Artistic works by Livio Badurina, Tanja Draškić Savić, Tanino Liberatore, Milomir Kovačević Strašni, and Antonija Rusković Radonić showcased in Pula’s galleries, a birthday celebration with Rambo at Portarata, and performances honoring the ship Galeb and the poetry of Aljoša Pužar

The theme of this year's 30th Book Fair(y) in Istria - the festival of books and authors in Pula is the Microcosmos. Taking place from November 29 to December 8, the theme extends to numerous programs beyond the literary stage of the House of Croatian Homeland War Veterans (DHB) in Pula. The microcosmoi of artists will be presented at the Fair through exhibitions featuring the powerful manuscripts of the actor Livio Badurina, the artistic photographer Tanja Draškić Savić, the comic book master Tanino Liberatore, the photographer Milomir Kovačević Strašni, and the academic painter Antonija Rusković Radonić in the following Pula's galleries: Vincent iz Kastva, the House of Croatian Homeland War Veterans, Pula City Gallery, Makina and Cvajner. The audio-visual performance of ‘Propulzor: Partitura za brod Galeb’ (Propulsor. Partitude for the Ship Galeb) will be held at the Istrian National Theatre – a city theatre in Pula, while Aljoša Pužar will transform his poetry into a performance at the Red Salon in the House of Croatian Homeland War Veterans. During the celebration of the Fair's 30th anniversary, the global mega star Rambo Amadeus will perform at the Portarata Square.

Everything begins this week: the announcement of the grand anniversary of the Fair will take place right before the event during the Theatre Night on November 16 at 7 p.m. in the Vincent iz Kastva Gallery at the Istrian National Theatre, where the first Fair exhibition, ‘Dnevnik glumca: Pokusna dvorana /prostor nastajanja i nestajanja’ (The Diary of an Artist: Rehearsal Hall / the Space of Becoming and Disappearing) by Livio Badurina, will open under the theme ‘The Microcosmos’ in partnership with the Istrian National Theatre. The theatrical artist Livio Badurina, the actor and the drama principal of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (HNK), who collaborated with the Pula’s Fair through numerous opening programs in which he performed—has recorded all of his theatrical productions since 2008 and has compiled these records into the video installation exhibition called ‘Pokusna dvorana/Prostor nastajanja i nestajanja’, and a part of his series ‘Dnevnik jednog glumca’. The exhibition was first premiered in March this year at the Zagreb’s HNK, the project’s producer, and later at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. Now, the Pula audience, too, will get to see Badurina's work. The mentioned exhibition features video works of photography intertwined with video captured both with camera and mobile phone during the production of Tomaž Pandur’s ‘Medea’, Eduard Miler’s ‘Oedipus’, Ivica Boban’s ‘They Shoot Horses, Don't They?’ (I konje ubijaju, zar ne?), Ozren Prohić’s ‘Kraljevo’ and Matija Ferlin’s ‘We are Kings, not Humans’ (Mi smo kraljevi a ne ljudi).

“What did he see while the stage ambient was being created, in which he himself would be glazed upon?”, Leonida Kovač asks herself in the essay accompanying the exhibition, and among other things, notes: “Judging by the Diary, there is no empty space for Livio Badurina, nor a boundary dividing the stage, whatever its form, from something that it is not. The space visible in his diary-like visual essays is saturated to the extreme with diverse micro-situations generated by the encounters and human misalignments, recorded words, and all sorts of things. From scraps of paper, wall tiles, and animal masks to computers. Thus, each sequence of perceived flashes articulated in the Diary raises numerous questions about the places, levels, and registers of drama’s events. About the scenicity beyond the stage and the migrating particles that inhabit living bodies, temporarily metamorphosing them into written, directed, or choreographed characters. About the imprints that suddenly surface as memories, which, existing within a peculiar temporality, become uncertainty themselves.”

During the entire 30th Book Fair, a great exhibition of authors’ portraits recorded by the long-time Fair collaborator, the artistic photographer Tanja Draškić Savić, will be displayed in the Café Mozart and the hall of DHB. The exibition titled ‘Tanjini portreti’ (Tanja’s portraits) presents around forty black-and-white portrait photographs of authors captured by Tanja Draškić Savić as the Fair’s photographer since 2013. Tanja Draškić Savić, using her camera has, among other things, preserved in time the moments when the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the Syrian poet Adonis, and the illustrator and designer Mirko Ilić arrived to the Pula Book Fair. 

As part of the program for the 30th Book Fair, on Tuesday, December 3, at 9 p.m. in the Pula City Gallery, the renowned Tanino Liberatore, a star of European comics, the creator of ‘RanXerox’, and a distinguished figure in contemporary art, will present his works titled ‘Fragmenti kaosa’ (The Fragments of Chaos). The exhibition is part of the Fair’s Storie italiane / Strip Strasse program, curated by Paola Damiano and Nicoletta Rondinella, who are coming to Pula from the renowned International Pop Culture Festival - Napoli Comicon. Tanino Liberatore, known as the Michelangelo of Italian comics, introduces himself to the audience at the exhibition ‘Fragmenti kaosa’ through "a mirrored interplay between past and present: Tanino Liberatore of the ’70s and ’80s, who was just starting his journey in the ninth art as a provocateur, dreamer, and experimenter, but at the same time, its captivator who stubbornly and minutely explores the perfection of a line—and today’s Liberatore, a refined illustrator who offers for the audience’s gaze decayed yet stunning women, erotic and provocative, but also damned and powerful, after years of reflection, digital drawing, and the embrace of influences from other forms of art".

On Wednesday, December 4, at 9 p.m., Milomir Kovačević Strašni, one of the most renowned photographic chroniclers of Sarajevo and a multi-award-winning photographer who has lived, since 1995, in Paris, will present his exhibition ‘Sarajevo 80-ih’ (Sarajevo of the 80s) at the Makina Gallery. In the catalogue’s text of the exhibition, titled ‘Osamdesete’ (The Eighties), the journalist and publicist Boro Kontić—whose show paved the road to fame for ‘Top lista nadrealista’ (The Top List of the Surrealists) —explores the roots of the iconic 1980s in Sarajevo. He clasifies Milomir Kovačević Strašni’s photographic records within the cultural milestones of the 1980s in Sarajevo and Croatia. Among these are Emir Kusturica’s film ‘Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell’ (Do You Remember Dolly Bell?), poets like Semezdin Mehmedinović and Miljenko Jergović, directors and actors from the Academy of Performing Arts, producers of ‘Audicija’ (Audition), and many more.

The official opening of the program ‘Konavle – zemlja gost’ (Konavle – the Guest Land) of this year's Histrocosmos and the exhibition ‘Let s vilama’(A Flight with the Fairies) by the academic painter Antonia Rusković Radonić from Konavle is scheduled for Thursday, December 5, at 12:30 p.m. in the Cvajner Gallery. Among the many guests arriving from Konavle, led by the lexicographer and writer Vlaho Bogišić, the opening of this program will also feature Božo Lasić, the Mayor of Konavle, and the artist Ljuba Gamulin. The exhibition curator is the art historian Gorka Ostojić Cvajner.

“White fairies, as mythical beings adept at flight, but also as a term for the women from Konavle in the local dialect, emerge from language, folklore, and storytelling. It is thus logical for each individual to recognize themselves within the landscape they traverse, whether in this reality or in the image condensed into the figurations of a painter whose voice has to be heard due to the opening of a window to the horizon from a small, completed world that seems to defy the fate of a submerged cultural heritage. Antonija Rusković herself has taken on and even completed so much to reconstruct and document the figures from which this world arises. However, what fundamentally distinguishes her paintings from the mainstream, which only seem to be derived from that world, is their distilled quality, their truthfulness in the Aristotelian sense: that only in the fictional, the invented, can one reliably achieve the necessary degree of credibility”, writes Vlaho Bogišić, among other things, in his review of the exhibition.

On Tuesday, December 3, as part of the program ‘Poezija pitanje srca’ (Poetry Is a Matter of Heart), Aljoša Pužar—a long-time collaborator of the Fair and the host of the Breakfast With the Author —will present his new poetry collection ‘Pitanje nadležnosti’ (The Question of Jurisdiction) (Fraktura) at 8 p.m. in the Red Salon of the House of Croatian Homeland War Veterans. Aljoša Pužar will engage in conversation with the poet Aljoša Pužar. "A performance we can’t wait to see", as announced by the Fair’s team. On Saturday, December 7, at 9 p.m., as part of the ‘Puna je Pula’ (Pula is Bursting) program, the audio-visual performance ‘Propulzor. Partitura za brod Galeb’ (Propulsor. Partitude for the Ship Galeb) will premiere at the Istrian National Theatre (INK). The project’s creators are Alen and Nenad Sinkauz (music), Andrea Matošević (research, script, texts), Vladislav Knežević (script, film director), Miodrag Gladović (audio setup for multiple channels, sound engineer), and Mario Kalogjera (editing and video sequence processing). The performance ‘Propulzor’ examines the genetic code of the ship Galeb. In the context of the Yugoslav non-aligned politics, it is known as the ‘ship of peace’, embodying the shifts in the socio-political realities of its region while reflecting the microcosmoi of Uljanik and Pula. ‘Propulzor’ delves into the ontology of the anthological training ship Galeb, and as Andrea Matošević writes in the essay following the performance, the story states that it was exactly the workers at Uljanik who gave it its name, and the western coast of the Island was subsequently named ‘Molo Galeb’ after it. In the making of the film, which is part of the performance, the materials from the Croatian State Archives’ collection were used.

We are celebrating the 30th concert spectacle which marks the highlight of this year’s Fair, featuring Rambo Amadeus on Friday, December 6, at 9 p.m. at the Portarata Square. Of course, all of Pula is invited. This grand celebration is supported by the Public Institution Pula Film Festival and is part of the Advent program in Pula.