BRODI/ONA “BROOMS INTO BOATS”

Art Workshop Lazareti,

Gallery “Otok” – Lađa X,

Dubrovnik,

25 November – 16 December 2022

 

Performative Launch Action from the Posat slipway, 10 December 2022 Boat Eudoksija Kustrić – Godmother Serena Melani / 7 boats, 1 godmother, crew of 6 navigators, “path” of cut brooms / Intervention in the Maritime Museum Dubrovnik, 10–21 December 2022, with 125 museum legends = markers Owning, maintaining, and repairing an old wooden boat – a leut (2009–2019) – I gathered knowledge and skills with the thought that one day I would build my own boat. On the slipways I gained valuable experience with different caulkers and masters. There were wonderful people, but at times I encountered outdated attitudes, such as the well‑known saying that “a woman is bad luck on a ship,” or the situation where a master, out of all tools, handed me only a broom. Thus the broom provoked me – inspired me – to build my own boat entirely independently, a fleet of boats in honor of maritime heroines who, despite prejudice and prohibitions, sailed the seas, built ships, and explored the maritime world.

For the exhibition at Art Workshop Lazareti in Dubrovnik, I built a boat from brooms collected for this purpose from Dubrovnik women and men, guests, and friends. As part of the performative launch action, we launched the boat on 10 December 2022 from the Posat slipway. The godmother, cruise ship captain Serena Melani, named it in honor of the lighthouse keeper from Daksa, Eudoksija Kustrić (1901). In wind and rain, navigators Ivona Vlašić, Ivana Pegan, Ana Marija Obradović, Natalie Šimunović, Eta Kaćić, Andrea Brajović, and I launched the boat into the sea, after which I sailed a circle through the harbor.

Behind the broom lies great historical, economic, and cultural meaning. It has always been an indispensable working tool, a symbol of domestic and “female” labor, of craft work (an essential tool of old artisan workshops), and a symbol of skilled women. “I transform the broom into a boat.”

Afterwards, we opened an intervention in the permanent collection of the Maritime Museum Dubrovnik, with 122 museum markers bearing short biographies of maritime heroines from history to the present.

About captain Serena Melani, the press wrote in 2019:“More people have walked on the Moon than there are women commanding cruise ships. There are fewer than ten worldwide, and one of them sets out on distant voyages from a Croatian address.”

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Captain Serena Melani (45), an Italian married to Dubrovnik native Renata Bulat (52), has lived in Vela Luka since 2014, where together with her husband, a ship engineer, she built a beautiful stone house in a hidden bay. "I am very proud and honored to have been chosen to command a new ship, because not every captain, regardless of gender, gets such an opportunity. I reached this point after more than 20 years at sea," says the captain, born in the Tuscan port city of Livorno. From an early age she felt the irresistible call of distant seas and oceans, and at just 16 began sailing as a cadet on merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean. But when she graduated from the Nautical Institute in her hometown in 1993, it was not easy to find work in her profession. She had to wait five years before securing her first officer’s position on a tanker, where she was the only woman in the crew, and for a year she worked without pay. She accepted this discriminatory condition so as not to remain indefinitely ashore. "At that time no one wanted a woman on board. I heard all sorts of absurd excuses for why they didn’t want to hire me," recalls Serena. "At the beginning of my career I was discriminated against simply because I was a woman, sometimes even on board, though not always. But when I started this job, I knew what awaited me. To succeed in this profession you need a sense of humor and the ability to laugh at those who oppress you. Even though it was sometimes very difficult, I didn’t want to give up. I found the cure for all hardships in salt water: sweat, tears, and the sea, as Karen Blixen so beautifully said." Thus, Serena Melani – now a Croatian daughter‑in‑law – entered maritime history as the first woman to command a completely new cruise ship from its very first day. Captain Serena Melani came from Italy, from overseeing the construction of a brand‑new cruise ship of which she would be captain from day one, to launch a boat in honor of the lighthouse keeper from Daksa, Eudoksija Kustrić. Eudoksija was a lighthouse keeper on the small Dubrovnik island of Daksa, tending the light in 1901. It was neither easy nor common to be a female lighthouse keeper, and Eudoksija surely had to face many challenges of her time. She belonged to the Kustrić lighthouse‑keeping family, which marked the first 30 years of the lighthouse’s operation. Now, 150 years after the first light, and 121 years after our lighthouse keeper, the Daksa lighthouse has once again shone this year. It was customary for lighthouse keepers to live on the lighthouse with their families, and women were capable of managing the light when the keeper was incapacitated, participating daily in its operation. At a certain historical moment, lighthouse keepers’ wives succeeded in securing payment for their work – first as assistants, and later as independent lighthouse keepers. (The information about the Daksa lighthouse keeper was found in the book “Svjetionički libar mali” by Vedran Trgovčić.)

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