The video “Abandoned”  is three minutes and 40 seconds long.  The video performance was created in 2019, as part of Marina Abramović’s Master Class, with twelve selected participants, organized during her retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade.

The work is based on the negotiation of autobiographical traumatic content in relation to the memory. Remembering traumatic event requires a cue, like Proust’s madeleine – mechanism to retrieve memory. In this video cues are sugar cubes, as a way to neutralize bitter and traumatic experience. Artist stares into the camera, while jamming sugar cubes into her mouth. At one point Latinović is trying to cry out the words “I am abandoned” in Serbian. Therefore this approach can be described as transactive rather than communicative. It provokes strong empathy, as the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of other, but it does not necessarily communicate the secret of personal experience.

In this visually and compositionally reduced video performance, artist focuses on her own psycho-physical experience, intimacies of her personal life, addressing the subtleties of psychological and bodily experiences. Transference of a traumatic experience today seems more important than ever, operating as an apparatus for experiential viewing.

If feelings and emotions are a key component of the human condition itself, then they should not be denied as a methodological tool for critical interpretation.

text by: Anica Tucakov