Artist
Dea Botica
Dea Botica (b. 1995) holds a BA in Cinematography and an MA in Photography, which she completed at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Her artistic work uses photography as a medium to explore topics of everyday life, identity, family heritage and tradition. Thus far, Botica’s work has been exhibited at several group and solo shows in Croatia and beyond. She has participated in several residency programmes – most recently in 2021, as part of the European Union art-research project, Island Connect.
Delta Oscar Mike
Delta Oscar Mike charts my two-month voyage on a cargo ship along the shores of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and West Africa. It was a chance to understand – and redefine my relationship to – my family’s seafaring heritage, and at the same time, an opportunity to carve out a place of my own within a male-dominated environment. As the only woman among the crew, my work offers new and personal perspectives on the lives of the seafarers, combining photographs of everyday life at sea with intimate memoirs. When decoded from NATO’s phonetic alphabet – used on ships to communicate more effectively, – the seemingly unrelated words "Delta, Oscar, Mike" spell out DOM, which is the Croatian word for “home”. The complexity of the relationship between ship and home is reflected in contrasting motifs of a maritime landscape and the interior of a cargo ship. In the form of an anti-logbook, fragments of everyday life join contradictory representations of the ship as both an intimate and a mundane space.
This year, we selected a group of artists working in the broader regional context whose artistic practices cover a variety of visual approaches we’d like to support through Organ Vida programs. Sanja Bistričić Srića experiments with different techniques of deconstruction and decontextualisation of archived images. The work of Filip Bojović and Pavo Marinović reflects on the visual language and heritage found in the context of the Balkans. Dea Botica revisits family maritime tradition through a speculative documentary depiction of everyday life on a cargo ship. And Fred Mungo captures the mundane experience of serving and eating food as means of understanding social, economical and cultural implications of food consumption.