Mom is going to Zagreb – Archive of Encounters
Drawing map
Dimensions: 52 x 36 cm
Pencil on paper
2010 – 2014
Mom is going to Zagreb – Archive of Encounters (2012 – 2014) is a work in process which I have started to shape after the birth of my second child, my son Toma. This work is inspired by my thinking about the experience and significance of the encounter with my children, Nola and Toma, and material traces which I have been collecting during the past four years with the purpose of archiving these moments. The title Mom is going to Zagreb is taken from a tiny letter which Nola had wrote to me before my last trip to Zagreb. The letter holds only this one sentence and a tiny heart.
Through the period of my absence from home, most often during my business trips to Zagreb, I bring a small present to my children when I return home. It seems that the little present that they are expecting, which is something I often buy at the bus station before my bus leaves, serves as a remedy to the children, for dealing with the discomfort during the period of separation. In time, Nola and Toma have begun to provide presents to me. I receive their presents usually when returning from a longer absence, but sometimes also on a daily basis, when I come back from work. Lead by their own children’s intuition and thought, children often surprise me with a rock, a handful of grass, a dirty tissue, or a yoghurt’s lid.
I see the presents from my children, which have become frequent signifiers of our encounters, as a specific kind of archive of creating an intersubjective, transitional space in the dyad mother – child, space of recognition and acknowledging the Other and his needs. Encounters and presents are traces of creating our independencies, evidence of a physical separation during which I am often dedicated to my artistic practice, and my children have a chance to create their life experience outside of my maternal practice, care and attention.
Mom is going to Zagreb – Archive of Encounters is expressed in the form of a drawing map, which consists of tonal studies of objects which I have received as presents from the children Drawings are made approximately in scale 1:1, according to the template. This type of presentation has demonstrated it’s advantage over photography and material archive, conisdering that some presents have begun to rot and to decay, and the amateur herbarium scattered all over the library has begun to dwindle. Fragileness of this object is expressed through achromatism of tonal drawing studies, with a minimally stressed contrast of light and dark tones. Currently, map contains thirty drawings that are classified, numbered, and labelled appropriately in terms of when and where the encounter has occured.
Ines Matijević Cakić
