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Jadran Resort ~ A Novel in the Landscape is a collaborative project by three artists: Natalija Vujošević, Neja Tomšič, and Tara Langford.
Jadran Resort emerges from the artists' research and reflections, delving into the layered cause and effect relationships between history, landscape, and class positions, with a focus on the multiple horizons these positions project.
The "novel in the landscape" adopts an experimental narrative form, intertwining theater and exhibition formats, fiction, archives, and documents into a speculative construct activated by audience participation. Referencing the immersive experience of a novel, the content is accessed by adopting the role of a specific character, aiming to dissolve the distance between the audience and the story. This approach reveals various layers of a mutating context depending on the perspective from which it is observed.
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In Jadran Resort, the audience enters through stories of an unborn worker of the hospitality class, a cruise ship named "Mr. Satoshi" christened by Margaret Thatcher, a corporation, and a tourist trapped in an endless introspective abyss. These stories and characters arise from the authors' research, travels, interviews, and discussions, with contributions from poet Uroš Praha, whose essay helped shape the corporate character.
The space of Jadran Resort is crafted through a kaleidoscopic interplay of images and stories associated with the Mediterranean experience, elastically tied to the context of contemporary Montenegro. On a transforming coastline and open sea, narratives overlap, intertwine, and diverge in an asymmetrical composition, highlighting our complicity and implicit positions within these processes.
Jadran Resort ~ A Novel in the Landscape is a journey through an active and evolving collection of images, experiences, and moments that, while deactivating the myth of reciprocity, offers a different view of the landscape.
Biographies:
Jadran Resort ~ A Novel in the Landscape is a collaborative project by artists Natalija Vujošević, Neja Tomšič, and Tara Langford, produced by Glej Theatre in Ljubljana in 2023/4.
Natalija Vujošević’s artistic practice emerges from the ruins of society, on the margins of global capitalism—examining the fatal transformation of the “Western Balkans,” neocolonial politics, and the exploitation of natural resources along the Adriatic coast. She is the founder of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Montenegro.
Neja Tomšič’s artistic practice combines research with drawing, video, poetry, and performance, reexamining dominant historical narratives and creating situations where new understandings of the present can form. She is the founder of the Nonument Group, an art collective mapping, archiving, and intervening in monuments, public spaces, and buildings that have undergone changes in meaning.
Tara Langford explores generative modes of storytelling and fiction. She investigates the possibilities and conditions for critical practices and interventions in corporate spaces amidst the wave of neoliberal privatization of creative industries in the UK, since the New Labour era.
