Still from "South Slavic Requiem," courtesy of the artist
Though he was making art when he moved to St. Louis from Belgrade in 1997, it wasn’t until 2007 that Zlatko Cosic tackled the subject of what had brought him to St. Louis in the first place: the war in Yugoslavia.
In January 2014, Gallery 210 featured Cosic’s haunting solo exhibit Still Adjusting, which included video installations and a glass vitrine containing all of the official paperwork and identifications he racked up as he navigated his way out of the Balkans and into the U.S. The show spoke of what it was like to have to constantly shift one’s identity in order to physically survive—or just move through a new, alien culture.
This month, Bruno David Gallery shows Cosic’s video installation South Slavic Requiem, a coda of sorts to the eight years’ worth of work that made up Still Adjusting. Cosic goes home to Europe every summer to see his parents, and during last year’s trip he went looking for the spring that feeds the Cetina River in southern Croatia near the Dinara Mountains. There, he came across a Christian Orthodox Church with an unusual iron bell pull on a chain. (“Usually you’d have a rope with a knot at the end,” he explains.) As he was filming inside the church—the bell pull became the focus—he caught the eerie, sad sound of what sounded like Pan pipes or a shepherd’s flute. He ran outside to find the musician, but he’d disappeared over a hill. Locals pointed out the flute player’s house, and Cosic returned three times before he found the man—who then spent several minutes trying to suss out Cosic’s political sympathies.
“He was so scared,” Cosic says. “He just stood behind the fence and wouldn’t open the gate. He didn’t want to come close to me. Eventually I said, ‘I don’t even live here. I’m a filmmaker…I don’t belong to any of those groups.’ ‘Oh, so you’re kind of nothing, almost?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I like to be. I don’t want to be labeled, or be a part of any hate group.’ He let me into his house and played all kinds of flutes, and all of that got morphed into the soundtrack—that’s the music.”
The piece is a meditation on peace and a lament on the 20th anniversary of the war in the Balkans. Each image of the hook “represents a dead person, a person who emigrated. And the sounds of the flute are a crying voice, and voices from the past,” Cosic says. But that voice is also meant to sound a warning: The hateful nationalistic forces that destroyed Yugoslavia were by no means an anomaly. “This piece is also a cry for the people in this country to not hate each other, to accept differences, to learn from each other,” he says. “To not judge.”
FYI See South Slavic Requiem in the Media Arts Room at Bruno David Gallery (3721 Washington, 314-531-3030, brunodavidgallery.com) October 16–November 14.
And Don't Miss: Harmony in 3
Still from "Harmony in 3," courtesy of the artist
In 2014, choreographer Ashley McQueen created “Laune,” a dance piece that paid homage to the many people who care for the grounds at Laumeier Sculpture Park. (At one point in the performance, dancers acrobatically performed on the bars of riding lawnmowers.) Zlatko Cosic filmed the rehearsals and the outdoor dance concert, which became the catalyst for his video piece Harmony in 3, an “audiovisual symphony celebrating workers, nature, and performers.” In addition to the footage of dancers, he followed the park’s workers every day, capturing not just their actions, but also the sounds of their work, which make up part of the film’s soundtrack. Cosic also shot close-range footage of the grounds in high definition—details of the park’s iconic sculptures and some astonishing nature footage as well. This sometimes required lying on the forest floor for hours, waiting to get the perfect shot of a spider weaving or ant emerging from its hill. “I have so much patience for nature,” he says. “You do have to sit there for hours to find that perfect moment of motion from a bird, or a dragonfly… I collected more than 700 video clips, which is the most I’ve ever done for one piece.” Though he had hours of visually stunning footage, what drove the editing, Cosic says, was sound; sometimes he’d even close his eyes as he worked, allowing sound to dictate the final edit. “I felt like I was building a symphony,” he says. “Halfway through the piece, the music takes over, and they’re all together in harmony.”
Harmony in 3 opens October 15 and runs through February 14 at the Aronson Center in Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12580 Rott, 314-615-5278, laumeiersculpturepark.org.
