BOJAN MUCKO – Experience It on Your Own Skin & Emptied in Restitution (Contribution to the Ethnography of Emptiness)

Workshops: May and September.
Presentation of workshops and the book Emptied in Restitution (contribution to the Etnography of Emptiness), published by Heinrich Böll in collaboration with UIII . Greta, 11 October 2012, 7 pm .

I am approaching the phenomenon of mass closures and demise of shops in the wider city centre from a pedestrian perspective, looking for the causes of these processes in which once frequented urban veins – Ilica, Tratinska and Ozaljska, and Maksimirska streets – have been transformed into emptied corridors. In the course of my research, I have become aware of my own disciplinary barriers, which is why I am trying to break them by organizing workshops intended for the students of those disciplines that are relevant for these issues as based on field research. I inform the participants about the results of my own investigation by using experimental, performative-educational methods. The workshop scenario is a fictionalization of the previous research process that I have been through when dealing with the problem of closed shops in the manner of field research, approaching it from the standpoint of cultural anthropology. My aim is to encourage the participants to do their own research and to approach the problem from the angle that is determined by their own, specific disciplinary positions, that is, to create an interdisciplinary debate. The workshop has been intended for students of various orientations (journalists, architects, lawyers), and each of these groups makes an individual walk; it is only in the final phase, depending on the interest, that they have the possibility of forming an interdisciplinary group that will approach the issue of decline and neglect of urban texture from a multi-perspective angle.

Project is realized in partnership with OKC Abrašević/Abart from Mostar (BiH) and MINA from Lubljane (SLO) in the framework of the project Amnezion supported by European Cultural Foundation (ECF).

Bojan Mucko (1983, CRO), studies on Animation and New media Department at Academy of Fine arts in Zagreb. For the last few years he has been engaged with urban-anthropological issues, reviewing the disciplinary boundaries of cultural anthropology through interdisciplinary projects with civil society organizations, designers, architects and contemporary artists. He has worked with Design studio Kancelarija [Office] and Udruga za interdisciplinarana i interkulturalna istraživanja (UIII) [the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research] on designing bulletin boards, in cooperation with a local committee in the district of Maksimir and a workshop of architectural interventions in the Special Hospital for Children with Neuro-Developmental and Motor Disorders (Goljak) organized by the organisation Beautiful Hospital and the youth section of the Architects’ Association (DAZ). Occasionally he writes for the architectural magazine Oris, and his works have been published in Zarez and the monthly magazine of the Association of Croatian Architects, Man and Space. He is the leader of the project for urban culture – ReS uRBANAE – under the auspices of the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research (UIIII), which focuses on urban-anthropological research on the phenomenon of massive closures and the decay of city and private business spaces, and, thematically, of the entire urban axes in the wider centre of Zagreb.