Olga Dimitrijević
area: Theory, Research
Key Facts
nationality
Serbiaarea
Theory, Researchresidence
Belgraderecommending institution
freiraum Q21 INTERNATIONALtime period
June 2016 - June 2016born in 1984, is (still) a Yugoslavian playwright and dramaturg. With the Dramaturgy diploma at Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and finished Alternative course in Women’s studies, her film and theatre reviews were running through Vreme, Teatron, Yellow Cab, Popboks and few other magazines. She participated in many international workshops, seminars and conferences dealing with arts, theory and gender studies. Amongst her published works is also an essay ”It’s all quiet, dear, nobody’s a queer” about queer motifs in Serbian movies and she defended her MA theses “The body of the Female Folk Singer: Constructions of National Identities in Serbia after 2000” at Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest, in 2009. Her play Boarding School was staged in Dadov Theater in Belgrade. The play Workers Die Singing won Heartefact Fund contest for the best contemporary socially-engaged dramatic text in the Serbian language. The play was staged in Bitef Theater (coproduction of Heartefact and Bitef) in 2011 and The Folk’s Play had its premiere in October 2012. Winner of Sterijino Pozorje prize for contemporary play in 2012. She enjoys trashy bars, long morning after night, and high quality hairspray.
I apply for this residence in order to develop my new project, based on lives of exYugoslav women of different generations, who live and work in Vienna. I am sure that the residency program would provide me with time and resources for completing the project.
As playwright and dramaturg, who works a lot on co-relation between storytelling and music, I took interest in how music is connected with cultural identity of diaspora communities. Having partial diasporic experience (I used to live between Belgrade and Berlin for five years), I had the chance to experience the importance of music in shaping everyday life, identities, ways of socializing, nostalgia and affects. Now I want to translate those experiences into the art piece that would be combination of research, writing and video and sound recording.
I would conduct the interviews with women of different generations, who live in Vienna, constructing the conversation around seemingly banal question: what is your favourite song you prefer to sing while chopping onions, that is, what is the music that fills up your domestic sphere in everyday life. Starting from that, the interviewis would cover the topics of: arrival to the country, professional and language challenges, family life, national and other identity... In the next phase, I would use the interviews as the basis for writing a new poem, with lyrics made for the melody of the song the interwieved women named as their most significant. The last phase of the production would include interviewed women themselves performing a newly written song, in front of the camera. Final outcome would be video installation.
The project aims to cover multiplicity of women’s lives, pinpointing the multitude of emotions and lived experiences of Vienna based gastarbeiter women. It will touch upon matters of identity, emotionality and their conectedness with everyday life practices. As their voice is rarely heard, I intend to offer writing and dramaturgical skills to bridge the gap between high culture and arts and everyday lives of gastarbeiter women.