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Indepth Arts News:
"Danica Dakic: Role Taking, Role-Making"
2006-02-10 until 2006-04-01
Gandy Gallery
Bratislava, ,
CZ Czech Republic
"Role-taking, Role-making" reflects attitudes to cultural role behaviour within a Europe that is being shaped by political change and fierce collisions between differing cultural codes. At the same time, it involves a variety of media - video, film, theatre and photography - at the interface between documentation and performance. The project focuses on "gipsy images", which are used to probe the possibilities and impossibilities of "Role-taking - Role-making" within an intercultural context. Role-taking-Role-making encompasses a series of photos, video works and a film. Each part is a separate work in itself, but diverse levels of reflection and the shifting of motifs and actors mean that they are also condensed into a kaleidoscopic synthesis of the arts.
FILM
"Role-taking, Role-making" is a cinematic narration about changing "gipsy roles". The film structure takes up the narrative culture of the Sinti and Roma; the real and the unreal are combined ˆ the film interweaves diverse roles and levels of reality, interlacing documentation and fiction.
The two shooting locations are vital components of the film: the Roma enclave Preoce in the Kosovo once again, and the Theaterhaus "Europa" run by the Roma Theatre Pralipe e.V. in Cologne, whose work was filmed regularly for several months until the last performance of their famous production of Garcia Lorca‚s Blood Wedding in April 2004.
The film reflects role patterns that create political realities, and in doing so, it presents images of the real conditions faced by the people in both locations - at the theatre in Germany threatened by bankruptcy, and in the desolate ghetto of the Kosovo refugee camp, but it also employs many levels of dramatic, filmic and photographic staging. The flow of images is dependent on a musical rhythm rather than on linear action.
The photographer and cameraman Egbert Trogemann has accompanied this project throughout its realisation.
PHOTOS SERIES
The series of photos "La Grande Galerie" was realised together with Kosovo-Roma in the enclave Preoce and the refugee camp Plementina during July 2004. The Roma refugees were engaged as actors or models to take on roles within a pictorial constellation combining the situation on the spot with paintings from the collection of the Louvre. Firmly-established, cultural forms of representation are investigated in pictorial roles; for example, these are played by a Roma family in the Kosovo, photographed in front of the room-sized backdrop of a reproduction of Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in the Louvre as a Ruin, or by a village fortune-teller, who was "transposed" into the corresponding picture from the Louvre collection using specific lighting and gestures.
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