Throughout history, art colonies were created with the aim of establishing a critical departure from established social and artistic norms. Starting from the famous Barbizon School, through the Bauhaus and experimental educational models such as "Black Mountain College", all the way to post-war communes and contemporary residences, artists organized themselves outside the centers of power in times that required a reaction to the prevailing academic, market and political circumstances. Their function was also to provide conditions for experiment, exchange and failure, which was often impossible in formal frameworks.
The Barbizon school and the principles on which it was created, from today's perspective can be read as naive (or even banal), since it was about painting outside (painting directly in nature, with the intention of recording the immediate experience of the observer). However, in 1830, when the school was founded, the famous Paris Salon and its jury considered it unthinkable to find paintings in exhibitions that consider the landscape as a self-sufficient and independent motif. Representations of landscapes were acceptable only if they appeared within the framework of history painting, a popular form of artistic expression after the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. Everything else represented a scandal, which Theodore Géricault felt best on his own skin with the famous On the raft of jellyfish.
photo: katarina soskic...
Charles Baudelaire described the rigidity of the Salon as a parade of finery and excesses of bourgeois stupidity.
The movement that was apparently dedicated to freeing the ossified norms of painting was only a sleeve of smoldering political discontent, and the turn to the pastoral and the peasants can be much better understood in the context of the revolution of 1848 and the so-called spring of the people.
Colonies, therefore, do not arise from an excess of freedom, but from its lack.
photo: katarina soskic...
ENTRY INTO THE WORLD
Therefore, it should not be surprising that the oldest colony in this area was founded by Nadežda Petrović, a great painter and fighter who did not shy away from taking her students out of class for protests, organizing protest choirs across Serbia and finally laying down her life as a nurse for her principles. The colony in Sićevo was created as a Yugoslav colony, with the aim that the participants "paint in the open air, study Serbian folk customs, exchange opinions and experiences."
In recent decades, art colonies have been reduced to functioning by inertia, with modest support from institutions, often maintaining a conservative stance on plein-air painting, which seems completely grotesque 121 years after Nadezhda's artistic revolution.
"Mokrin House Art Colony" is an exception in this sense. Bearing in mind the media practice and the international activity of the mentor - Marina Marković, through performative practices of exploiting her own skin, penetrates deep into the field of biopolitics; Ivana Ivković uses the male body as a performative medium; Šejla Kamerić gained international fame through her work Bosnian girl, reacting to the misogynistic graffiti written by a member of the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica during the war for the Yugoslav heritage, while Saša Tkačenko deals with space and the transformation of architecture - the colony in Mokrin decisively departs from the romantic notion of artists withdrawing from the world in order to produce "pure" art from a distance and perform from much-needed critical positions.
At a time when the art scene is under multiple pressures, deprived of a legal and legal framework for funding from the private sector and ostracized by the state, any attempt to move the artistic practice outside the dominant matrices of party art acquires a subversive political dimension.
POLITICIZATION OF ART
In this context, we can paraphrase Baudelaire's description and say that "Mokrin House Art Colony" represents an alternative to parading decorations. The need for this practice did not arise due to the absence of institutions, but because they stopped performing their basic function: educating and creating an audience, establishing continuity with progressive practices from the past and working on the visibility of contemporary artistic practices. The long-term neglect of the cultural infrastructure, the absence of a clear cultural policy and the replacement of long-term strategies with short-term projects led to the fact that the responsibility for the survival of the artistic work is shifted to the artists themselves. In this sense, the colony does not offer a solution, but indicates a problem. And precisely in that position lies its specific strength: fifteen young artists had the opportunity (from January 18 to 25) to create works that will be exhibited in the Belgrade gallery "Eugster".
Then we will get the answer whether the Mokrina colony managed to change the dominant attitude towards authority and knowledge. Born and raised in turmoil and instability, young artists resist a hierarchical system in which knowledge is transmitted vertically. At a time when diplomas are bought, owners of roasters are requalified as energy experts by edict, and the world's greatest scientists are bragging about their relationship with Epstein and similar beasts, their relationship to authority is not based on the formal qualifications of mentors, but through reliance on personal experience. Therefore, authority is acquired directly and continuously, with the risk of losing it at any moment.
Sofija Pavković, participant of the colony, doctoral student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, testifies to this: "Staying in Mokrin was a valuable experience for me, first of all because of the people who were sincerely committed and committed to spending that week meaningfully and with quality, from the participants and mentors to the entire team of "Mokrin House". In such an environment, with excellent working conditions and space for open and meaningful conversations, it is easy to gain experiences that prepare for the following steps in artistic practice and career."
In the time of bureaucratization of culture, in which quantitative criteria are used (number of exhibitions, visits, publications and reviews), when the value of a work becomes dependent on its ability to fit into existing formats, and not on its critical or experimental strength - "Mokrin House Art Colony" represents a place that brings back into focus the question of the meaning of artistic work, while neglecting the realization of norms following the example of Alija Sirotanović. Exchange of experiences, joint work and informal conversations become an integral part of artistic practice. The focus shifts from the product to the process, from individual affirmation to collective reflection. At a time when artists are forced to constantly produce evidence of their own relevance, this shift has clear political weight.
photo: katarina soskic...
PROFESSIONAL AGORA
The wider social context additionally reinforces this aspect: the generation that enters the field of art today forms its aesthetic and political positions in an atmosphere of deep mistrust towards institutions. This does not mean rejecting knowledge or experience, but rejecting hierarchical models that have lost credibility. Horizontal forms of organization and joint learning become a way of articulating that distrust. In this sense, the colony takes over the models of current political practice, not declaratively but actively, through the way of organizing work.
The question that "Mokrin" raises is not whether this model makes sense, but why it is still an exception. The reason is probably hidden in the fact that such spaces are not easily integrated into the existing mechanisms of cultural policy. They require trust, long-term planning and strategic determination of the state. If art colonies today have a meaning, then they have it only under this condition: that they do not serve as an aesthetic expression of apoliticality, but as a professional agora. "Mokrin House Art Colony" hints that such an approach is possible. And we know for whom all this is a problem.
