During August 2023. our guests at ZVONA i NARI residency are Anne Schmidt and Gašper Kunšič, artists from Germany/Slovenia. Here you can find out a bit more about their stay with us, as well as about their creative projects.
If one leaves through the kitchen door in the back of the house, one can see a rosemary bush covering the ground next to the tiles. The pointed leaves of the oleander shrub, which framed already the highway between Ljubljana and Rijeka. The sun is pushing strongly against the wall which is pushing the heat back; it creates a solid thick unease. Makes it difficult for us in the beginning to use the space especially in the morning. We say to each other, the front side of the house, that’s where locals spend the mornings with coffee and some bread with honey. The backside is for the evening, a cigarette, a cold beer, borek and fish. A couple of days we except it and keep the rule.
The grass is brown and dry and sunburned. So are the spiked Oleander leaves, red earth after the rain, tribes of ants. Clover leaves. Robinia, the queen of the trees. Old looking oak leaves of young trunks. My mother would name me all, her excitement which would make her pointing from leave to plant to blossom to flower to tree. It would ring a bell. So often I have heard her poems. Sometimes she would bend over asking full of caution for names and families and use and growth. Field bindweed it is echoing in my head when the blossom is long withered. I pick it out of my plate.
There is the sound of summer, of lunch time plates, of garden fence conversations, of a wooded drilled construction, of leaves, of wings.
There is the summer bleached plastic of outdoor comfort. The slightest smell of melon peal rotten in heat. The promising form of fig tree leaves without yet ready fruit. The silence of a cabbage white.
The disorientation of using another phone google account and not finding searched names anymore. In his algorithm they are lost. The plate with juniper berries you found and watered.
My feet covered in red warm mud.
I pick some grapes after their juice touched my tongue I'm surprised that they are mature. I stand and watch the yard imagining how hands will cut them with garden scissors and collect them and wonder how much bottles of wine the eight rows will make. I bend down and pick the thick leaves of portulak which I don’t know from growing up, which I know from working in Berlin on a farmers' market, bio quality, Charlottenburg. Where I said to my lover “I will come by at 7am and buy cherries from you” in the night of a garden when he is about to leave because he has to get up early. We worked on different markets for the same farmer. The ride in the tubes with the outworn workers at 6am. The suspicious looks of the sales woman if I steal when I'm working alone. Not well hidden. The handful drawings on green packing paper ensuring me my way. The costumers, the girl screaming to her mum: “Is that a girl or a boy!” Mum looks pitiful at me; I excuse in guilt. Grapes, translucent green as bottles, white foggy surface. Portulak, thick, paired leaves, in red mud. Small blackberries on the fence. Kupina, balem, nar, krevet od portulaka, rajčica, avokado, pepper& salt.
Anne Schmidt, August 2023
Anne Schmidt (*1990, Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany) is an artist and author. At the age of fifteen, she worked as a sour cherry harvester and in a factory for cheese products in order to finance her prom dress as well as her living expenses. Later, she completed a few degrees at prestigious institutions, including sociology, criminology, art and art criticism. She has participated in exhibitions with international reach, publishes, and would like to attach herself to the street for hours with superglue to create silent cities for passengers. By today, she counted that to finance her interest in the world, she has worked thirty-two jobs. Her next book will be autobiographical, non-fictional, feminist criminology on sexual, patriarchal violence.
Gašper Kunšič (*1992, Kranj, Slovenia) is an artist and poet. In his work, he appropriates visual references from the Slovenian countryside of his childhood, as well as folk motifs and pop culture from the former Yugoslavia. Through interventions and works, he transforms exhibition spaces into emotionally charged environments that subvert the traditional, creating a new (folklore) world for those who do not belong. Sometimes he slips into a crack in time, tinted by melodies of Adriatic, whose poetic lyrics fuel him to do what he does. He studied art in Ljubljana, Vienna and Frankfurt and has done some museum exhibitions, biennials and public sculptures. He thinks that he as an artist is a swallow and would like to live by the sea. He writes when others sleep and is working towards a book of poems.
