The work Without a Proposition for a Concrete Solution, structured as a spatial installation and video, considers the concepts of friendship and solidarity in three chapters. I am taking the context of the Non-Aligned Movement and the complex political landscapes of the second half of the 20^th century as a historical prism that refracts these topics. The starting point of the entire work is a hand-painted postcard from my private archive, dating back to the 1970s, written in broken Serbo-Croatian. The postcard was sent to my father as a gesture of friendship by an Egyptian friend/colleague. In the first chapter, the object and its written message bring us back to the time of non-aligned politics and the relations that the movement promoted and created. The concept of the world as an image of the political map, often found in the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement, is being established and deconstructed before the viewer throughout the work. The second chapter consists of conversation notes with a woman friend. Running through the content of the conversation – that is not heard but is present in the form of telops that enter the film’s structure – are toponyms such as Amsterdam and Sweden, topics of classes and immigration, as well as the organization of life in the capitalist system. This conversation, located in an apartment somewhere in Western Europe, reconstructs the potentials of freedom in the past, at the same time predicting a society that balances on the thin line between communion and situations of control and micro-violence.

The last chapter of the video is a metaphorical and alienated image of the mechanism of mass production of images, representing conflicts and pressures as social matrices in whose cracks we must find the space for encounter.

The spatial installation shapes the way we observe the film and other elements in the space. It is an inharmonious ambience of questionable functionality – it is a simulation of a museum and a fictionalized historical cabinet at the same time. It is a space in which the ideas and narratives of the work are unstable; they are floating, open for interpretation, looking for fragile connections and relations that open up a space for sharing of time, knowledge and emotions.

© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-472/16.12.2019.
Inventory No. 1668
Photo: still from the video work, installation view 56^th October Salon, Boris Burić