BRODI/ONA “BROOMS INTO BOATS”

Art Workshop Lazareti, Gallery “Otok” – Lađa X, Dubrovnik, 25.11.–16.12.2022

Performative Launching Action, Posat 10.12.2022

Intervention in the Maritime Museum Dubrovnik 10.–21.12.2022. 

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By 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. In the shipyards I gained valuable experiences with different caulkers and craftsmen. There were wonderful people, but sometimes I encountered outdated attitudes, such as the well‑known saying that “a woman is bad luck on a ship”, or situations where the master, out of all tools, would hand me only a broom.

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Thus, the broom actually provoked me – that is, inspired me – to truly and independently build my own boat, a fleet of small boats in honor of sea heroines who, despite prejudice and prohibitions, sailed the seas, built ships, and explored the marine world.

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For the exhibition at Art Workshop Lazareti in Dubrovnik, I built a small boat out of brooms collected for this purpose from women and men of Dubrovnik, guests, and friends. As part of the performative launching action, we launched the boat on 10.12.2022 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, the 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.

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Behind the broom lies great historical, economic, and cultural significance. It has always been an irreplaceable working tool, a symbol mainly of household and “women’s” work, as well as of craft labor (an indispensable tool of old artisan workshops), and a symbol of skillful women. “I turn the broom into a boat.”

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After that, we opened an intervention in the permanent collection of the Maritime Museum Dubrovnik with 122 museum labels containing short biographies of sea heroines throughout history up to the present day.

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 in the whole world, and one of them sets off on distant voyages from a Croatian address.”

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Captain Serena Melani (45), an Italian married to Dubrovnik native Renato Bulat (52), has lived in Vela Luka since 2014, where she and her husband, a ship engineer, built a beautiful stone house in a hidden bay. “I am very proud and honored that they chose me to command the new ship, because not every captain experiences that, regardless of gender. I welcomed it after more than 20 years of sailing,” says the captain, born in the Tuscan port city of Livorno. She felt the irresistible call of distant seas and oceans early on, 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 a job in her profession. She had to wait five years before getting her first officer’s position on a tanker, where she was the only woman in the crew, and moreover worked for a year without pay. She accepted that discriminatory condition so as not to remain indefinitely ashore. “At that time nobody wanted a woman on board; I heard all sorts of crazy excuses why they didn’t want to hire me,” Serena recalls. “At the beginning of my career I was discriminated against just because I was a woman, sometimes even on board, though not all the time. But when I started this job, I knew what awaited me. To succeed in this profession you need a bit of humor and to laugh at those who oppress you. Even though it was sometimes very hard, 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 beautifully said.”

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Thus, Croatian daughter‑in‑law Serena Melani entered maritime history as the first woman to command a completely new, just‑built cruise ship from day one. Captain Melani came from Italy, from overseeing the construction of the brand‑new cruise ship she would command from its very first day, in order to launch the small boat in honor of the lighthouse keeper from Daksa, Eudoksija Kustrić.

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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 came from the lighthouse‑keeping Kustrić family, which marked the first 30 years of the lighthouse’s operation. 150 years after the first light, and 121 years after our lighthouse keeper, the lighthouse shone again this year. It was customary for the lighthouse keeper to live at the lighthouse with his family, and the woman was capable of managing the lighthouse when the keeper was incapacitated, participating daily in its work. At a certain historical moment, lighthouse keepers’ wives succeeded in securing payment for their work, initially as assistants and later as independent lighthouse keepers.

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*The information about the lighthouse keeper from Daksa was found in the book “Svjetionički libar mali” by Vedran Trgovčić

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Matea Šabić Sabljić