A dancer on the shore, a diver beneath it

A dancer on the shore, a diver beneath it

Two of the six Blue Residency works were made on the Adriatic, in and around Bibinje, between August and October 2025. They could not be more different in form. They are asking the same question.

I'MPRINT

Anđela Bugarija is a dance artist. I'MPRINT is a twenty-minute dance film, built from three miniatures that can also stand alone as solos.

Above the water: choreography made on land, site-specific, each sequence responding to the particular texture of the place it was made in - the built environment, the shoreline, the ordinary landscapes of a small coastal town.

Below it: archival underwater footage, filmed by Đani Iglić, a diver from Bibinje. Marine life. Seabed textures. Pollution.

In the edit, the two merge. The dancers' bodies are folded into environments they cannot survive in. Familiar landscapes turn into figures for ecological vulnerability. Movement becomes the medium through which invisible threats - the things circulating through the sea and the air, the things you cannot photograph directly - are made into something a body can express: tension, uncertainty, fragmentation, adaptation.

The collaboration with Iglić is the centre of the work rather than a technical arrangement. A diver who has spent years watching one stretch of seabed change knows things about it that no visiting artist could learn. That knowledge is in the film.

I'MPRINT is available in full: youtube.com/watch?v=Ny3dgsWrxO0

TALES OF THE SEA

Kristina Bugarija is a visual artist. She made three paintings.

Acrylic on canvas, and then things that are not paint: shells, pebbles, wire. The shells and pebbles are what the sea gives - biodiversity, abundance, the ordinary richness of a coast that has been generous for a very long time.

The wire is what we brought. Thin, bright, artificial, running through the surface of the work. Civilisational progress, rendered as something shiny and sharp and slightly out of place, embedded in a painting that would look complete without it.

The sea was already the artist's subject before the residency began, which is part of why the work does not feel commissioned. It feels continued.

The place they were made

It is worth knowing what was happening in Bibinje while these works were being made.

The railway had been reactivated. The industrial zone had been expanded. Residents describe both as things done to the town by interests located elsewhere: daily life disrupted, public space degraded, local objection registered and ignored. In the project's earliest co-design sessions, participants from Croatia spoke of scepticism toward activism, of environmental concern treated as marginal, of institutions they do not trust and decisions they do not affect.

Artists in those same sessions asked, openly, what meaningful action even remains available, given how much has already been done.

Neither of these works answers that. Both were made anyway, in that town, with those people. A dance film in which bodies enter water they cannot breathe. Three paintings in which wire cuts through shells.