Dora Ramljak    
About    
CV

Quicksilver: Closed Circuit Currencies
Installation, video, database, nanotechnology, research paper, 3d print
(2023, ongoing.)







Being ill appears to be a de facto resistance to the established social order, to capitalist production and subsequently to the engendering of material relations between humans.

Project deals with concept of {auto) immunity in present state of democracies. Observing immunity as a legal concept first conjured in ancient Rome, where it functioned almostexclusively as a political and juridical term. “ Self-defense” is defined as the first “natural right.”Autoimmune diseases are observed as conditions in which the organism fails to recogniseparts of itself as its consecutive parts, and therefore starts attacking its own cells. 
This behaviour of cells can be reflected in current state of politics as law protects itself through practicing violence in order to keep a level of homeostasis, to prevent violence. 
Autoimmunity is a paradox that can teach us how engaging in self-defence mechanisms is an act of preventing co-existance of different bodies in the shared space and time.

The work focuses on observing natural habitat of fish in the Adriatic Sea, and conducting a case study that examines levels of heavy metals in fish tissues. The Adriatic is a personal choice as my family has relied on fishing as income. Heavy metals can induce autoimmunity in people and alter immune responses in fish. 
I observe the fishing industry in comparison between the borders of two countries, Italy and Croatia, to understand the respect each has for the way fish and marine environment is treated. I examine the levels of heavy metals to understand the trends of movement and possible futures of this relatively healthy sea. 

The levels of heavy metals speak of migration as their presence in tissues is correspondent to their presence in seawater.I wonder, how does culture of food, of consumption of fish speak of our possibilities to develop different relationships to the environments our nurture comes from.

 What can a teeth tell about our consumption habits, and how can a teeth function as a memory of a human? How can my research protect the sea that brought me food to plate? It is a quest of artistic/biological action and field study where a teeth functions as a data drive of information, and is powered by the energy of the sea. 

Installation consisting of self made bioreactor where Microalgae biomass serves as the energy source of the processor. Processor  contains research data on fish migration and toxicity as well as offers possibility for storing personal medical data in a protected manner.









Exhibited at Fabrica Research Centre, part of grop exhibition Blooming in Embers



Sensory Body: Researching Self through Community


installation,  workshop series, design  
(2023, ongoing.)
Graduation catalogue


 KABK Graduation Show 2023.



I used to hide in a shell of facts and feelings, unable to process them, and my body became tiny but it carried a lot of weight. I lost the ability to connect and just lived in my own reality, but then I started feeling my body again, a little bit. This project emerged from the necessity to heal my perception of my own body.

Sensory room, a tool used in the treatment of neurorisk-impaired people, people with cognitive disabilities, and mental illnesses opens as a place for exploration of the limits of individual bodies. Care is allowed to become subjective, individual, collective, and un-hierarchical as body experiences differ from person to person. The sensory room is snapshot of viewer’s bodily experience in time and space constantly changing as it encounters the others.

The room is a tool for accessing the body, it functions in the urban,the city, institutional, or individual spaces. By creating a room-project based on elements of sensory integration, the design of sensory elements derived from natural forms is facilitating the adaptation of institutions to the outside world. The elements are mobile and together they can form a sensory room or be used individually.

Each element is designed and hand made, with help from various workshops and people, to who I am deeply thankful for.

The space should not be an obstacle to providing assistance to those in need, to anyone.

Sensory room extends in a form of a public sensory  workshop, where use different techniques to enable focusing on senses and  disrupts the regularity in which we inhabit the city. Engaging in play in collective and urban spaces, establishes an institution where re-claiming individual bodies trough re-discovering our body memory is possible. 

The city becomes a space whose potentiality shifts as knowledge of our own body deepens.




Textile Workshop; creating Hanging Garden

    
           
Photographs marking eash step of research and creation of sensory elements

Workshop Marinating led by artist Trang Ha during  KABK Graduation Show 2023. held in designed sensory room with hand made ceramic pieces.





RE-Inhabiting Movement
Audio-visual essay; 2023.






Photographic research and audio essay into people’s movement in public spaces focused towards how they perceive the space around them. Care, listening and senses become guidelines in the process of re-shaping and re-establishing care practices. The institution, the city, the body. In everyday moments, everyday actions and interactions, or at the set meeting moment in the city, understanding ingrained behaviours and how institutional spaces compress our body knowledge compromising on individual well being in order to ensure productivity. Using the same framework of an institution as a point of critique as well as the point of change, city and movements it contains are stopped and compared. Not tapping into criticism but constructivism. Individual vs the collective. Care vs capitalism. City as institution vs city as a collective.

29.09.2023 Mostra: GRISIAyouth 2023 Competition Winner, Rovinj, Croatia



Sensory Diet


Interactive website, toolbox (2024, ongoing.)
https://sensorydiet.cargo.site/


Sensory Diet is a versatile tool designed to facilitate sensory exploration and integration within urban spaces. Inspired by the plasticity of modernist architecture, the box transforms solid architectural structures into pathways of sensory discovery.





Ripping Footnotes




Ripping Footnotes is a series of public space initiatives and platform for artistic research. A nomadic platform hosted by different spaces and organizations.
The workshop(s) become a space for mutual learning and decentralizing how institutional education is centred around hierarchy; a learning from top-down shaped for able-bodied bodies.
A space where re-claiming individual bodies is possible, but only in the creation of a collective body. A space for artistic research in its presence and after-digestion through dialogue.
The focus on re-sensing urban space becomes a method of deinstitutionalising care and learning in form of public drawing and sound workshops. 
Each workshop is centered around listening as a method of caring and drawing as a method of slowing down. At times, we invite guest artists to participate to share their practice and learn together.
The act of slowing down in urban landscapes is considered as regressive, dysfunctional, yet it is the act of listening to one‘s own body and understand its relation to an environment. Play contradicts the intention of functionality as it is often considered an intuitive action without purpose.

A-topical spaces are described  as places that do not have a reconsidered purpose or function and so, play becomes a purposeful space for resistance to re-think learning as a fluid process without one fixed origin or end.

05.08 at Beautiful Distress, Amsterdam, Netherlands

01.05-02.05
at De Vrolijkheid, Almere, Netherlands

17.03
at Atelier de Kunstvlieg, The Hague, Netherlands

17.02-18.02
at the Grey Space in The Middle, The Hague, Netherlands








Growbox

    installation,wet plate emporium,
    plexiglass engraving growing booth, (2023.)



Exhibited at The Grey Space In The Middle, The Hague, Jan 2022.
UNFOLDING TERRITORIES: Co-creating Through Cartographies of Care
organised by the Cockroach Collective.


We have created a world so sterile, so senseless.
We have lost our connection to the larger ecological environment. In October of 2021 I planted a specific type of garlic crop, Istrian Red Garlic, in the Netherlands. The Association of Producers of Istrian Garlic was officially founded with the aim of granting EU protection status for this specific crop. This is where my interest arose.

I planted the significant clove in a way that disregards its specialty, and it grew, better thanI could have ever imagined.
I am fascinated by light. It escapes every intention to be controlled. It is always following its path and we are fooled when we think the opposite.

For a long time we have subjugated those around us, organisms, phenomena, laws. This is where the story begins, a story that is taking place in a box. This is the place that tracks time, every day and every night, it tracks the concept of time as well as simple process of growth. . 
This is the story that opens questions about control, how we are controlling the environment trough artificial shortcuts, but still relying on natural laws. We are working for it and against it. This is an intervention in the organic space, it disrupts the natural order but on the other hand it provides life, it can stimulate change.                                

                                 

The project is brings together installation, photography and spatial experience. Growbox, the home of blossoming garlic acts as a tool for production of images as light sensitive chemicals are fixed on the changeable glass plates in order to track light transitions. The process of applying gelatine on glass becomes a pillar for understanding human persistence in materialising light rays, and observing how filtering certain light frequencies affects both chemicals, their shade of blue, and growth of garlic. This work offers a dialogue between the audience and the light, it allows the audience to understand their position in the work and how without them, this process would be left in the dark.









Also exhibited at: SúnPoíēsis: from Ego- to Eco-Centrism through Art




Grain
    Installation, live set,soundscape, essay;
    (2021.), In collaboration with Andrejs Poikaans.







The inability to understand language trough which one is being accused of empowers the inability to claim one’s own rights and opens questions about the right to stay silent. In collaboration with Andrejs Poinkaans, I undertake the task of dealing with perception of human speech and examining proprieties of its manipulation due to its audible base.

Complete silence can never be achieved as internalised noise from engraved social patterns is formulating our thoughts and feelings. Therefore, I aim to create silence by using sound.

Relying on interference of sound waves to produce silent spots conditioned the organisation of sound carrying objects in the space. In that sense, the deconstruction of power structure and punishment, created trough objects and spatial design, stands in contradiction with the content of sound itself.

Placing the speakers in the metal object embodying the shape of corn can serve as a reference to my personal heritage. As a child, the stories we listened to often spoke about kneeling on the corn if you acted in a wrong way, if you spoke when you weren’t supposed to, punishment indeed. In this sense, sound of voice coming from these objects once is punished, but the person who is punishing is on the same level as the speakers, power is contained in each individual.

The installation is a provider of the space for self reflection and acknowledgment, for further interventions.




Exhibited at Echo, group exhibition.Brønshøj Water Tower, Copenhagen





The Centuries of Selves

    video/spatial installation/ 3d rendering/
    photogrammetry (2020./2021.);
    In collaboration with Tang Ha (graphic design).
    Garments provided by Anouk van Kampen Wieling.





Loop video on the subject of community.
What will community be like in the future?
Will it survive the ever growing individualism in the midst of the pandemic and ecological changes?
Will we lose the ability to communicate, to interact and to listen to each other’s words?
Maybe words will stop having meanings. What will remain will be just noises humming into the ears confined by the lonely ambient space.


Landscape inspired by white circles drawn on grass in one of the parks in Rotterdam during the covid-19 pandemic. They are meant to measure safety distance between people sharing the same open public space.





Social Textile
    public space intervention; (2021.); 
    In collaboration with Angelina Nonaj 






Have you ever thought about what kind of social interactions are allowed within the urban environment?
In the current context of the city of the Hague, the urban planning of the public space does not seem to encourage intersection of different cultures and realities.
Therefore, spontaneous encounters are losing their priority in people’s life.
Art is a way to activate critical discourse, help to raise questions, tell stories, show blind spots, invite people to get involved.The possibility of experiencing togetherness, connection and collective empathy is achieved by creating a piece carrying transcultural meaning. In order to represent this idea of safe space and reciprocal trust, we are going to produce an object of everyday use, the carpet, which symbolizes familiarity, comfort and warmth.

Our idea is to bring this object outside, in different neighborhoods of the city, where the “blind spots” of social life reside due its urban solutions. Our intention is to document this process and all the interactions with the help of audiovisual strategies, which will be used as base material for the construction of our concluding work.
The medium of Photography is going to be constantly affected and questioned by this project as it will serve as ground of construction and “matter” for deconstruction of its meaning.

The purpose of this Collaboration is rooted in both our motivation and final goal: to create a possibility of exchange and growth through facing different perspectives on the same matter of concern.








 Internazionale - The Sun Is Red (ft. Loverman)

shot and edited in collaboration with Vixtoria Salomonsen.