How can a city be “healed and shared”? This is the main question of Mending The Invisible, a series of public interventions and a subsequent performative presentation of the imbroidered map of Ljubljana, which outlines the city as a “common body” and points to its problematic yet intriguing places that seek the communal imagination and care. Created by Ivana Müller and Bojana Kunst together with collaborators, the project was performed during the several days at the Mladi Levi festival in August 2024. The public actions through which the toposes of Ljubljana were mended addressed serious issues such as the coexistence of generations, tourist overcrowding that displaces locals from the city center, the lack of sustainable social housing, and more (yet, the project sought to avoid becoming Procrustean in its activist and political components by amplifying its poetic and humorous approach).
Interview by: Valeriia Buradzhyieva Valeriia: Can you tell us how Mending The Invisible came about and what role the collective aspect played in it?
Ivana: This work is the result of an ongoing conversation that Bojana and I have been having for more than 20 years, as we have been working together since 2002. This conversation takes various forms—sometimes we give talks together, sometimes Bojana’s talks include research about my work, and we have also done some performances together. She has always been a kind of dialoguer for me, also when I was creating my own works. Apart from that, we started preparing Mending The Invisible about two years ago. A little later in the process, we invited Ajda Bračič, Ana Čigon, Urban Belina and Klara Drnovšek Solina.They were also feeding this thinking, this research with ideas and suggestions, and I think that the textuality of the final performance really emerged from all these different inputs. So in terms of authorship, it's a very fluid thing. Bojana and I provided, let us say, the general framework or broad questions and ideas, but the work on it was a collective process.
After the conversations with Bunker and other people who were involved, we started to actually weave this idea of common and how all these stories we gathered are related to the common, and at the same time to the more personal feeling of the city. Intimate, and yet collective, a relation that goes outside of institutional views. We wanted, from the very beginning, to have something that dealt with the notion of mending by containing those stories. And then we thought about the mending actions and about making a new, embroidered map of a “mended city”. Partly, because embroidery is something that takes time, that implies a certain type of meditation or reflection, with repetitive gestures. You get to have plenty of space and time to think and talk about different things if you do it together with others.
Valeriia: It seems to me, that in terms of temporality, Mending The Invisible extends beyond just the interventions and the final performance. Ivana: We wanted to create a work that has a temporality that is not of one single show (I also didn’t want to make a conventional stage piece), that has a temporality of a couple of years, something that will grow roots and develop practices that make possible to engage the local people and goes beyond the times where we are there. The map will hang at Stara Mestna Electrarna, maybe until next year, and then we will come back and do more actions. The embroidered map has places that have been mended in the past, places we have mended through actions, and the places that have not yet been mended, but they are also marked on the map as an invitation to everyone to mend them or to us to continue to mend them in the coming years. The idea is to do it for the five consecutive years, so it becomes almost a kind of a parallel poetic city. And at the same time maybe in five years something really concrete will happen with all that.
Valeriia: It’s not your first time working with textile—I at the very least remember the choreographic piece with the yarn you made a couple of years ago.
Ivana: Yes, Bojana has also written a lot about this idea of weaving. Dramaturgically speaking, we weave with the traits of stories and actions. So this idea of the embroidered map came naturally. You can also see a collective effort on the map: some of the embroidered titles of the different places have left traces of different handwriting, different persons that created this “mended” city together. And in some of the titles there are also spelling mistakes, because they were written by people who do not speak Slovene very well, who may have misspelled something, but we decided to leave it. Because that would not be mending, it would just be correcting. The reality in the city is that there is not only perfectly spoken Slovene, but all kinds of dialects and accents — in a more symbolic way as well. In a way, we see this practice of mending not only as an artistic and poetic work, but also as a social choreography, perhaps even as community work, a certain form of soft activism.
Valeriia: What’s behind the interesting choice of words for the work’s title?
Ivana: Bojana and I were interested and preoccupied with the notion of the common, which is sometimes there and often invisible, and the ideas of repairing and care. And through the conversations about repairing, we came across this word “mending”. “Repairing” was already such a hot term that was used a lot in politics, in the social sciences and in different artistic practices. And we thought, okay, let's not use the word "repair". Let's try to find a more poetic or appropriate term for the kind of practice that we were envisaging. And then we found that mending was a good term because it's more hands on, artisanal, autonomous. It's not really grand and spectacular. And then in Slovene, one way to translate “mending” in the name is “krpanje”, which comes from the action of stitching, stitching together.
Valeriia: Besides inviting people to add to the map, you also encouraged them to contribute to the intervention board near the bookstore on Trubarjeva Street. (This bookshop is visually recognizable by the portraits of 16 well-known men from Slovenia and Serbia on its façade. During the intervention, the project team installed a board near the store entrance in the same colors of the façade near the store entrance with the portraits and names of the representatives of the ecofeminist school that are important to the members of the team - editor’s note). Yesterday I went to check the board and saw that there are now two new names written with the marker—Elda Piščanec and Karla Bulovec. (When I left Ljubljana a week after the end of the festival, Simone de Beauvoir's name also came up on the display - editor's note). Have you seen?
Ivana: Yes, somebody sent me a photo this morning.
Valeriia: Did you have any feedback eventually from the owners of that bookshop?
Ivana: Not really… What is perhaps important to say is that we did not want to “delete” these 16 men. They have been there so long that they have maybe somehow become invisible anyway. By putting the board with the suggestions of women, queer people, and more than humans who have influenced us, we wanted to propose a cohabitation and to revert different paradigms that the images on the façade of the bookshop and their choice contain. These portraits have no names, as if it is presupposed everybody knows them. We decided to put the women's names near their portraits on the display, so they are not anonymous, that we know who they are. Unlike the selection in the bookstore, which consists only of Slovenian and Serbian personalities, our selection is not nationality-based, it's international.
This board is ephemeral. It's quite precarious, a small thing standing there, attached to the street lamp with a bicycle lock. So we don't know how long it will last, but we've left it there, in the public space, for people to care. Bojana once mentioned in our conversation that today care is often left to the professionals—urban planners, architects, cleaning companies, janitors—the specialized people. But actually, the very essence of a community is the fact that its members care or take care. So if you lose the sharing of responsibilities of care within the community, the community disappears. We then just have a bunch of individuals cohabitating, basically just living side by side. And so, by leaving this small display on the street, which belongs to everyone and no one, we decided to trust and see how it goes. And up until this morning, it was still there, it had been there since the morning of the of August 26 when we put it there. Nobody has touched it. And it seems that people have started to write names on it too. It would be great if people understood that it is possible to add names, and then it would kind of accumulate. I think accumulating collectively the photos and the names of possible ecofeminist queer school teachers is much better than accumulating locks on the bridges — when people are celebrating their passage through the city in a very personal, individual way. You know that in Paris the locks are taken down from the bridges every month because it gets too crowded, and the metal is re-used for fabrication pipes and stuff like that. Valeriia: Whose suggestion was it to include Vanga on the board? Whose icon is Vanga? Ivana: Baba Vanga was Bojana’s suggestion. We were reading about some things that she would be doing, like predictions for governments. A socialist witch. Valeriia: What’s the role of walking in this project? Because eventually, the project’s final artistic artifact is a sort of a mental map. Ivana: At the beginning of this process, Bojana and I were thinking through walking. Sometimes, we would go on 15-kilometer hikes together. During those walks we would talk and come up with ideas. So, in a way, a lot of ideas or concepts for Mending The Invisible came about very concretely through the practice of walking.
At first we actually wanted to turn to a form of a walk in the city. But then we decided not to, because it's been already done a lot and this format would make us look for places that could be geographically connected by a walk, so we could basically only work with places in one area, in the city center, or in the outskirts. Also, we thought it would be very hot in summer and that it might be difficult to invite people to such an experience. And by the way, we were right: it was very hot.
So this idea of walking is present in the project in several ways. Firstly, as I have already mentioned, we came to its content partly through the practice of walking. Secondly, there are some mending actions that also involve walking with the group of participants. For example, we did the action with the zoetrope and then immediately went to Trubarjeva Street [to do the bookshop intervention]. We had with us the display board covered with plahta (a piece of white cloth of the same texture and dimensions as the fabric on which we embroidered), which we carried in front of us, and behind us were those who had come to see the action. So it was like a demonstration or a procession. And this afternoon, because it's the last of our performances, we will also go in procession from ŠD Tabor to Stara Elektrarna to hang the map on the wall, where it will hang for a year.
The other level on which walking, or more precisely traveling, is also present is the way we narrate the process in the performance: it's like a journey or a travelog. We “walk” with the spectators through these different actions, through the geography that is partly real, partly imaginary geography that, as you said, corresponds to the experience of travelling. Valeriia: What makes a good intervention for you? Ivana: I think what makes the mending actions interesting is the participation of the spectators/participants: the idea that something collective has happened or can happen. That together we can create an experience of view shifting in a public space, outside the places of representation. It was important to us that the interventions remain poetic, that they do not have inaugural or only political or activist quality. That they also have this quirky side... Internally, we jokingly refer to ourselves as serious clowns. We played with the codes of inaugural actions, but we also transgressed them, we made them an artistic experience. It was important to have the performance afterwards where we could narrate the experiences of actions and propose broder reflections related to the common, invisible or mending. Another crucial moment in the performance was sharing the thoughts on whether the mending that we did worked or not—because this process is not about finding “good answers”, it is more about finding forms that will be kept questioned. And there is also a question whether it is possible to mend certain problems at all. It was very important to listen, to see what was really happening during the actions of mending: we had a plan to do a certain “partition of repearing” in a space and under conditions that we could not control. We could only imagine how it might go. But what really happened was sometimes much more interesting. And that's why we actually only wrote the texts about the interventions after we had made them. So we actually wrote it in a very short time — working on this performance was in itself a performance. But in terms of mending, I think it works if we keep on creating context in which we can imagine collectively. And I think that imagination is a certain form of opening. We live in a world where there is very few places for freedom because we are very formative all the time. We are very surveyed, observed, also in terms of language — people are influenced by this economic, neoliberal context. I think that using poetic languages and opening doors for the imagination creates a more autonomous view on the realities around us. When we do these actions, we are also changing things in that sense as well. Valeriia: This explains beautifully why what you try to mend is invisible. Ivana: Yes, but it’s something fundamental, super important. Valeriia: And there's a song that marks each walk. Ivana: Yes, the songs we sang were like milestones in every intervention. It was nice to sing because it's very joyful, but also a bit silly. And the lyrics are kind of relaxed and perhaps humorous, even if they refer to the real questions we were asking about the problems we were mending in the actions. Valeriia: And is the motif traditionally Slovene? Ivana: Ah, do they sound folkloristic to you? No, thay are original songs. I invented the melody, and Bojana, Ajda, Ana and Urban wrote the lyrics.
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Ivana Müller is a Croatian-born artist, choreographer and theater maker based in Paris. Her works have been presented at major festivals and venues across Europe, including the Festival d'Automne in Paris, HAU in Berlin, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. Through her choreographic and theater work (performances, installations, text works, video-lectures, audio pieces, guided tours and web-works) she re-thinks the politics of spectacle and spectacular, re-visits the place of imaginary and imagination, questions the notion of "participation", investigates the idea of value and its representation, and keeps on getting inspired by the relationship between the performer and the spectator.Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturge and performance theorist. She is a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. She was a researcher at the University of Ljubljana and a guest researcher at the University of Antwerp (2002). She was a DAAD guest professor at the University of Hamburg (2009 - 2012). Her research interests are contemporary performance and dance, art theory, political theory and philosophy of contemporary art. She is in the international editorial board of Performance Research and Maska. Her latest books are Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, Zero Books, London, 2015 (in Slovenian, English, Polish and Danish) and The Life of Art. Transversal Lines of Care, Ljubljana, 2021 (in Slovenian and German 2023).
Valeriia Buradzhyieva is a curator and researcher from Berdiansk, Ukraine, who has worked with IZOLYATSIA foundation (Ukraine), Wild Theatre (Ukraine) and Milvus Artistic Research Center (Knislinge, Sweden). She is currently finishing a Master’s Degree in Performance Studies at Stockholm University with a thesis on dramaturgies of the endings in contemporary dance. In her projects, Valeriia works around relational aesthetics and psychogerohraphy. She is a co-curator of SONIAKH platform.
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This interview was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union'.