Gypsy Style, 2009, 5’14’’ / Last Tango, 2011, 2’3’’.
Belgrade Cultural Center, Serbia. www.kcb.org.rs
Gypsy Style and Last Tango were created during the 80 days trip within the project Re: Re Residence Revisited that implied “returning”, “rethinking” and “reconsidering”, inspired by the questions such as urbanism, migration, communication and notion of “home”.
In a fact both videos have 20 kilos together i.e. as much as the artist could bring luggage with him on a plane. Ernst Junger said that modernity – the time of projects and plans, par excellence – taught us to travel with light luggage (mit leichtem Gepack). It appeared that modern reductionism became strategy for surviving that rejects everything too heavy, too loaded with meaning, mimesis and traditional criteria of mastery, inherited ethical and aesthetic conventions. But at the same time, as Boris Groys said, this reductionism also reveals a kind of hidden truth that transcends their immediate effectiveness.
In the real time artist is torn between obligations to complete the project for which he received the financial support and the desire to spend summer on the coast. Spontaneously, naively but perhaps deliberately, Jamesdin decides to, due to the lack of money for summer vacation (some kind of a critic of the “financiers”) indulge his need for swimming in the city fountains in Oslo, Berlin, Belgrade, Saint Petersburg, Zurich and Quito.
Gypsy Style is actually the name that artist gave to the “swimming style” that was first practiced by the Roma children in the city fountains downtown Belgrade and later taken over by seniors who begun to mark the completion of high school. Through seemingly harmless act of swimming and well known “choreography” from the plane in Last Tang, the artist raises a question: could one give up a great deal – traditions, hopes, skills and ideas and still continue one's project in the so called reduced form.
The other video work called the Last Tango, even though it chronologically precedes the first one in real-time, having in mind that videos are recordings of the trips to cities where the artist finds his refuge in the fountains, are actually recorded moments in the plane just before the take off. They represent a potential choreography for the last moments in the case of aircraft accident. In fact, this short video triptych anticipates the destiny of the artist, who has to accept, surpass and leave behind what he has inside himself to be able to embark on a new path.
Art production which Jamesdin signs create his own crossover art system in which artistic inspiration can be anything and everything: the “immigrant punk” which bears the mark by which one can recognize artists who leave the trace behind.
Aleksandar Jestrović or Jamesdin (1972, Zagreb, Croacia) lives and Works in Belgrade. He obtained his master degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 2000 in the class of professor Čedomir Vasić. Since October 2011 he is in Art in Kontext master program at UDK Berlin.
Jamesdin’s works are mainly inspired by the symbols of modern popular culture, by "unpopular heroes" He is neither a modern mannerist, l’art pour l’art artist, politically engaged, nor beast from the east (which was the title of his last exhibition in Belgrade), but is a hardcore demystifier of the iconography of the society he lives in (be it in Belgrade, in Bežanija, or in Berlin) whether it was about nonsense and stereotypes of media, economic and political systems, misconceptions, folks beliefs, personal experience or travelling.