The 2025 Magic Carpets residency in Novi Sad unfolded within a climate of civic unrest and student resistance that has significantly reshaped public life in Serbia over the past year. Against this backdrop, the project Collective Intimacy – The Unspoken Silence brought together artists Hannah Hoebeke (Belgium), Ivana Čuturić, and Vasilija Dobrić (Serbia) to explore how personal emotion intersects with collective experience – and how silence, grief, and care can become shared artistic and social gestures.
Concept and Methodology
Conceived as a laboratory for examining the boundary between the private and the public, the residency centred on a participatory method the artists described as “interview through sculpting”.
Each session gathered participants from diverse communities – members of the student blockade, peers from other faculties, local residents, and passers-by – who were invited to bring an object connected to their personal experience of revolution or social change.
These objects – a student booklet, a protest badge, a knee brace – functioned as catalysts for conversation. They carried traces of fragility and resilience, linking individual memory with collective history.
As participants shared their stories, everyone present sculpted simultaneously in clay. The process was documented through audio recordings of the conversations and video footage focused exclusively on hands, intentionally excluding faces in order to preserve intimacy and anonymity.
Through this approach, sculpting became a parallel language – a medium of empathy in which gesture and material replaced direct representation. Personal narratives were translated into tactile forms, allowing emotional tension to take on a shared, physical presence.
Artistic Outcome
The process resulted in two interconnected works.
The first is a wooden chest containing selected sculptural fragments – a collective vessel of testimony and memory. The second is a video work combining recorded dialogue and filmed gestures, forming an audiovisual trace of the sessions and an embodied form of oral history.
Rather than concluding in a fixed exhibition format, the project was conceived as a travelling artefact – a transferable tool of solidarity. The chest is intended to circulate among communities across Europe, inviting others to contribute, adapt, and continue the process. In this way, it becomes a growing archive of shared experiences.
Public Interaction and Continuation
The project extended beyond the residency framework during the Dobro došli na Naselje community festival, where additional open sessions invited local audiences to participate. These encounters reinforced the project’s commitment to art situated in public and communal space.
Importantly, the work remains intentionally unfinished. Its continuity depends on future encounters – on those who will open the chest, listen to the voices, touch the clay, and perhaps begin sculpting their own silences.
Through this evolving structure, Collective Intimacy – The Unspoken Silence redefines artistic practice as an act of collective care. Intimacy becomes not a private retreat, but a shared method of resistance, remembrance, and connection.
Curatorial text by Tatjana Mateša