Adventures of a Dreamcatcher

"Dream Catcher" is the name of the exhibition of comic books by Aleksandar Zograf dedicated to dreams (cinema "Balkan"). Zograf is one of the most respected European (and therefore worldwide) creators of comics, a regular author of "Time", an artist who found his expression relatively quickly, but continued to change, upgrade and deepen his style. "Capturing" dreams is one of his graphic constants, and "Dream Catcher" is the third exhibition he works with Stevan Vuković - after "Styrian Autumn" in 2003 in Graz and "O3ONE Gallery" in 2017 in Belgrade - a philosopher who, as he says for himself, "writes texts about art and works as a self-proclaimed curator".

"WEATHER" Aleksandre, dream and wake up, in your comics, sometimes they distinguish only because the narrator tells us that it is a dream. To what extent is the difference between reality important to you?, dreams and imagination, or everything is equally good material to create?

RAKEZIC: I understand working on comics basically as shaping the story. Unlike, say, a fiddler, I use words and drawings, while a fiddler uses poetry and the monotonous sound of an instrument, but basically we are driven by the same effort to tell a story. I realized many years ago that an event that took place in "waking" reality and what we experienced while dreaming can leave an equally strong impression. This implies that stories based on reality and dreams have an equal chance of stirring our feelings. However, when it comes to sleep, there is also a special excitement, since dreaming has an aura of mysterious, shadowy, something that is vague, but certainly causes a kind of strange chill. Technically, there is no big difference in describing real events and those seen in a dream, and it is one of the topics that has occupied creative people in various time and geographical frames. In my comics, I sometimes deal with dry reality, sometimes my approach is almost reporter-like, I describe the places I've visited, but my dealing with dreams in the comics is often just a reportage from the dreaming dimension, I try to be an objective observer without additional fantasizing.

photo: bojan janić

Stevane, one gets the impression that there is no reality in Zograf's comics (ontological) advantage over sleep. If that is so, how it is reflected in the drawing, in the comic book?

VUKOVIĆ:U Dream interpretation, in the chapter entitled "Method of Dream Interpretation", analyzing his own dream about a patient named Irma, Sigmund Freud wrote that "every dream has at least one place where it is unfathomable, like a kind of umbilical cord by which it is connected to what remains unknown". Zograf, in his confessionally formatted graphic narratives in the first person, created as a testimony of the visual content of his own dreams, leads us to exactly those points. For example, in the two-page comics presented at the exhibition, such as "Scenes from Half-Sleep", "Hypnagogic Moment", "Hypnagogic Mirror", "Hip, Hip, Hypnagogia!", "Hypnagogic Shadows", "Hypnagogic Rust" and "Hypnagogic Dimension", after one or only a few introductory frames on the first page, in which the narrator expresses some of his general thoughts about visions from the state of half-sleep, the composition breaks down into a series of non-sequentially arranged shots, without a clearly discernible cause-and-effect flow, and often without words, but only with numbers indicated by the dates when the dream catcher managed to fix the scenes shown there with a drawing. This is where the language of the comic narrative becomes fragmented, producing a kind of "affective excess".

What is affective surplus??

VUKOVIĆ: This term refers to elements that (in the visual representation) exceed or disturb the narrative logic and symbolic order. These elements produce an immediate sensory, emotional or physical reaction in the viewer. In this way, the observers themselves interpret what they see, and the artist keeps for himself the function of a mere witness of unconscious processes in the work of sleep. Therefore, he does not present to the readers and viewers of the comic book products of his imagination, but graphic testimonies charged with affect, for the connection and contextualization of which they must use their own imagination. An even more radical example is his graphic cues in the space between frames. Symbols are, namely, abstract symbols (e.g. a light bulb for an idea, a heart for love, drops of sweat for nervousness or tension, the letters 'Zzz' for sleep), and issued are expressive lines or cues (eg lines of movement behind a running character to show speed, or lines emerging from the head to indicate surprise or shock). Zograph's graphic signs that appear between frames do not signify or express anything. They simply exist there, resisting meaning and forcing an effort to think about comics as a medium.

Aleksandre, you often make comics out of photos. Why photos??

RAKEZIC: Those photos are mostly from flea markets, so I don't really have a pre-prepared explanation of who these people are, what their life history is, and the like. But it is not difficult to conclude that these are photographs that record emotional moments from someone's life, you can guess their imaginations, perhaps - what impression they wanted to leave on their surroundings, and the like. Humanity is universal and recognizable in its manifestations - I just try to, thinking about all this, create a new framework, to breathe new life into those scenes that the photo camera recorded many years ago (I mostly use old photos, they are more interesting and expressive than those from recent times). I probably unintentionally created some kind of new genre - there was a photo-comic for a while, but that's something else. One of my favorite found-photo comics came about when I asked a friend in Japan to send me some turn-of-the-century portrait photos he'd picked up at a flea market there. After that, I found photos from my own collection showing local people from the same period. In the end, I placed them all next to each other in the comic. It turns out that there are more similarities between people from different backgrounds, even different cultures, than one might think. It's that universal humanity I was talking about…

What makes you think that old photos are more expressive than recent ones? We can also reverse it.: it is precisely the possibility of serial photography that allows a wider range of recording sensitivities...

RAKEZIC: Almost all the photos that became part of my comic stories were created by the end of the sixties, and mostly they are much older, from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the fifties, and the largest number were created in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century. Although at that time it was more difficult to record a photograph than today (you had to buy film, install it in the camera, count on a limited number of shots, and in the end you had to wait for development, and all of this was not cheap for most people. Modern times have greatly facilitated but also devalued the whole process, although the creation of photographic notes has been simplified, cheaper and adapted to almost all situations. Why is this so? How is it that the world of the crisis thirties, for example, visually left far a deeper trace of what arises in today's incomparably more relaxed environment (even if we ignore all the current crises)? I have often discussed this with perhaps the most important creator of contemporary comics, Robert Crumb. He has been in this world for much longer than I have, but we can only conclude that there is no clear answer to that question. I believe that during the twenties and thirties our world was in some kind of focus were happening. Today, every student can without much effort to make perfect photos and I think that this has improved the documentary aspect of that medium the most - in our time, unimaginable moments, details that are missed under normal circumstances have been recorded.

Stevane, The painter moves, it seems, and the limits of what seems clear and self-evident? If reality slips out from under our feet, whether what is usually considered clear also eludes us, unambiguous, clean?

VUKOVIĆ: I don't think that he escapes us from what we routinely perceive as reality, but only presents it as a kind of fiction accepted by socialization which, in fact, conceals from us the much deeper reality of our desires and affects, fears and traumatic truths that the symbolic system (language, society, storytelling) cannot fully process. That deeper reality visits us in dreams but also in reality. As a passionate archaeologist of flea market contents, Zograf constantly finds many strange artifacts, inexorable material witnesses of erased personal and collective histories, which emerged from the garbage cans and reappeared at the flea market, just as dreamlike images emerge from the unconscious and resist suppression. In accordance with his affiliations with the underground and alternative culture, to which he contributed a great deal himself, Zograf's themes are phenomena, people and objects suppressed from the mainstream of history and culture, with which his autographed avatar introduces us. Thus, on the pages of his comics, one finds the characters of anonymous witnesses of wars, aboriginal artists, local personalities, poison grandmothers who believe that their dreams determined their fate, characters who, in fact, very well match the superheroes of the industrialized comic book business. In this sense, although he respects Rancière's principle of equality, Zograf is probably more ethical than overtly political. Perhaps he would even agree with the words of one of our common musical heroes (I haven't asked him yet) that what is served to us as politics in liberal capitalism is only the "entertainment sector of the military-industrial complex" (Frank Zappa).

Aleksandre, Has it ever happened that ethics overpowers aesthetics for you?? Not to draw something for ethical reasons? Or again, to do something for justice, injustice, or something that is outside the sphere of aesthetics? your "Borsk notebooks", let's say... big comic.

RAKEZIC: I created a whole series of World War II themed comics, published under the title Stories from the Second World War (published by Popbooks and the Museum of Yugoslavia), and the second part of this material is being prepared. I think that the publication of those stories was prompted by the desire to understand how an ordinary man survived in such circumstances, how he resisted and the like. These are questions of vital importance and do not concern only rhetorical assumptions. It was during the work on this material that I discovered in the Archives of the city of Pancevo the records of my maternal grandfather and grandmother, who during the occupation were "illegals", members of a secret resistance movement. That's how everything became part of the personal story, even though I didn't even know that these notes about their activities existed. It is interesting that those comic stories were first published in German and Italian, some were also translated into Japanese, that is, in countries that once belonged to the Axis Powers. If you approach these topics honestly, people will understand your intentions.

photo: bojan janić

Your comics are (your boards) sometimes talkative, sometimes without words. When words are needed?

RAKEZIC: I've been drawing comics for as long as I can remember, but I first started publishing newspaper articles when I was still a teenager - so, at least professionally, I have more experience in dealing with words than in shaping a story in pictures. That's probably why some of my comics are packed with text. However, sometimes I like to completely leave words aside and speak only through drawings, as in the comic story "The Lonely Path", which was transformed into one long strip of large format and exhibited in the basement level of the "Balkan" cinema.

Stevane, how do you see the relationship between words and drawings at Zograf??

VUKOVIĆ: In short: this relationship is always dialectical. But not in a Hegelian sense, rather it is a kind of dialectic of parallax, in the sense that the perspectives of the storyteller and the viewer are usually significantly different, and sometimes they even stand in a mutual contradiction that cannot be resolved, let alone overcome. For example, the narrator sometimes expresses, through text blocks and speech bubbles, some very vivid inner reality of the hero, and the viewer contrasts it with the rough, naturalistically presented social reality in which he finds himself, often completely alienated from it. In other cases, the narrator dwells on extremely dry, almost factual comments, while the viewer visually places the protagonist in a world of hallucinatory displays and surreal motifs. And sometimes it works completely without the use of words, as in the case of the comic that is ambientized at the exhibition at the underground level and is called "The Lonely Road". However, even here, the visual representation, in the absence of words, still suggests something captured in the image, and not said in words, as if in fact silenced, which reinforces the split between the mute lonely traveler and the environment that does not touch him in any way.

photo: bojan janić

Aleksandre, your narrator looks a lot like you, but that circumstance is important only to the extent that we problematize the concept of fidelity.

RAKEZIC: A good number of my comics are autobiographical, or based on reflections that have come from personal experience, observation, and the like. It is easiest to tell such stories through one's own character, but in order to achieve that I created a character that is still only cartoon character. So he retains the freedom to be something more than the real "me" that I meet every morning in front of the mirror. Let's say, I once presented myself as an old man with a long beard staring at a drawing board, so what, someone forbid me if possible... I understand myself with a touch of humor, and also as a complex personality (laughs), and drawing allows me to play with all that to my heart's content...

Stevane, to what extent Zograf's comics are universal? Even when he travels around the white world, one gets the impression that he is always interested in detail: window, stone on the church, newspaper, a passerby, view, what is characteristic of that moment and that place...

VUKOVIĆ: The language of comics is globally readable, because comic book authors respect conventions that were created slowly, even over thousands of years, in different cultures, only to be combined in mass-produced and distributed strips and volumes of graphic narratives, which have created their audiences on all continents, since the nineteenth century. That long path leads from Trajan's Column, as a "visual narrative without text", erected in 113 AD, through medieval tapes of speech (banderola), which came out of the mouths of prophets, saints or angels, uttering quotations from the Holy Scriptures and were, according to Hans Belting, "a bridge between the invisible voice and the visible world", all the way to modern comic frames and comic bubbles. In Zograf's interpretation, given in the meta-comic entitled "The Language of Comic Reality", which was realized as part of the project of the University of Greifswald in 2022, the beginning of that process is dated from 12000 to 4000 BC. Thus, the language of comics is not a universal language in the sense of automatic readability, but it has a transcultural potential thanks to its iconography, emotion and narrative structure, which is recognized in most contemporary cultures. For example, Neil Cohn in his 2013 book The Visual Language of Comics even explicitly states that "comics are not a universal language" and are written in visual languages ​​that must be learned". And yet, even though there are visual grammars specific to each comics system (eg American, Italian, Japanese, Francophone), and that readers must be 'literate' within that system to understand comics, comics like Zograf's succeed in most significant comics scenes. because they combine testimonies with personal reflection, in a way that can be universalized to a large extent. In this sense, Zograf's work is most often compared to the works of Marđan Satrapi and Joe Sacco, who also achieved exceptional international visibility thanks to their ability to convey local, often intimate stories through forms that combine a documentary approach and introspective narration, confirming Barbara Postema's claim that "comics as a form are not only a sequential narrative, but a tool for emotional mapping of space and time".

Aleksandre, Approach yourself with humor.. Of course, people who take themselves seriously are usually insufferable. Yet, At what point? "get serious"? Even when they're funny., Your comics are serious....

RAKEZIC: Yes, yes, I actually deal with quite heavy subjects, and I can imagine that it would all be pathetic and gloomy if it didn't contain at least a grain of humor. If you exclude the humor, some serious questions seem a bit wooden, flat, and you run the risk of sounding like a preacher... It seems like a hellish scenario, which I am terrified of and which would leave me no room to enjoy what I do... I think that only fulfillment and striving for some higher justice can make your work meaningful, but you also have to know how to laugh at yourself and your lofty ideals... If I tried to please others, or my own ambitions, I'd probably be a pop singer, not a cartoonist...