Comrades, we need your hands, your voices, your presence!
Staged as a fim set Remake invites the audience to step in as extras at the shooting of a film that can only be made together. Just as youth brigades once built roads and railways in Yugoslavia, we gather on stage to rebuild a memory of collective labor and enthusiasm. No previous experience is required – only the willingness to join, to work, to witness, to remake. This is not a performance of distance but a call to work, to belong, to participate in a building of the future that was once brighter in the past! Join us!
In Remake, Dragana Bulut explores choreographies of nostalgia. Departing from her own Yugo- nostalgic sentiments, she stages a speculative re-enactment of collective voluntary Youth Work Actions in Yugoslavia (ORA) - vast initiatives that mobilised thousands of young people to build roads, railways, and public infrastructure, that transformed generations both socially and politically. What happens when the old ideologies of collective work are transplanted into new soil?
At Sophiensaele, the stage becomes a film set where audiences as extras are invited to work, to contribute and to re-enact the actions, solidarity, and ideologies of the postwar Youth Work Actions. What once belonged to the narrative of socialist progress is reassembled here as a practice of remembering and reimagining what binds us together today. At its core, the performance explores Svetlana Boym’s notion of reflective nostalgia: not a sentimental longing for the past, but a critical lens attentive to its contradictions and possibilities.
How are the tools of the past used as instruments for imagining futures otherwise?
Concept, artistic direction, performance: Dragana Bulut
By and with: Cécile Bally
Dramaturgy: Andrew Hardwidge
Dramaturgical advice: Andrej Mircev, Kareth Schafer, Dragana Jovanović
Music, sound design: Ivan Marić
Lighting design: Gustav Kleinschmidt
Cinematographer: Joanna Piechotta
Editor: Basia Napora
Film research collaboration: Dragana Jovanović
Stage design collaboration: Valentina Primavera
Production management: M.i.C.A. – Movement in Contemporary Art
Assistance: Cathy Walsh, Ayko Bleisch
PR: Nora Gores
Thanks to: Andrew Hardwidge, Chrysa Parkinson, Ilse Ghekiere
A production by Dragana Bulut in co-production with Sophiensæle. Funded by the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF). Supported by Theaterhaus Berlin, Dancecentrum Stockholm and O Espaço do Tempo. Media partners: Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, taz.
