Art workshop Lazareti
Matea Šabić Sabljić
BRODI/ONA (SHE/SHIPS)
Brooms to boats
25.11. – 16.12.2022.

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Visual artist MATEA ŠABIĆ SABLJIĆ aka BRODIONA is a master of boatyard. For many years, she has been quietly making boats herself from objets trouve or found and thus recycled materials that she often finds at markets (wooden boxes, etc.). Coincidentally, all of this takes place on the continent, in her studio in Zagreb, which with its barrel vault and compactness can at times remind you of a vessel. However, even though there is no sea on the horizon for tens and tens of kilometers, its metaphorical power is everywhere, and the boats that this author builds will potentially set sail one day. And they have already done it twice from 2021 to today; they set sail from Split's Matejuška and from the island of Silba, and on December 10, Dubrovnik is expected to sail from the port from which these days mostly sat sail boats built kilometers away, primarily for tourist purposes.

Brodiona's activity is two-fold, both socially and artistically engaged, because it not only consciously encourages and revives the local maritime tradition of these regions - from the micro-local boatyard to the shipbuilding industry - but also critically examines the social history related to seafaring and shipbuilding. With her still peripheral (for all the subjects mentioned above), but strong and focused action, Matea Šabić Sabljić creates a glitch, but in contrast to the digital sphere, in this context a glitch is not considered a mistake, but quite the opposite, a conscious expansion of a system, i.e. its correction, which an artistic institution like the Art Workshop Lazareti or a cultural institution like the Maritime Museum resoundingly supports and thus significantly strengthens, (out)systemically.

By using the tools of artistic and museological production and diffusion (spatial installation within the gallery context, happening launches, inserting one's own legends, a kind of intruder into the permanent and expertly certified museum display), Šabić Sabljić opens a place for invisible, oppressed, erased stories inserted into the local, but also world dominant historiography related to seafaring and shipbuilding, marine biology, oceanography and ecology. Considering how that history could be written differently, not through the hegemonic, Western-centric, exploitative key, but all-pervading horizontally. It is a big and daring request for one person, who calls for broader, intersectional solidarity with her methodologies and way of speaking. There is a transgenerational dialogue, a multi-voiced narrative about mimicry, transvestism, breaking conservative frames, connecting where the connecting thread was missing, big leaps,...

The author will often recount an anecdote that led her to embark on this great undertaking. When she once found herself in a boatyard to learn about boatbuilding firsthand, the master craftsman sent her to get a broom and clean up the area because it never occurred to him that she would really be interested in building a boat. Therefore, the action that the author launched in anticipation of the Dubrovnik exhibition, where she collected brooms that were used to make a new boat, a locally specific one, dedicated to the legendary Eudoksia Kustrić, lighthouse keeper from Daksa, is particularly strong and witty.

We often associate the iconography of the broom with the household, but also with witches, who not only bear witness throughout recent history to a real, extremely violent systematic persecution and social exclusion, based on rumors and feudal hegemony, but according to S. Federica, they indicate their own flight , which is, paradoxically, a liberating symbol, imbued with emancipatory connotations.

Take everything into your own hands. Brodiona's motivation is strong, atypically focused for today's moment of reduced attention, knowledge transgenerational. And while denying oblivion, she repays to the obliterated ones, and trivialized symbols she obligates .

Ivana Meštrov

Art workshop Lazareti

Matea Šabić Sabljić
BRODI/ONA ( SHE/SHIPS)
Brooms to boats

OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION: 25.11.2022. At 7:30 p.m
DURATION OF THE EXHIBITION: 25.11. – 16.12.2022.
WORKING HOURS: 11 - 18 H

LAUNCHING OF THE BOAT "EUDOKSIJA KUSTRIĆ"
GODMOTHER CAPTAIN SERENA MELANI­
December 10, 2022 at 12 p.m., Posat

INTERVENTION IN THE SETTING OF THE DUBROVNIK MARITIME MUSEUM
AUTHOR MATEA ŠABIĆ SABLJIĆ
from December 10, 2022.