Pascal Thevenet : The City of Valence has this particularity, for the appel for contemporary art projects, of proposing a phrase, a locution. For 2022, it is « l’espace d’un instant ». How do you, artist, receive this orientation?

Damir Radović: I found it interesting that every time there is a sentence¹. That’s what pushed me to respond to start building a project. The sentence was the trigger and persuaded me to think about it even before I knew the conditions of participation. My artwork, viewed from a certain angle, could fit the proposed phrase. Even if the title of the exhibition is now different, the central work, created for this event, evokes the space of an instant when everything changes or can change. To change the world in a second is when a story becomes stories. An instant, it is uncertain like the art and the world in which we live.

P.Thevenet: You have experienced a war. Your work, taken as a whole, reminds me of the remnants of your experience: fragmentations, slogans, glimmers, disorders. What can you say about it?

D. Radović: Yes, I have experienced peace, war, exile… I have become a fragment of something that no more exists, like a nameless gem. A diaspora. So I try to put order in the disorder. Words in slogans. History in the stories. Territory in territories.
There is an example, the pomegranate, this fruit, enclosed in a single skin, also evokes « destruction and death ». Why? In order for its seeds to spread, the pomegranate itself dislocates because it needs to burst to ensure its descendants.
For me, the transmission of memory is very important. I use the collective memory of cinema, literature, history, geography… These are the data, the disseminations of reality.
I research an act of permanent manifestation, a way for me to fight daily against amnesia, by inviting to the reflection.
As an artist, I want to express my opinions as much as my unsuccessful attempts to change the life of the society we live in.

Personally, I can’t change the course of events. I can only offer to other people a little dose of cynical humor at the crossroads. As an actor in this boring world to live in, I try to alleviate this chaos with my artistic contribution.