Teuta Gatolin –
Warmth / Stuck inside a tub to watch the future develop at this rate

Warmth/Stuck… is about a 200m tall chimney of the thermal power plant EL-TO, built in the 80s and situated in Trešnjevka, one of Zagreb’s residential neighborhoods with a lost industrial heritage and a place currently undergoing a slow but steady process of gentrification. It is also about home, and what is seen from one’s kitchen – in this instance the artist’s kitchen overlooking directly the chimney situated a short walking distance away. In this work I’m interested in the hauntological aspects of these architectural and spatial elements that form the public space I move through daily, especially in regards to how they inform the thinking about the future of necessary social, and other, adaptations for ecological sustainability; or a lack of thereof due to inability to imagine them. This work is also interested in “saving/recording” cities or their parts (and pasts) in virtual archives, exploring what this transmutation of physical space into a virtual one does to the actual, real place and the context of its memories/histories; but also in what our technological capability of archiving the world at yet unprecedented scale means for our human ability to remember, to define what is history, and to how we relate our present(s) and possible futures to the past(s). This research is developing through working with physical materials and the building of an installation piece consisting of photogrammetry, scenography animation, text, textile, and objects, consulting ideas about futures/pasts/nostalgia/ecology as presented by Svetlana Boym, Federico Campagna, Donna Haraway, and others.

Biography:

Teuta Gatolin (1993) is an intermedia artist based in Croatia, currently researching storytelling ecology, the subversive potential of mythological tricksters, nostalgia, illusion, and technology as one of the companion species to humans. Her work is often process-oriented, spawning iterations of itself realized with other fabulators. She often collaborates on intermedia performance projects and has worked many times with the independent contemporary dance community in Croatia. Her works have taken the shape of installations, text, collections of objects, workshops, letters, costumes, virtual spaces, and a range of mixes, mashups, and negotiations between various art media. She studied New Media Arts at the Fine Art Academy, and Journalism/Media Studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences, both in Zagreb, Croatia.