slide show performance, 25 E6 color slides, 12 min, 2018

Bora Ćosić wrote ‘The Tutors’ from 1972 to 1977 in Belgrade. Ćosić, as many other artists at that time, was silenced by the Yugoslavian regime. His books had disappeared from the bookstores, his plays were taken off the schedule and he was critizised in newspapers for his destructive and hostile writing style.

In this rejected situation, in a state of joyful loneliness, he devoted himself to the “proletariat” of language, the counter-language of ordinances, ways of speaking, letters, all the prefabricated phrases, these tutored languages and inserted them into the events of his family chronicle, which begins in 1828 and ends with him as an author in 1977.

The slide show Anna Hofbauer reads Bora Ćosić ‘The Tutors” is composed of slides taken during various trips to countries of former Yugoslavia and the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The text is an assemblage of short excerpts from the book ‘The Tutors’ by Bora Ćosić.

Three short text passages from three different chapters of “The Tutors” are vocally interpreted according to the different writing styles and range from a hard cut officials’ intonation to a staccato of nonsense rhymes and end in an exhausted matter-of-fact descriptive tone.

The slide projection is arranged in alphabetical order, which creates a random order of places and countries in a strict system. A system undermined – again – by the language, as German and Serbo-Croatian namings are chosen by chance.

Albania (landscape, 2002)

Bosnia Herzegovina (river, 2017)

Crna Gora (man at platform, 2013)

Dunajuvaros (swimming pool, 2004)

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