Interview: Mira Brtka

DNA as a horizon of the Vojvodina Plain

Interviewed by Gordana Draganić Nonin

15 June 2012

One should tap into light from one’s own soul, from the insides of one’s being

A film director, sculptor, painter, fashion designer… Mira Brtka was born in Novi Banovci in 1930. Everything which she went through and lived through, from running barefeet in the dust of Novi Banovci, to playing with cloth among Slovak women who were making embroidery, all the way to the last [54th] Venice Biennale where she took part in her colleague Dora García’s Red Suitcase [Luggage?]¹ project in the Spanish Pavilion, or, until the last day of March this year [2012] when in Petrovaradin the Brtka-Kresoja Foundation began its work, one could hardly put all of this in a single interview. Not for a single moment has energy left her, and everything she does, Mira Brtka does with innter zeal which emanates towards everthing around her.

Art historians have immediately deemed her painting important. After she graduated from two academies, film directing in Belgrade and painting in Rome, Brtka has been active in the then very important and significant art scene in Rome as a protagonist of post-informalist, geometric and minimalist tendencies. Already in 1964, she had a solo exhibition in the reputed Artflex Gallery, and, a year later, she took part in the Forme presenti group exhibition. From the start of its activities, she has been a member of the international Illumation art group. The groupo was founded by a Japanese artist, Nobuya Abe, and its members, next to Brtka, were also Marcia Hafif, today a very well-known US artist, two Italian painters, Paolo Patelli and Aldo Schmid, as well as the Belgrade painter Milena Čubraković with whom Brtka had shared a studio in Rome. She was a participant in the Arteideologia movement headquartered in Italy, which dates as early as from the time of the Bureau for Preventive Imanation’s activities established in Rome in 1970, in which she acted together with a group of artists among whom were [Martin?] Boyce [Bois?], Christo [Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon], [Michelangelo] Pistoletto, [Vjenceslav] Richter, and others. At the international symposium of artists, art critics and art historians in San Marino and Rimini in 1965, she represented Yugoslavia, directly cooperating with one of the leading authorities in theory of modern art, Carlo Giulio Argan. All this time, famous actresses were walking the streets of Rome wearing her creations which the famous Vogue magazine dubbed “Slavic shirts“. She made films with Roger Vadim, [Michelangelo] Antonioni, [Pietro] Germi… At the set of the most expensive ever film project in Yugoslav cinematography, while working on the Sutjeska movie, she met Dragan Kresoja, one of our most talented filmmakers (Just This One More Time, The End of the War, Oktoberfest, Original of the Forgery, Full Moon Over Belgrade, and Night is Dark), to whom she was married until the tragedy in 1996 when, over Belgrade above the Danube, a helicopter in which Dragan and their son Miloš Stefan, a cameraman, crashed. She remained, she says for Nova misao, to complete what they could not complete. By huge personal effort, aided by and through cooperation with the Novi Sad-based BelArt Gallery, she opened the Brtka and the Illumination Group exhibition in Petrovaradin (23 Beogradska Street), a gallery space in which the Brtka-Kresoja Foundation started to work.

From many interesting information from your biography, I would highlight, for the beginning, the fact that you graduated from the Film Academy in Belgrade in 1953, and, ten years later, from the Academy of Arts in Rome. How did this happen that you complete two degrees and what pushed you towards the film in the first place?

Brtka: This is really an interesting story. I finished my high school in Belgrade. It seems to be that the choice of a university department goes by itself, that something leads you towards that which you will choose. In the beginning, I was not thinking about film at all. I wanted to study architecture, something which is close to art. Completely by chance, some friends told me that a contest was out for film directing in Belgrade. They were going to apply and so they talked me into joining them. We went together and I could tell you that we had rather complicated entrance exams. They showed us Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, whom I met later on and with whom I cooperated in the Sutjeska movie [The Tatars/I Tartari, MGM 1961]. After the screening, we were to write a review of the Citizen Kane. We were among the first generations after the war, and all this was happening in 1949. We all came from various sides, almost unprepared, without much prior knowledge about all this. Of course, the other part of the exam was an interview with candidates. There were 60 of us who applied. I was much into sports then, I played basketball for the Red Star, and I was late for the interview because I had a practice. I literally ran to the Academy, and arrived before the commission in my sneakers, all wet. My colleagues told that my name had already been called several times, and, what could I do, I literally flew in to answer the call. I remember that Žorž [George] Skrigin was in the commission, he was a very important photographer and film director. After some time, I received a letter in which they informed me that I was admitted. I thought to myself, well, if they chose me out 60 of them, I guess I am fit for this thing. You know, they could not see if I was talented or nt, but what they could see was the huge energy of mine. So I gave up on architecture and I devoted myself to studying film directing.

I lived in a boarding house which was paid for us, because we were members of new generations which were supposed to, as they used to say back them, work on developing socialist culture. It is interesting that the headmistress of the boarding house was [Margita] Gita Predić, the daughter of our well-known comediographer, Branislav Nušić. She completed studies of applied arts in Prague, and she knew what was going on in the world, and she taught all of us manners, everything which forms a personality, knowing that this we would need this later in life. This may seem a little bit odd nowadays, but we had nowhere to learn about all this in those days. The boarding house was located in Dedinje, in a wonderful villa. We had our own circle of friends, we hung out with [President Josip Broz] Tito’s daughter in law who played basketball with us. There was also an actress, Milena Dapčević, the wife of [People’s Hero General Petar] Peko Dapčević… We were all full of enthusiasm, something new was being born, and we wanted to create new film, new art. There were always ministers around us who, also, wanted to create a new society, they supported artists, they wanted great movies to be made.

What did you do after you finished film direction studies?

Brtka: I first wrote scripts for short films. I was sending them to Zagreb Film [the main studio in Croatia then part of Yugoslavia] because they then had their representative office in Belgrade. I wrote so many of those scripts that someone who was deciding there, as I later found out, said: „Give this person something to do; she wrote so much, I guess she will executive some of it well.“ So I filmed a piece about postage stamps, about things represented on them. The topic was the family, and we were filming how a typical family from all corners of the world was being represented on postage stamps. We represented families from all races and this was important, for that period, to show that all people are equal. The film was a success, and it is interesting that when [Emperor of Ethiopia] Haile Selassie came to Belgrade, he recieved that film as a gift. Naturally, Ethiopian postage stamps were also represented in the film with motifs from lives of families there. Things were happening all the time, I would say, out of their own. Even today, when something sudden and unusal happens, I say to myself: Someone is helping me, I do not know who but someone helps me all the time. This is probably about that you have invested enough energy into something, and so it is all paying back to you. I have worked on so many projects so far that they, and here it is like that these days, set themselves. I have never had exact plans of what do to and how I would go about it. I have always follwed things which have been gnawing on me since I was little.

Do the roots of the artistic talent reach the childhood in Novi Banovci?

Brtka: For sure. As a little girl, I have always played with some cloths [threads]. Here, this is where, probably, the root of that which made me venture into fashion. And around me, during my childhood, there were always those women, Slovak women, who were incessantly embroidering, making dolls, creating pillow cases with handles [volan]… in fact, there was always some creativity around me, a tendency to create something new and beautiful.

And then you reached Rome. How did it happen for you to enrol in the Academy of Fine Arts there?

Brtka: In Rome, I worked in film, and, again, I was quite lucky. I spoke Italian well, and I was always good in learning languages. Nikola Majdak, a cameraman from Belgrade and myself, we worked on a animated film. Together we worked on the first film by the Belgrade School of animated film. He received the [FILM] Ferrania Award by an Italian company, and we then, his wife Marija who was a journalist, he and I went to Rome. Circumstances had it that I remained there to participate in a film which was in the process of being made. Naturally, I already knew some Italian filmmakers because they had already worked in Belgrade on large co-productions. For example, in Belgrade, I had already worked with Antonioni. Antonioni was filming love scenes for the Tempest [(1958) directed by Alberto Lattuada; Antonioni was Second Unit Director]. So, he was not the director of the whole movie, but he was tasked for love scenes only. It so happened that when I went to Rome with the Majdaks, they invited me to work as an assistant director in a film because an Italian colleague had got sick who was supposed to work there. I popped in and I worked with Pietro Germi who was, like Fellini, already a big name of Italian cinematography. Claudia Cardinale played the main role.

My friend, the paintress Milena Čubraković, whom I have known since Belgrade days, and with whom I shared a studio, she worked on animated films. They asked me on board to draw backgrounds for Magpie Thief [La gazza ladra (1964) by Giulio Gianini and Emanuele Luzzati], which was nominated for an Oscar. Then I went to the Academy [delli Arte] to see how I would go about this painting. I cannot paint, not even backgrounds, unless I understand what this is about. So I applied to the Academy, and they admitted me. Milena had already graduated from the Academy in Belgrade, she was in the class with Stojan Ćelić. When I asked her how it was possible that they took me to this Italian academy, she told me that they had realized that I was a raw material with whom nobody had worked before, nobody was teaching me and I was not following anyone’s influences. There, and today, young people prepare themselves so hard ahead of their entrance exams…

While I was attending the Academy, we have worked on film a little bit as well. I was working with Roger Vadim on Barbarella. We designed mechanical dolls which moved, and then we did a movie with Carlo Rambaldi who later did E.T. You know, in those days, we were all equal, we made friends and we worked together. Later on, he created Extraterrestrial in America, he won an Oscar and everyone was writing about him. We also hung out after work. I remeber, once, we were filming with Germi, and after the shooting we went, like we usually did, to a cafe where filmmakers hung out. Then Fellini showed up and sat on our table. We were all taking together. They asked me afterwards, because I had already published interviews in NIN, why I did not interview him. But, you know, for us, it was all different. Nobody was a star there for us. They were ordinary peole who were doing their job. Important job.

How did it happen that you met Abe, a Japanese artist who was ideational creator of the Illumination group?

Milena Čubraković and I had a shared studio in Rome, and one evening someone knocked on our door. A gentleman came in, a chubby Japanese. He asked who Mira Brtka was, and I told him that it was me. He explained that he was coming from Belgrade and that he had got my address from Nikola Majdak. He came immediately to us to invite us to his exhibition which was opening the same night. Our best friend, Gencay Kasapci, a Turkish artist, also came with us. The two of them got engaged the very same night and they stayed together for the ten ensuing years. We created a circle there, and started cooperating. Abe was a very important artist, and he was the ideational founder of our group. When he died suddently in his sleep in 1971, everything fell apart, and we no longer exhibited together. Abe’s ideas were very interesting. Even today when you visit internet pages, you see how big of an importance he was. The Japanese say that in those days, Japan did not have such good information about the revolution in contemporary art which Abe had, and which he tried, during those 1960s, to envisage for them. He visited most famous artists and networked them with galleries in Tokyo. Thus [Lucio] Fontana and [Alberto] Burri, and many others exhibited there. Abe, true, was a painter, but he was also someone who did much for other artists in the world. He was a member of the jury for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He knew things. Twice he was a guest of our government because he was working on a project – taking imprints of the Bogomil stećci [monumental medieval tombstones] from Bosnia.

Abe wrote a piece for the catalogue for the first Illumination exhibition in Rome in which he gave a unique credo of the group. Which was the basic idea which linked all of you together?

Brtka: The idea was – to change things, to move towards the new. This was the time of revolutions, and student unrests, and the time of flower children. There was a general fatigue over the situation in society and politics. Of course, all of that took to the arts as well. We said – what has been painted so far – one should not being doing like that. Not represent nature the way it has been done so far. One should tap into light from one’s own soul, from the insides of one’s being. Abe said that one should be confronting, and he called that a constant crisis, the fast-paced life… Imagine what he would say today about this full swing…

We were in a counter position in that incessant crisis. This is why he took the word illumination, the very French word, of course, taken out of Rimbaud’s poetry… the emanate. In Middle Ages, they used to write the first capital, starting letter in a large font and ornamented, and in this drawing, red paint was dominant – miniyum, so that all of that has several meanings. Abe thought and spoke that we should see, at the beginning of our artistic work, in fact, our name, our initials, our spirit, we should mark it, read it, in order to get to know ourselves.

The group, as a matter of fact, had one exhibition…

Yes, can you imagine, this was in 1967, in Rome. The plan was to stage more exhibitions in Italian towns, and then in Klagenfurt… Everything was ready, a catalogue and all that, but Abe died one night in his sleep, prior to that. And it was planned that there should also be an exhibition in Japan as well, RAI even published a piece about us which ends with an announcement that the group would be exhibiting in Japan, too. Nothing of all that came true.

I must also tell you that Abe also visited Vojvodina. He was in Stara Pazova, driving through the region in his car. He was enchanted with Vojvodina. He used to say: “Japanese gardens are nothing!“ He thought tht the Japanese were already flipping about those rational ideas. He much more felt and loved this purity, the reduction of these flatlands of ours. He would say: “This is my garden“. His idea was to return towards that something which is purer, something which has not yet been processed, something primordial. He wanted his ashes, after his death, to be sprayed over here, over the Vojvodina Plain. An interesting piece of information is that he had used to live in Mongolia for a long time, he was teaching in a university there, and he also spent some time in an Indian town called Barodi

[in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh]

. He passed through many parts of the world, so that it is not naive when he says the Vojvodina is something special. When we drove through the area, he would always make comments: “There, you see, over there… those are the roots of Mongolia“. Our Slavic roots, of us who came from the East, he saw in design. Once, he said for a Hungarian bus that it was absolutely identical with buses which he had seen in Mongolia. When he saw our Vojvodina šubara [traditional male woollen hat], he said that this was square + circle. Therefore, the square is the ratio, and the circle is the emotion. His idea in art, too, was that art must not be ratio only or emotion only but rather a combination of both. Chubby like he was, he would stand up before us and say: “Both ratio and emotion must go TOGETHER.” This was his credo, his vyeruy

[motto]

.

In 1971, when Abe died, you were working on Sutjeska the movie…

Yes, I was in Sarajevo. Abe advised me to get onto Sutjeska. We used to call him “Mister Abe“ and when they called me from Belgrade to join that big film project, I asked him what his thoughts were about it. I was in a dilemma because I was already very much into painting at the time… but he told me that I absolutely had to do, that this was good for me. Sutjeska was being filmed for two years. We frequently went from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik where authors, producers, and main actors were lodged. Whenever we would go to Dubrovnik, I would cross into Italy with a ferry to see my friends. I did the same that time, too. I was in Rome, and I visited him in the evening. That night, we had a long talk about art, about everything… long into the night, because I was supposed to leave in the morning. I was telling him how enchanted I was with Bosnia, and how I had started, in Bosnian villages where we were filming, to collect their folk dress, fantastically weaved. We talked about everything, and in the morning his wife called him and told me that she could not wake him up. He died in his sleep. He was buried in Rome.

In that period, you were also working in costumography design, and then in fashion. You were making fashion creations, bringing Slavic elements and colors into modern dressing, which is something that gave its stamp to the Italian fashion of the time. In the fashion magazine, Vogue, a term was launched camicione slavo – a Slavic shirt, and numerous film stars wished to wear those dresses.

Times were like that. In Rome, hemless skirts were already in, like – everything was hanging, and often, in the middle of the downtown area, you could see people walking barefeet. Everything was leading towards something natural, towards returning to roots, to simple things. As in painting I never wanted to make compromises, to make paintings which would sell well, I had to live on something. And we were never selling our paintings, we were not even thinking about selling them! Abe always told us not to make any concessions, never to paint what the audience wants.

I was working as a costumographer in Pigs Have Wings [1977] by Paolo Pietrangeli. This was a film about young people, and older generations used to say for the young that they “acted piggishly“. I created dresses from Slovak costumes which I had brought from here. I just retailored them a little bit. Everybody wanted to wear those dresses. Marina Vlady, an actress from Paris, called up and asked me to make several dresses for them. Then, I urgently came to Pazova, take everything I can find from costumes and material among our peasant women, cut it into pieces, and together with them, sew it. Only later I realized that the beauty of those dresses was in that I individually dyed them, every single one of them. In a large pot, I made color and dipped them wrinkled, tied into knots. Later, I made creations for the Belgrade-based Center for Fashion and Yugoexport Company. When Sandro Pertini with his wife, paid an official visit to Yugoslavia, and when they asked him what else he would like to have as a gift, his wife right away said that she would like to have those Yugoslav dresses. She came to me in Pazova, and we quickly, off the hand, sew a lovely white dress with embroidered flowers for her.

How did you personally like the One (Im)Possible Encounter exhibition which, last year, was staged in Art Expo in Novi Sad, when the author of the exhibition, Sava Stepanov, in an original manner made a parallel between you activities and that of Andy Warhol?

As far as the One (Im)Possible Encounter exhbition is concerned, I think that art historian Sava Stepanov very courageously staged this exhibition. One did not attempt to make a comparision, in the sense of importance or greatness, between Warhol and myself.

There were, however, some common grounds, which was very successful… Andy Warhol and I were active in the same period, we have a common mother tongue, we were also into applied arts as well, and we both used folk elements. Flowers which painted both his mother and my mother, we applied them in the fashion of the time. Warhol said during an exhibition of his shoes MY SHOE IS YOUR SHOE. It also happens to me, even today, that someone calls me and says I JUST SAW A GIRL IN YOUR DRESS. There, even today someone shows up in those dresses of mine from the 1960s…

When did you return to Stara Pazova?

I was always in my Pazova. But I also always traveled. This possiblity of traveling was terribly important to me, this finding out of new things, comparing. During the filming of Sutjeska, I met my husband. Dragan [Kresoja] was working as an assistent in that movie. Somehow, from then on, things started to take on a somewhat different course. Nevertheless, a woman is different from a man. We can be equal, but, nevertheless, a woman, when she realizes herself as a mother and a wife, she could not neglect her family beacuse of her work. Somehow, I was doing everything paralelly. I wanted both. I strove to make both function. When the tragedy happened, I survived. I remained to finish something behind them, something which they did not complete. This is how the idea about the Brtka-Kresoja Foundation was born. I had a studio in Rome in a very nice palce, with a view of the sea, but I decided to come back here and make all of that here in Petrovaradin.

How comes you chose Petrovaradin?

This is also a very strange thing. Whenever I came here to Novi Sad, this access in the lower city was always so beautiful to me: those long houses, gates, roofs… everything. Can you imagine the coincidence that my father had served in the army precisely in this building in Petrovaradin where the Brtka-Kresoja Foundation now is? Incredible, but he was a clerk and he was serving precisely here. Afterwards, he was a clerk in Novi Banovci as well where I was born and had my childhood. There, another coincidence, the Macura Museum was opened there, and I am on very good terms with Vladimir [Macura], and we had not known each other before. To have Museum of modern art in Banovci! Some things just clicked for me. The museum is build on the spot which I have known from when I was very little, on the very bank of the Danube. There I was running barefoot in the dust, played in the sand… and now I have, precisely on this spot, Museum of modern art. Incredible.

Yet, neverthelss, now that I think of it, it is not so strange after all. The plain has always inspired me. In my time, when I had an exhibition in Belgrad, in the Museum of Contemporary Art, they purchased two pieces from me: Horizon 1 and Horizon 2. This could be interpreted in the way that if you work on various things, there must be some coincidence, but, I have a feeling that, there is nevertheless something in that spiritual sphere in which we are not capable of reading to the very end. Something which, outside our knowledge, works and functions. Afterwards then we say that this is religion, faith… Yes, all of that is needed, but all of it is that outside thing. Inside, however, there is always something pulsating, which takes you somewhere. Somehow, all of this is constantly moving. And it is good that it is so, isn’t it?

The plain, the horizon and this straight line have always been an inspiration for me. I did not know it then when I was painting, but this is it. Here, now this DNA movie which I am making with my friend from Turkey, it is precisely about it. Did our culture in which we grew up influence us? Yes. Of course it did. My friend, Gencay Kasapci, always works in points. Her paintings are like a mosaic, and in the basis of it is Byzantium, whereas I, on my part, always paint some lines. Straight ones. I remember, in Banovci, we had a farm compound. As a child, I always looked at those farm compounds, somewhere, this remains impressed. Like some sort of a code, our code to which we are tied.

The interview was published in the Nova Misao (New Thought) magazine for contemporary culture of Vojvodina, No. 16, February-March 2012.

1 The Inadequate, 54th Venice Biennale, Spanish Pavilion, Italy. Curator: Katya García-Anton.