Interview with Valentina Lacmanović, published in Kontura Art Magazin, no. 121
Croatia, August 2013
“Each culture understands the notion of time and lives it in a different way. Globalization imposes a sort of universal method for measuring it, but we all know it is just a consensus and that the connection with time can only be felt if we allow it ourselves.”
There are fewer and fewer artists whose work makes the observer feel entirely present in a given moment, creating an open window
for reflection. Many works of art resemble newspaper articles or TV reports, absorbed in the world of media under the excuse of
social engagement and many artists find themselves drowned in hyper production of the contemporary art scene. It is more and more difficult to find artists who are still in touch with intemporality
and in whose silence of work are hidden the entire stories – which is far from case where the artists’ statement remains their only story, used as an excuse for the shallowness of their work. These real artists are usually discreet, absorbed in their art somewhere far from media over exposure. One of these artists is dancer and performer Valentina Lacmanovi , who for years has balanced on the border of her artistic and geographic existence. Zagreb was the starting point for her journey where her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy met Oriental philosophies. She left Zagreb for Paris to study at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts and finished her studies in philosophy with a Masters at University Paris 8. All this knowledge will eventually pour into her acting and dance career in France, Spain and the Netherlands. From oriental dance techniques, to whirling dervish, combined with contemporary dance and performance practice, the expression of this artist is like a solid centre through which permeate her multiple professional and personal experiences on a meditative level.
Within her dance performances – and lately more often art performances – east and west merge and bring to western contemporary art that feeling of interconnection that only art and nature can give.
Even if more present on the dance scene, this artist showed in December 2012 in the “Bacva” gallery (HDLU Mestrovic Pavilion, Zagreb) the art performance “From Zero to One”. In the white circular space, on the grey floor were written with a thick white chalk the following words: body, word, silence, key, breath, water, thought, world, consciousness, history, letter…in Glagolitic, Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic writing, each script recalling different historical phases of the soil on which the hypnotic Pavilion Mestrovic was built. Turning slowly around herself, but also moving first in large, then progressively smaller and faster circles, using her spinning technique, and in her white dress, Valentina Lacmanovic created an atmosphere where the repetition and sensation of the performance builds itself directly from the static of white walls. She achieved a union of monumental and ritual, static and dynamic as well as of limitation and openness of the space.
Observing from above in the circular first-floor gallery “Prsten”, the audience could not see the feet of the performer – she seemed to levitate in the air, like an oracle that erases and builds the world around herself and herself within it.