mentorship of Associate Professor Bojan Gorenc and Assistant Professor for Painting Borut Vogelnik. In 2006, the Ministry of Culture granted him a scholarship to study for an MA at the University of the Arts London / Central Saint Martins in the UK, which he successfully completed. After the premiere of his intermedia performance at Kapelica Gallery, he was invited by curator Jurij Krpan to present the Slovenian experimental scene at the Ars Electronica 2008 media art festival in Linz. A month later, his exhibition opened the VIENNABIENNALE 2008 in Vienna and, at the invitation of Brane Zorman, participated in the RADIOCONA project in Ljubljana. Together with the son:DA tandem and the HONF collective from Indonesia, he toured all major multimedia centers in Slovenia in April 2009 with a series of presentations and intermedia performances. After the Ars Electronica festival, he started to collaborate with Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, and together with them carried out projects at the famous Kunsthaus Graz Bix Facade, Forum Stadtpark-Gradec, and the production of the intermedia performance Parallel Digital Structures. In addition, the Ministry of Culture awarded him a work grant in 2010. He has also participated in all major intermedia festivals and galleries: Arzenal Depo 2k, Earzoom, Moderna galerija, Transmediale 2010 – Berlin, Netaudio – London, Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Izolenta 07 festival in St. Petersburg, 10th Istanbul Biennial in Turkey, Media Art Friesland Festival 2007 in the Netherlands, Visual Deflection festival in London, Pixxelpoint in Nova Gorica, MFRU, Peek&Poke – Croatia, SHARE FESTIVAL in Turin, LAB.30 in Germany, Simulaker Gallery in Novo mesto, Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, etc.

Žiga Palčar (1989, Ljubljana) is a multimedia artist living and working in Ljubljana. He attended the Secondary School of Technical Professions Šiška, Ljubljana, where he was awarded the title of Electrical Technician – Electronics Engineer. In May 2021, he completed his studies in photography at the Faculty of Applied Sciences in Ljubljana, where he obtained the title of Photographer. His field of work is divided between photography, video, installation and performance art, and he is also increasingly focusing on sound. As a photographer, he works in the field of technically unencumbered, sometimes banalized photography, which opens up a debate about the medium itself. In the field of installation, he is interested in analogue and digital techniques, combining them with contemporary multimedia practices. He always uses different media and combines different technologies and approaches to his work. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Marta Fakuch collective, an experimental AV ensemble working in the field of contemporary avant-garde practices, combining musical and visual elements into a compact whole. By combining acoustic instruments, modular synthesizers, various effects, and digital image and sound processing tools, they explore the synthesis of analogue and digital audiovisual masses composed of both intuitive and prefabricated parts.

Lina Rica (1980, Makarska) is an intermedia artist working in the field of conceptual, experimental and new media art. She creates installations using video, graphics, light, photography and animation. Her work deals with social processes of past and present worlds and their impact on the individual. In 2008, she received her Master's degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she was awarded the prize for the best diploma thesis at the Department of Graphics. Her work has been presented and published regionally and internationally. She has exhibited at biennials, triennials, festivals, group and solo exhibitions in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovenia, Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Austria, Montenegro, England, Spain, Germany, Argentina and North America. Her graphics are part of the collections of the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana; Oficina Arara in Porto; Longest Night in Gothenburg; Critical Mass Portfolio and Femicomix Portfolio. She has received several awards for her graphics. Between 2012 and 2016, together with Boštjan Čadež, she ran the association for the production and promotion of contemporary art and the gallery space GaleRica in her home in Makarska. She has done video performances at several festivals and events in clubs and autonomous cultural centers, and collaborated with several artists. She is a founding member of the audio-visual experimental ensemble Marta Fakuch, active since 2019. Since 2020, she has been part of the audio-visual trio Etceteral. She lives and works in Ljubljana.

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Production: X-OP Association
Co-organized by: KID KIBLA and CODE BLUE Association
Financial support: Ministry of Culture and Municipality of Maribor