Art organization: conversation with members of the ŠKART group : Đorđe Balmazović Žole and Dragan Protić Prota, Belgrade 2019

Biography: 

Škart is a collective founded in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. During the experiment through their work, they primarily focus between the medium of poetry and design. “Architecture of human relations” is their main concept. Through the constant flow of the collective, present from its very beginnings, members work collaboratively to develop new values. They are especially capable of accepting "nice" mistakes during the making process and work tirelessly to combine work with pleasure.

ŠKART group: Đorđe Balmazović Žole and Dragan Protić Prota
Summary: 

Art organization: conversation with members of the ŠKART group : Đorđe Balmazović Žole and Dragan Protić Prota, Belgrade 2019

ŠKART group: Đorđe Balmazović Žole and Dragan Protić ProtaŠkart is a collective founded in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. During the experiment through their work, they primarily focus between the medium of poetry and design. “Architecture of human relations” is their main concept. Through the constant flow of the collective, present from its very beginnings, members work collaboratively to develop new values. They are especially capable of accepting "nice" mistakes during the making process and work tirelessly to combine work with pleasure.

Art Organisation is a long-term international research project that analyses the phenomenon of artistic (self)organisation and relations within artistic groups and collectives in the post-Yugoslav region during the last fifty years, and the ways it influenced the profile and quality of their artistic production. Research within the project Art Organisation is aimed at group and collective processes of creation and internal dynamics between artists and other participants in them. The focus is on self-organised initiatives outside the framework of official institutions. Through the phenomena of self-organisation, the project questions the role of civil society organisations as potential progressive places in society through dealing with art. The project covers a wide historical field through discussions with the protagonists of these practices from the 1990s until today, with a review of the experiences and heritage of organising and collective creation in the recent past of local and national culture, through the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s and the Belgrade Surrealism of the 1930s.

The introduction to the research of group work, joint authorship, working conditions, was conducted during 2017 through interviewing participants and protagonists of the contemporary art scene from Yugoslavia, and continued during 2018/2019. The research team is composed of members of kuda.org with associates from Belgrade, theoreticians and art historians Milica Pekić and Stevan Vuković. During 2019, the interlocutors in the interview interviews were collectives and groups in the field of contemporary art, theoreticians and art historians, and protagonist artists who realized their practice through group art work.

Art Organisation is part of a wider project Vectors of Collective Imagination where kuda.org cooperates with partners: Multimedia Institute mi2 and Kulturtreger-Books, Zagreb (HR); Glänta Gothenburg  (SE); Kontrapunkt, Skopje (MK) and Berliner Gazette, Berlin (DE).