Blokhaus is a student-initiated platform that emerged within the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad during the period of student blockade and civic mobilisation. It was formed as a space for artistic responses to social pressure, using art not as representation, but as a way of acting, organising, and sustaining collective presence.
Blokhaus brings together students, graduates, and collaborators who explore artistic forms of struggle through exhibitions, performative actions, shared production, and self-organised programmes. Its focus is on collective authorship, mutual support, and experimentation outside institutional and market expectations. Rather than functioning as a closed group, Blokhaus operates as an open structure that grows through participation, shared responsibility, and direct engagement with social reality.
“Magic Carpets” project
Collective Intimacy – The Unspoken Silence
The community involved in this “Magic Carpets” residency consisted primarily of students participating in the ongoing student blockade in Novi Sad, alongside peers from other faculties, local residents, and passers-by who were directly or indirectly affected by the current climate of civic unrest in Serbia. Rather than being approached as a predefined or homogeneous group, this community emerged through shared conditions: exhaustion, uncertainty, collective pressure, and the need for spaces where experiences could be processed without public exposure or political spectacle.
At the time of the residency, students were inhabiting public space daily through protest, occupation, and self-organisation. However, what was largely missing were protected environments in which emotions such as grief, fear, doubt, care, and solidarity could be articulated without the demand to perform resilience. The residency responded to this gap by creating a temporary, low-threshold space for collective presence and mutual attention.
The core activity of the community unfolded through a participatory artistic method developed during the residency, referred to as “interview through sculpting.” Participants were invited to bring a personal object connected to their experience of the blockade or the broader social moment — for example, a student booklet, a protest badge, or a medical support item. These objects functioned as quiet triggers for conversation rather than symbols to be explained or defended.
While participants spoke, everyone present sculpted simultaneously in clay. The focus was placed on hands and gestures, not faces. This decision protected anonymity and shifted attention away from individual identity toward shared action. Speech, silence, and physical labour existed in parallel, allowing participants to contribute at their own pace and according to their own capacity. Some spoke extensively; others remained mostly silent but fully present through the act of sculpting.
Through repeated sessions, the activity became a collective ritual rather than a workshop. The sculpting process enabled participants to externalise emotional tension and transform it into a shared material form. The absence of visual representation of faces reduced self-consciousness and competition, reinforcing a sense of equality within the group. The method proved especially important in a context where public visibility is often associated with risk, pressure, or misinterpretation.
The community’s activity did not end with the residency timeframe. During the local community festival Dobro došli na Naselje, additional open sessions were organised, allowing new participants to enter the process. The outcomes — a wooden chest containing sculptural fragments and a video work composed of sound and hand movements — were conceived not as finished artworks, but as carriers of collective memory and tools for continuation.
The community’s contribution lies not only in what was produced, but in how people gathered, listened, worked, and remained together. The residency affirmed that, in moments of social strain, artistic practice can function as a form of collective care: a way to hold space for what cannot yet be resolved or spoken aloud.
Collective Intimacy – The Unspoken Silence is a 2025 “Magic Carpets” residency by Novo kulturno naselje in Novi Sad, developed in the context of student-led civic unrest. The project explored how private emotions such as grief, silence, and care can be shared within a collective artistic process.
Working with students and local participants, the residency introduced interview through sculpting — a participatory method combining conversation, silence, and simultaneous work with clay. Focusing on hands rather than faces, the process created a safe space for collective presence and mutual listening.
The project resulted not in a finished artwork, but in a transferable process and shared artefacts that continue to carry collective memory and invite further participation.
Number of community members included in the project: 15-20
Reasons for participating in the “Magic Carpets” project: People joined the residency because they needed a place where they could stop for a moment and not be publicly visible. Many of them were already constantly present in protests, assemblies, and daily actions, but had very few spaces where they could deal with what was happening on a personal level.
The project did not require anyone to speak, explain their position, or produce something finished. Participation was possible through simple presence and working with hands, which made it accessible even to those who felt tired, unsure, or emotionally overloaded. Some joined to talk, others to listen, and some to stay silent while still being part of a group.
What drew people in was the atmosphere of equality and trust. There was no hierarchy between artists and participants and no pressure to perform. The residency offered an opportunity to be together without expectations, to share time and attention, and to experience a sense of collective support in a period marked by uncertainty and tension.