Nela Milic
Wedding Bellas
Nela will present an ethnographic record of Wedding Bellas, a photographic project about female desire for roots and stability. It explores a wish to belong. It acts as a comment on aging, migration and marriage, but can be a record of an individual’s urge to hide personal problems, as a human need for dressing up etc...
The project presents brides passionately attached to the objects of their marriage. That is evident from the photos - women in wedding dresses have a physical connection with their rooted fellow. Wedding dresses are surrounded by other wedding iconography, but the image is not a joke – it is a serious matter - an event of desperation and illusion shot as on a true wedding ceremony.
The photographs are stories of twelve women who all found themselves at different points in their lives at the time when they refused to leave. Many have been rejected by their partners, by their landlords, by their employers, but majority have been refused to stay in the country by the state. The women showed an extraordinary resilience and resourcefulness in the face of sometimes all of these rejections happening at once and the burden of so many problems caused them to escape into fantasy by opting for equally stable, rooted and good looking ‘Queen’s subjects’ – a lamp post, a tree, a traffic sign – London landmarks... With the mix of the text and image we trouble the perception of migrants and refugees in the UK today. The project is funded by European Cultural Foundation with women from Migrants Resource Centre and females who wanted to join them.
Nela Milic is a producer who works across theatre and visual arts. She had a diverse career, from arts and political journalism to feature, art and documentary film production, thriving in the production and programming of culture industry for fifteen years now. She developed projects for the Barbican, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Lyric Theatre, BBC, and others. She regularly produces performances for multi-disciplinary festivals and often works in site specific (community or corporate) environments. As a coordinator of Refugees and the Arts Initiative, a British national organization for ‘refugee arts’, she dealt with over a 1000 practitioners. As a freelance practitioner, she delivered projects with different outcomes – a collage, an installation, a feasibility study for deverse contexts including John Lewis, Light Gallery, FTS, Miramax, Film Four, new Asian cinema and others.
No comments:
Post a Comment