COLOSSAL BALKAN
Colossal Balkan Fiction
Karmina Šilec: Colossal Balkan Fiction (with a Catalog) AUDIO BOOK BOOK
At midnight these pure old women visit the house of the sick person who is dying. They take off their skirts. They only keep on their white shirts with the colourful festive scarves on their heads. Barefoot, with bare genitals they stand there under the wide sky. They direct their wrinkled, childbirth-stretched grey old vulvas towards the sky. Then they slowly start to rotate their bodies like satellite dishes towards the clouds. This is the ritual that wards off disease. Thus the old women communicate directly with the spirits, with the other world. Now the power of these women is finally recognized.
About the project
He was a "baptized in the plague," which didn’t protect him from harmful forces but did bestow on him special gifts. For this reason, he could hear buzzing, magical sounds and made out strange voices. He distinguished between the sounds and words of stones, plants, and animals. They taught him what things cure which illnesses. Other people, especially his mother, passed on to him much of his knowledge.
texts: Karmina Šilec narrated: Minca Lorenci
dramaturgy: Tanja Lužar language counselling: Mojca Redjko
translated: Timothy Pogacar, Saša Požeg sound: Danilo Ženko
Everything about the visits to the Balkans reminds me of the slumming tours, the former American tradition of tourists visiting the poorest parts of the cities, such as the Chinatown, to see people of other races and cultures. They watched their baths, their nightclubs, prostitutes, and even patients on their deathbeds. The sworn virgins seem to have been turned into a similar spectacle for the tourist. The bodies of tobeliasare now collected on the stage of the scientific and media exhibition. Ethnic tourspromise hidden landscapes and opportunities for the close-ups of these women’s tragedies in a maze of the Balkan medieval themes.
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- works/IMG_1681.mov [mov, 25.04 MB]