(Transcript of the Q&A session after the presentation at Public Colloquioum 1, PhD in Artistic Research, May 2017)

Q1.
Could you maybe explain a little bit what the images have to do with the text? What it has to do with your PhD examination or your PhD research?

A1.
These images are used not only to follow the text but to stand for this, I would say, still open question to myself, how to put words and images together. What is the capacity of the image and what is the capacity of words, and what happens between them when I put them together, but not in terms of directly illustrating any of them. So image was not meant to illustrate the text, but to help or disturb an opportunity to built a connection.

Otherwise, these images are some images, there are many that I found, most of the images I have taken, in different life situations, for different reasons. After I constructed the text, as this text consists of pretty much appropriated material from the books I read, and my notes - the text that I wrote, so after the text was constructed finally, I searched for images that I very intuitively put there in order to help or disturb building of associations that I wanted or I did not want. Sometimes I thought it was good to have them sometimes I thought it was not so good to have them, direct.

Q2.
For me what you read was extremely rich and multiple, but somehow. … I had a feeling you are kind of constructing a web of tension which you, I don’t know if you put yourself in, or use as a kind of your own hermeneutic device, in order to address, I don’t know if the content of the web or what it is supposed to address.

A2.
I hope both. I noticed when I started doing this, as I also was accompanied by my colleagues, I was all the time thinking that there are few geeks among us, I was thinking what am I geeky about? And during the process I discovered that I am not so geeky about tourism but about how do I approach this topic, so I get geeky about the process. This is new, this I didn’t know before I started. This is the most exciting part about my first phase of research - to discover that the process is also something that excites me, something that I want to deal with.

Q3.
A lot of your notions, a lot of your expressions, lingered, meandered around words. So in the beginning you say, way to put photographs into words, then you say, an audio-photo-book without words. If it is about words then it is also about the idea of Sprachkunst, of literature, in that sense, so I was wondering, how are you referring to rich context of literature history in that sense of Rimbaud, Bruce Chatwin, of all those people travelling, getting lost, making notes about that. I think you showed one drawing of Italian journey of Goethe, so this is very interesting in that sense, how you relate to the literature side to that?

A3.
For me, It turns to to be a very natural step. After I started feeling claustrophobic with only using photography and photo-books that was quite a natural way for me, for long, to share the results of my previous investigations, I came to, I mean, I always used words, but its becoming, it seems like an easy, not easy, but logical thing to reduce certain channel and to go to the other one to see what I can get from there. I am not done with photography but I think exploring the other field and what I can get there while playing with it without not knowing how to really do it, because I think that is another very important point for me, not being an expert, and then approaching the field that you are not an expert for, what can you get out from this, and then going back to the field where you feel maybe more cosy, then you can actually improve it. And that is what I am curious to see. Because, for now I still don’t know, and I think it is also the beauty of this… Of course I was worried few times that I am going far away from the field that I am familiar with or that I should maybe stay consequent to, but I think also this is a challenge and I also see it as a duty to understand it better, what I can get from other fields.

Q3-add
Maybe an interesting note to that, for me, it is very interesting what you do because I can’t really pinpoint actually what you do. Talking about you where your expertise is coming from is always for me, is it photography, is it …, where is it? But the result is so compelling that I think It works in a sense of brining things together that are your points of interest into this meandering mode, but this is just a remark.

Q4.
Just a remark. I was interested in text as a letter. It actually felt like a confession or like a traveller confession to a far away friend. I am questioning the presence of the “I” and how “am I here” “What do I do in this environment that I don’t know”, so the environment seems also quite alienated, “the world” has alienation somehow, and you as a passenger, trying to communicate to future generation the impression of the world that you can not recognise anymore, therefor also an effort to appropriate something, to find. And I find that very interesting in relation to the pictures, because, indeed, each scene I don’t know myself, but I can also identify with it somehow, when I see them, so there is a contextualisation of something that I don’t know. So text makes me look at them as something that I can suddenly appropriate.

Q5.
I am a bit curious can you develop now outside the reading the thing that appeared to me as the flattening of the before and after of a photograph, a person being in the photograph, the photographer and the one that looks at the photograph?

A5.
As I concluded, I imagine an audio-photo-book, without the photos, that consists only of text, that you are not even listening to. I know now, after this seven months, that photography has a certain meaning that it didn’t have before. I do take pictures and I work as a photographer, but I try to understand more and better what is it for me, exactly, why do I need it, when do I need it and what do I want from it. And none of this questions is answered. What I know for now is that it serves me as a trigger, as materialisation of questions, I take a picture and then it serves me, to remind myself what I want to search for and in this terms I don’t think it is important to show these pictures. Who knows will I ever show pictures, because I am not sure about showing pictures.

Q6.
We all know about the pieces that are without the title. What do you think about the idea of a piece out of your artistic research that is without the picture? Without an art-piece? So it is not without the title but you have it without the piece?

A6.
Yeah yeah, great! Well, for me, I think art... I had this discussion before, why do I run away from being identify as an artist. But for me production of an art piece is something I can not relate to. So this production of an art piece is not my aim in any terms. I am curious is there any other place where art could happen and how then to deal with that, what is it?

Q7.
The aesthetic medium, I prefer even to talk about aesthetic research in order to escape the normativity of art, can also manifest you know in this multiple re-functionalization or redefinition of the function of this medium which is developed as a medium of representation originally, afterwards as a medium of presentation, and in this context of research, of inquiry, of exploration, can be understood as a form of alienation as aesthetic version of objective distance. Just a remark.

Q8.
Maybe in the relation to the alienation, you used the word Egzotika, could you elaborate on that please.

A8.
Somehow I am obsessed with buildings, and I was thinking why, I also think I am into housing, and I know that traveling is, and I mean we all know how it was historically, you go somewhere else to see something different and you come back, what is colonial attitude, but I have the feeling that this “different” that you want to find, you can find around, where you are. SO, if we need the word exotic, I pronounce it in Serbian, so that we get a bit of the exotic feeling, what is on purpose, as it is almost a dangerous word to use…

Q8-add
What is the opposite of egzotika?