Domagoj Burilović / Dorf

The work of Domagoj Burilović under the title “Dorf” (German for village) comprises complex layers of the present, past, and future of the Slavonian space. Burilović has been conducting his visual fieldwork in the area of the whole of Eastern Slavonia, which encompasses Vukovar-Srijem County, Osijek County, and the eastern part of Brod-Posavina County. Although the artist records the present, by treatment and montage of the motifs he puts in the focus, these objects are wrapped with additional atmospheres, which take in a spectator in the author’s preoccupations pregnant with historical layering.

For several years, Domagoj Burilović has been passionately tackling the architecture of the villages of Eastern Slavonia which was created by ethnical Germans, who were settled in Slavonia in a few waves: in the time of the empress Maria Theresia, then under the reign of her son Joseph, but also, as the artist has recorded, there are cases of settling down at the beginning of WWII. These objects which Burilović divided into two typologies – gable (agrarian) and longitudinal (craftsman’s) type, – have been rapidly vanishing from the space of Slavonian villages: Retkovci, Mirkovci, Babina Greda, Petrovci, Novi Jankovci, Otok, Bošnjaci, Cerna, Šiškovci, … these are just some of the names in the topography of this profound research, motivated by sincere enthusiasm for an understanding of the phenomenology which enters the frame of his lenses.

Namely, besides photo-recording Burilović (in)forms his artistic gaze with abundant studies of the expert literature that enables his extraordinarily strident, objective, simultaneously hyper-realistic, and surreal angle. Burilović’s work, with his artistic dispositive, questions the relationship between photo collages and collaging of historical facts. His work is based on the cognition of the historical and ethnological facts, so we can say that the work that Burilović carries out is manifold and incorporates field work, camera work, and recording of the vernacular architecture that is disappearing, written notes about each of these objects, studies in expert literature, artistic treatment of the photography, creation of the artistic representation, etc. We are talking here about the outstandingly demanding roles of an artist, a curator, and producer of one’s work, but also about the undertaking of a self-taught visual anthropologist who performs exceptionally important work which, in the scientific field of ethnology, is known as „rescue ethnology“. If Domagoj Burilović had not taken over that series of social roles, the past, present, and future of these idiosyncratic objects that vehemently enrich Slavonian space with their beauty, would have been completely lost. That is a le fait social.

As the artist himself emphasises, by the irony of history the Germans used to settle in Slavonia and raise the quality of living in the past while today the Slavonians are migrating to Germany in the quest for a better life. Burilović’s investigative and artistic but also autonomous curatorial work expounds on the situations of the German (de)population of Slavonia. The exhibition dispositive is based on photography and can evolve into inter-medial / (expanded-)cinema work, or an artist book, in which endless scenes from different epochs of life in Slavonian could be staged. The subject is too interesting and the artist lifted the benchmark high with his social engagement, while separating the awareness of a spectator from merely superficial speculation. With each motif, with every object, the curiosity of the artist is growing, and so is the curiosity of us, spectators, and the wider public, the curiosity that is promoted by the question: what shall we do with Slavonia? What shall we do with this beautiful heritage of vernacular architecture which is vanishing in front of the artist’s eyes, and now, thanks to him, also our eyes? Slavonia can be a huge, magnificent garden and a granary for all of us and for uninterrupted flow of generations about to come, or just a grey, muddy terra incognita that might be exhausted by some foreign corporations aiming at accumulating capital.

Let it be a garden and granary, with housing and living culture that is to be developed on the firm and adorable fundaments which the artistic and visual-anthropological work by Domagoj Burilović has been rendering, while creating a hypothetical (r)urban space that transcends political borders, revives old and forms new characteristics of conviviality on which a diverse and extraordinarily rich culture of Slavonia has always been resting.

Sonja Leboš (Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research)