Volumes: cinematic worlds for transformative spaces

Jelena Viskovic is a Lecturer in Game Design on the BA Media at the UCL Institute of Education.

Above image credits: Jelena Viskovic, Ties of Allegiance, film still, 2023.

Still from Jelena’s most recent work in the series, “Volumes: Motonation” (2024), currently on exhibition at HDLU Zagreb.
Still from Jelena’s most recent work: “Volumes: Motonation” (2024), exhibited at HDLU, Zagreb, between April 25 and June 16th 2024

Jelena gave a talk about a body of work developed between 2020 and 2024. The works are loosely linked by the idea of Volumes – contained, reverberant spaces where things can take on new forms. The series combines speculative storytelling and emerging cinematic technologies to talk about social, political and environmental movements throughout the 20th century that were seen as radical, as in, moments known for their potential for social change, but retrospectively often viewed as unfulfilled promises from a past era. Volumes looks at ways in which media technologies were intertwined with these movements and their representative bodies (governing bodies, communities and individuals), understanding the previous, historical projects of worldmaking. This artwork is primarily focused on the research of practices, principles and infrastructures of social transformation.

Playful Stairs - A 1968 artwork by Constant Nieuwenhuys, an example of Homo Ludens as the protagonist of creative expression
Playful Stairs –  Constant Nieuwenhuys (1968), an example of Homo Ludens as the protagonist of creative expression

The first work, New Babylon takes a Situationist world-building project of the same name as a starting point to decenter ideas around a productive, creative subject-citizen rooted in narrow ideas of the Homo Ludens in utopian imaginaries.  The second work in the series, Ties of Allegiance, takes international organisations and the formation of the Non Aligned Movement in the 1950s and 60s as a starting point for unraveling a personal story whilst thinking about limitations of archives and institutions when it comes to memory. The third project, Motonation is a biker-film about individual expression, movement and body-politics of performance in post-socialist regions.

Humor and play are central to the approach used to create these works, serving as a catalyst for dialogue and means to subvert entrenched ideas around technology and the future, and focusing on the extent to which these ideas are connected to lived experiences and identity. Borrowing from a cartoonish, carnivalesque logic, the worlds these works embody become rebellious but approachable. A repeating narrative tool that reappears in each work is a speaking object-character, that uses its voice and gestures to continuously challenge the narrative structure of the work.

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