A town photographed twice

Bibinje is a small coastal town near Zadar, generally described - to the irritation of the people who live there - as a suburb of it. It has a fishing tradition, a maritime memory, and a coastline that has been rearranged in a single lifetime by tourism, urbanisation and environmental change.

Recently the railway was reactivated and the industrial zone expanded. Residents describe both as things that happened to Bibinje rather than in it: daily life disrupted, public space degraded, local needs plainly outranked by national and private economic interests. What that produces, beyond noise, is a deep mistrust of institutions and a sense of powerlessness.

This is the town in which Anđela Bugarija, a dance artist, made BETWEEN TIMEFRAMES.

The method

She did not arrive with a concept. She arrived and listened, building on the trust established during the first Community Artivism sessions, and what surfaced in those early conversations were photographs - family albums, shoeboxes, images of a coastline that no longer exists in that shape.

Working with local photographer Leo Banić, she put out an open call: bring us your pictures of Bibinje, and the memories attached to them.

Then she went back to the same locations and photographed them again - not as documentary comparison, but as performance. New staged photographs, made in the exact places the archival images were taken, with the human body placed into a landscape that had shifted around it. Several residents took part in producing them.

What it does

Hung together, the past and present images do something quietly devastating. They do not argue. They do not accuse. They simply place two moments beside one another and let the viewer perform the subtraction.

The gradual is the hardest thing to see. Coastal change does not announce itself; it arrives across decades, one building, one road, one season at a time, and each individual step is defensible. A family photograph from 1974 and a staged photograph from 2025, taken from the same spot, makes the accumulation visible in a way that no dataset does.

Who made it

Thirty-six people contributed directly. Ages eighteen to eighty. A long-standing fishing community. People with disabilities. Rural residents. Young people from under-resourced backgrounds - many of whom had few other places to make anything.

Around a hundred and fifty more encountered the work at the exhibition, which incorporated visitors' own reflections back into the piece, so that what began as a collection of private memory ended as a shared and public record of a town's environmental concern.

Afterwards

BETWEEN TIMEFRAMES led directly to I'MPRINT, the dance film Bugarija made during the Blue Residency, and the exhibition will be shown one last time on the project's Concluding Conference — in Bibinje, in June 2026, to the community that made it.

There is a particular thing that happens when a person stands in front of a photograph of their own coastline, in their own town, and understands that someone considered it worth exhibiting. Several participants said they had never seen Bibinje treated as a place worth making art about.

That, on its own, is a form of climate resilience. It just isn't one that appears in most funding frameworks.