The Unnoticed, 2013
urban choreography
author: Mateja Bučar
performers and co-creators : Aja Zupanec, Evin Hadzialjević, Martina Ruhsam ,Ales Zorec, Ivan Mijačevič, Maja Kalafatič, Nina Pertot Weis
producer: Sanja Kuveljič
production: DUM – Društvo Umetnikov / DUM – Association of Artists , co-production: Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Project is supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia , Cultural Department of the City of Ljubljana
Special tanks to: Nataša Fifolt, Dijaški dom Poljane, Aleša Valič, Lijana Dejak, Zavod Zet
All of us are merchandise laid out in neat rows for the inspection of our time. We must not die: kindred spirits will be found.’
V. Shklovsky
Paying attention to things we don’t need for our (more or less) immediate survival is not part of our daily public, or even private, life in the city. The Unnoticed have been created and placed in our shared everyday urban space for that very reason: to capture a glance for the overlooked.In the excerpt from the tractate »So what are we supposed to do?« (“Tak cto ze nam delat”), writer Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy offers a very clear insight into something fundamental, present in the work »The Unnoticed«, and in our everyday doings:”I remember walking down the street once in Moscow and seeing a man step outside ahead of me and peer at the stones in the sidewalk; then he selected one stone, crouched over it and began (or so it seemed to me) to scrape or rub with singular strain and effort.
‘What is he doing to that sidewalk?’ I thought. When I got right up to him, I saw what this man was doing. It was a young man from the butcher shop: he was sharpening his knife against a stone in the sidewalk. He was not thinking about the stones at all, though he was scrutinizing them; still less was he thinking about them while performing his task he was sharpening his knife. He had to sharpen his knife in order to cut meat; it had seemed to me that he was performing this task over the stones in the sidewalk. In exactly the same way, man seems to be occupied with commerce, treaties, wars, the arts and sciences when one thing matters to him and one thing is all he does: he tries to clarify the moral laws by which he lives”.