Garden of Memory. Site-specific audio and light installation. 800 cm x 700 cm x  350 cm.  2021, Cetinje, Montenegro

Artists: Milica Jankovic, Montenegro; Migle Duncikaite, Lithuania/Finland. Software engineer: Martynas Januskauskas , Lithuania. Sound design and composition: Stefano Sasso, Italy

This house is a temporary zone in which we have created a natural environment, filled with sound compositions, in order to provide to the public a unique interaction with the plants and nature. You may feel amazed because it is a garden in an abandoned house; but upon entering you will have the opportunity to think about your connection with nature, the history of this building, and the space that surrounds it. In the room, some of the plants are already starting to bear fruit, and in the evening, a light installation becomes visible, which, like the sound, responds to your movements. When moving through space, sound recordings are activated, which overlap, complement each other, creating a new composition with each movement. Plants that have been planted: Dogwood (Cornus mas), Red maple (Acer rubrum), Maple (Acer platanoides), Hazel (Cornus avellana) and White ash (Fraxinus excelsior). Biophilia is the love of everything that is alive, growing, and evolving. It is a tendency to affirm life. Our attempts to settle into this new world have fed a hybrid through which nature and technology have become symbiotes, not adversaries. How can we use and develop our techno-biophilic instincts to live well in the digital world? Instead of keeping the virtual and natural worlds separate, we think of them as integrated elements of a unique life in one world. Authors about the work:
“Reshaping the city somehow presupposes a change of consciousness, and that is exactly what happened during the entire process of preparing the terrain, planting trees, grass and making a bench where visitors can rest. The contribution that citizens continue to voluntarily provide by maintaining the plants that form part of the installation in Mijatović's house is a confirmation that through art we can develop a more empathetic approach to what surrounds us, as residents or casual passers-by of this city. Therefore, we invite you to join us on this journey. " We owe special gratitude to the Mijatović family, who gave us this space for temporary use, as well as to the Municipality of Cetinje and the Prince Claus Foundation from Netherlands, which enabled the realization of this project.

About the festival:

Re / Shaping The City is composed of series of site-specific interactive installations in public spaces that, with their content, aim to reshape and modify stereotypes, implementing new ways of seeing and thinking. The mission of the festival is to revive old, abandoned houses in the historical part of the city center of Cetinje and the prison premises in the Bogdanov region, through a new way of perceiving, interpreting and repurposing them. The vision of the festival is to bring artists together from different cultural backgrounds in order to create new spaces of communication and exchange of ideas, suitable for further development of creativity.

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