Milica Denković Portfolio
FROM IDEA TO MEDIA
Destination Dystopia
Welcome! This is Destination Dystopia!
Collection of 10 scenes. Each illustrates of one the dystopic novels.
Themes of dystopia included in the exhibition are disease epidemics, society system & relations towards individuals, culture, and science, genetic engineering, and war caused nuclear catastrophes.
On each pedestal is one isolated story.
Each scene is depicted with one logo in which sums the crucial features of the scene itself.
Objects which constituted these scenes can be found in these novels and are performing some of the crucial symbolic or practical functions.
Each scene is accompanied by a short text.
The state of the world around us is introduced via some details.
The isolation of the scenes on the pedestals depicts the people isolated by different kinds of crises. Lonesome and afraid. Maybe we are islands to ourselves, but we are together in this archipelago called life. Now and here.
This exhibition due to a specific health situation in the whole world is happening in the digital world.
Like documentation. Like archive. Like a memory. Of past, future. Present.
Like a call to write down different experiences of the year 2020. via documentary approach or fiction.
In an aim to change the environment of this pedestal, the first instance is reality.
The first pedestal commemorates all doctors who are working now in hospitals with Covid-19 patients.
Middle pedestal talks about decisions and reflections upon the choices we make and the way we do it. So this collection of fiction and reality wouldn‘t increase.
The last pedestal is warning us that all experiences, which are happening now we have to keep.
The way they happened. For the doctors and the patients, who couldn‘t survive Covid-19.
Other pedestals invite us to measure how much is our reality far away from the fictional world.
If fiction is a step away from reality, we should think about how to trip it.
So we can walk freely.
Gallery
We are starting.
Entering. The gallery is empty. The audience is not physically here. Today is 12.08. 2020. The world is currently the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to all measurements, this exhibition is held in a digital format. Topic: Different types of dystopia their spaces and rules.
If you are by the chance in the gallery you will have the direction of moving and spots where you can stay to watch the artwork and approximate time to look at it.
In the virtual world, the visit to the gallery is different. There can be more than one of you around these objects and that this fact isn‘t a problem for anyone, at this moment when we have to pay attention to physical distance.
You have a chance to see ordinary artifacts of the imaginary worlds and to hear the stories about the world where they have belonged.
Take your accreditation with you. To be sure you are not a walking exhibit. So you can step out of this frame if you find this too much familiar or too unfamiliar.
We are starting from reality. Later we will adjust coordinates according to fiction. There is no distance, that why we going around this plexiglass membrane and take this book in our hands. Carefully, in surgeon gloves, so we couldn‘t by chance damaged the story or facts inside. Fiction and reality are overlapping. At this moment:
None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
Alber Camus „Plague“
Then they diverge. But it‘s crucial they commemorate the doctors, the real one, which are now fighting for the lives of others.
Other novels will speak about different topics. From the different dystopian destinations.
Welcome, where the future begins!
Quarantine had just started. This is the airport Heathrow on which rabies reings.
In the dimension of space, the Control Tower was the epicenter of the universe
Around the Tower was the belt of the world of rabies, and around that, the belt of the world of the healthy.
Graphically, it was the shape of a bullet with two concentric circles and a black spot at its center.
Rabies had changed all the perspectives with which you accepted the things around you. Them outside- we inside.
Inside- people are distancing from each other and become islands. “Yesterday” is something that cannot be thought about. “Tomorrow” is something that dared not be thought about. There remains only “today”.
‘For those “outside” rabies is a threat. For us “inside”, rabies is a way of life.
With rules of course:
1. It has become uncivilized to shake hands, inhuman to kiss.
2. The concepts of “need” and “luxury” have changed their meanings. The needs of the outside world have become our luxuries. And luxuries are things we simply don’t have – none of us.
3. Solitude has become an affair of good habits, and not misanthropy, eccentricity, or paranoia.
And how people create privacy in given circumstances, as well. In terms of usage of space.
Shelter
It was difficult to find a relatively safe place in the Terminal, after the first numbing shock had passed and people had, at last, realized the true state of things, that the quarantine had to be accepted as a way of life to which they had to adapt if they wished to survive, it had all begun again, their unfortunate history from the very beginning, a struggle for the most favored place in the sun. Once lost, it was hard to win a place back. And all the others were already full, all the cubicles, offices, storerooms and smaller official and public corners. All the holes in the Terminal which had four walls to separate them off from other similar holes had been taken possession of during the first few hours of the quarantine.
Automobile fortress
It seemed as if the car park was a ghost town, which had been destroyed by fire. Tiny interior lamps, beneath whose malarial gleam, lighted some of the cars as if under the candles before church icons, hung gothically elongated human faces.
Some of the cars were full to bursting, in others, there were only two figures, a man and a woman, and some cars had only one passenger, shut themselves away in their car-fortresses, perhaps they were even their own cars, and defended themselves from rabies, indifferent to everything that was going on outside, with their solitude and their monkey wrenches,
While they are waiting for the scientist to invent the vaccine against rabies.
It was also stipulated that all inhabitants of the quarantine, both rabid and healthy, including officials, would be obliged to wear dog’s muzzles over their heads at all times, anyone without a muzzle would be terminated on the spot.
A curfew was introduced for the whole of the 24 hours. Anybody found moving between 00.00 hours and 24.00 hours would be terminated on the spot.
Welcome where the future ends!
all the images in the church had their eyes covered, statues with a white cloth tied around the head, paintings with a thick brushstroke of white paint,
Maybe they are blind to the world around them, for that white syndrome. An epidemic that is happening and the society in disarray. Which expands with geometric progression.
With the clinical picture:of a form of blindness hitherto unknown, with every appearance of being highly contagious, and which, to all appearances, manifested itself without the previous existence of earlier pathological symptoms of inflammatory, infectious or degenerative nature, And where they see everything white.
And in all that madness, one woman remains to see. The cruelty of the world. And all those madness. From an abandoned mental hospital where first cases were isolated, with herself fabricated.
Close your eyes and imagine:
Old building with nonfunctional arrangement.
doorways so narrow that they look more like bottlenecks, corridors as crazy as the other inmates of the asylum, opening for no clear reason and closing who knows where, and no one is ever likely to find out.
the labyrinth of rooms, corridors, closed doors, stairways they might only discover at the last minute.
There are three dorms on the left and three dorms on the right side. Each dorm has 40 beds.
There were more wards, long and narrow corridors, rooms that must have been the doctors’ offices, dingy latrines, a kitchen that still reeked of bad cooking, a vast refectory with zinc-topped tables, three padded cells in which the bottom six feet of the walls had padding and the rest was lined with cork Behind the building there was an abandoned yard, with neglected trees, their trunks looking as if they had been flayed There was litter everywhere The doctor’s wife went back inside In a half-open cupboard she found strait-jackets
The building was under armed protection.
Serving as a handrail, a thick rope stretched from the entrance to the main door of the building,
Once inside, the rope divided into two, one strand going to the left, the other to the right,
Sounds like instructions for a video game, but this is not it, although there are some rules.
first, the lights will be kept on at all times, any attempt to tamper with the switches will be useless, they don’t work
second, leaving the building without authorization will mean instant death,
Enough
There are many ways of becoming an animal, this is just the first of them.
A smell of brine and seaweed came from the unseen, storm-tossed sea. And in the growing darkness the almost empty town, palled in the dust, swept by bitter sea-spray, and loud with the shrilling of the wind seemed a lost island of the damned.
The only regulation that seemed to have some effect on the populace was the establishment of a curfew hour. From eleven onwards, plunged in complete darkness, Oran seemed a huge necropolis.
The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes,
Which increases the feeling of separation and fear, general abandonment, extreme loneliness, and isolation.
Telegrams only way of communication
exchange of such trite formulas
“Am well. Always thinking of you. Love.”
and
small official notices had been just put up about the town, though in places where they would not attract much attention. It was hard to find in these notices any indication that the authorities were facing the situation squarely.
but the only means of righting a plague is, common decency
“I say, doctor. Is it a fact they’re going to put up a memorial to the people who died of plague?”
“So the papers say. A monument, or just a tablet.”
“I could have sworn it! And there’ll be speeches.”
He chuckled throatily.
“I can almost hear them saying: ‘Our dear departed…’ And then they’ll go off and have a good snack.“
The hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre’s four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two.
CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.
Types of people produced in the center – each type of caste.
Society is controlled by Alphas and their subordinates, Betas
Alpha
Beta
Then follows:
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
With the Bokanovsky process of cloning made to be identical human beings predestined to work identical jobs on identical machines. Later in INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS further processed to match their caste.
Hierarchically arranged by importance and intelligence from Alpha to Epsilon.
Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons
Of course, they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned. Besides, we start with different heredity.
I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,
And if you were an Epsilon, your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.
And at the end of the path of life
Hospital for the Dying
As though men were more than physical- chemically equal
O brave new world,
O brave new world
that has such people in it.
Everything should be made out of the glass, a ground, walls, and a ceiling. Where you live. Without any privacy.
In other areas as well.
So to speak:
we celebrate elections openly, honestly, in broad daylight I see everyone voting for the Benefactor; everyone sees me voting for the Benefactor.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
Any kind, except a bit of intimacy.
The schedule says:
The free is only the personal hours from 16-17h nad 21-22h.
Then you can lower the blinds. Shortly.
Then you can use the pink token for the sexual days.
Every number has a right on another number as a sexual product.
You have to just fill in the registration form for using a number for your sexual days.
Numbers are obliged to sleep at night, to work at day.
All obligations and rhythm of life are written down in an hour timetable.
Maybe it says how long you can stay here.
Because staying in one place maybe can force you to think, and that not desirable.
They don’t tell you the half of it, you see?
Secretive things from test tubes
Myth
You’ve been told about it. You’re students. You’re…special
Future
Myth
Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life.
One big idea behind finding your model was that when you did, you’d glimpse your future.
Reality
Your lives are set out for you.
You’ll become adults, then before you’re old before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs.
That’s what each of you was created to do.
You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.
However uncomfortable people were about your existence,
they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us.
That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.
“One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.”
you something else, something troubling and strange.
Does it have a soul or is it even important does it have it or not while it‘s purpose on the Earth is predetermined?
Does it really matter what it keeps inside itself if it‘s just a collection of vital organs, but not feelings, thought and memories?
Why they exist at all?
Why Hailsham at all?
Spaces
at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn’t possible there.
So to say:
Norfolk was England’s “lost corner,” where all the lost property found in the country ended up. The fact that we’d never
So one of the important things from the Collection of the main protagonist is by accident found there. One cassette. One song. One evidence. That inside exists. So no one can take away it from them.
Stone bowels of the great metropolis – Metro
Above: the realm of radiation and lethal sun rays.
Beneath: descended to great depths, the kingdom of rats, the complex network of hundreds of corridors, freezing, stinking labyrinths of horror. There are strange, freakish, and dangerous creatures and underground water. That‘s where the powers of darkness begin – the most widespread form of government in the whole metro system.
In the middle: The Moscow metro system. The year 2033. : a multitude of stations unconnected by a single power The stations became independent and self-sufficient, distinctive dwarf states, with their own ideologies and regimes, their own leaders and armies. With a passport with a station stamp of course.
Fight for all resources. Space, food, filters for water, accumulators, munitions, and arms.
Survive. Survive at any cost.
The starting point (red battery)
Station VDNP
Housing units:
office spaces, army tent
Day and night:
At night the lightning on the station is weaker.
Divide between a day and a night is just a matter of habit, not a real need.
Exact time is shown on two station clocks.
Forbidden:
– Making diversion on a strategic object: clock, water filer, electric generator, ammunition depot
– Smoking and lighting a fire on a platform and outside of for this activity intended place
– Have a careless attitude towards weapons and ammunition
– Avoiding work obligations
Other important things:
Library. Doctors. Literacy.
Target point (green battery)
Polis
Polis was located where four metro lines crossed, and it took up four stations all by itself: Alexander‟s Garden, Arbatskaya, Borovitzskaya, and the Lenin Library. That enormous territory was the last, genuine seat of civilization.
Polis remained a unique phenomenon in the metro. There, and only there, you could still meet the keepers of old and strange knowledge, which in this severe new world, with its disappearing laws, you just couldn‘t find anymore. And the last remaining artists lived there too – the actors, the poets. The last physicists, chemists, biologists.
Polis was below what used to be the very center of the city above. Right above Polis stood the building of Lenin‟s Library – the most extensive storehouse of information to come from all ages.
Voyage in the Metro 2033:
Useful things:
lamp, batteries, mushrooms, a package of tea, and liver and pork sausage, a full machine-gun clip, a map of the metro, and more batteries.
Light:
Whoever needs light has to bring it here with them.
Time:
Whoever needs to know the time, whoever is afraid of chaos, needs to bring their own time with them.
Everyone keeps some time here. Their own time. And it‟s different for everybody and it depends on their calculations
In the metro, it is basically always night-time and it makes no sense to keep track of time here so painstakingly.
„Tunnel fear“
It was when you were going along a tunnel, especially if you had a bad flashlight, and it felt like there was danger right behind your back.
Who knew who or what was there and how it perceived the world
„Listening to the tunnel“
Supersensibility for the feeling of the tunnel developed through the years of going through the metro and only in rare cases
a particular smell, brought up by the tunnel vents, or was it a particular mood, an aura, that belonged only to this tunnel and gave it an individuality, making it dissimilar to all the rest.
There weren’t two tunnels alike in the metro
Tunnel darkness
But it was terrifying here. The tunnel that lay before them was totally black, and an unusual, total, absolute darkness reigned – it was so thick you could almost touch it. As porous as a sponge, it greedilyswallowed the rays of their flashlight, which was hardly sufficient to illuminate even a foot ahead.
Legend and myths, gossip, information:
That‘s the main problem with the metro: there aren‟t any reliable communication lines. There‘s no exact information
Legends were always flying about, but there are thousands of them in the metro
____________________________________
You now have some basics for a heroic adventure through the various ministates, with unpredictable obstacles in a way and a reason for an odyssey through the apocalyptic Moscow metro. And something that waits for you there. In-depth of the tunnel. In the darkness. Which not even the flashlight can chase away. If you happened to be afraid, bring a lot of spare batteries. Because light there means life.
A passport and real map of the metro are implied.
And remember…
____________________________________
But if they have a flashlight, it means they‘re human and not some kind of monsters from the surface.
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all.
’We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’
In the Ministry of Love
through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.
Where we will teach that black is white, if we demand that.
And that two and two equal five.
So you forget that you believed otherwise.
Reality exists only in the human mind and nowhere else.
All other things will be vacuumed in the memory hole, all up to glowing furnaces.
Every news, document, newspaper, or book.
This one none.
We censor it, change. Control.
Everything that now already the past, but will have an impact on the future.
Who controls the past, controls the future.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Science is…
There is no word for science in the dictionary and speech.
For all other things, there is. For what is allowed.
Allowed to think about.
That the purpose of this dictionary.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
To shape things in head, direct, conquer.
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words
Ther would not be an opinion, in the current sense of the word.
If censorship starts from there, we don‘t need external barriers.
Other things are redundant, so you don‘t even think about that.
That why there are no words.
Except for chatter on the TV screens.
From where only the hates come.
In a package of 2 minutes, because
He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors…
In the dollhouse boxed set, there was a Handmaid doll with a red dress and a bulgy tummy and a white hat that hid her face
She is a doll, a service body.
Civil service. Handmaid.
Raised to serve for pregnancy.
To couples who can not have children.
There is no question why the women can not get pregnant.
There are no two sides here.
Only one.
Woman.
Which is replaced by handmaid in that duty.
Which whole life is like that.
Serviceable and foreign.
This is not a prison, but a privilege
Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but alter a time it will, It will become ordinary.
It‘s normal not to possess your own body. Not even to decide what will you do with it. You must not provoke and you must be obedient. it‘s very important what kinds of clothes you are wearing, in the contrary, you will provoke the bully. And it‘s your own guilt.
It‘s normal that you don‘t even possess your own privacy.
It‘s normal that you don‘t possess anything. Not even freedom.
They look in all our rooms.
Does each of us have the same print, the same chair, the same white curtains, I wonder? Government issue?
There is no glass in the frames, but there is shatterproof glass on the windows.
The door of the room, not my room, is not locked.
My room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even at this time.
I’m waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go to bed it’s a bedroom.
Someone has lived in this room, before me. Someone like me.
Will I ever be in a hotel room again?
How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen.
…once a year, every fireman’s allowed to bring one book home, from the old days, to show his family how silly it all was. Like this one here. On this burned pedestal. Other books he burned. After reading, he burns this one too.
Now we will read the quote from one of the smuggled books, which are circulating:
If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Maybe that why there is TV inside the houses instead of walls.
On each of the four walls. And we know what is usually what is on TV. We are not interested in that. We are curious to know who lives in this house. Fireproof house. Without porch. That means no socializing. (No talks). About books especially.
I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me.
I would say a fireman.
With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame
One who burns the books.
GUARANTEED: ONE MILLION LIGHTS IN THIS IGNITER
Brief histories of the Firemen of America
“Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin.”
Rules:
1. Answer the alarm swiftly.
2. Start the fire swiftly.
3. Burn everything.
4. Report back to the firehouse immediately.
5. Stand alert for other alarms.
because
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Burn it.
Take the shot from the weapon.
But if this book continues to live in another way. Maybe at that time not yet invented. It becomes unstoppable. Because the internet is huge and it has a lot of hidden corners.
Info
Juried solo exhibition