Le Monde Analogue

Le Monde Analogue is a creative collective with two permanent members — Anita Krisko and Jadranka Kljajic. Our self-titled exhibition, featuring photography of thirty-nine authors from twenty-seven countries, is held in Berlin from March 6 to May 2 at the Art Stalker Gallery.

Anita is a Croatian photographer who lives in Goettingen, Germany. Her passion for street imagery is driven by action and emotion that various geographies and their inhabitants reveal.

Jadranka is a multimedia artist who lives in Split, Croatia. She often chooses to photograph people and their interaction with the surroundings.

Together, we favour and produce moody, cinematic images shot on analogue medium in an urban environment.

Our public showing, a first with the creative collective, is an exercise in collaboration and community building. To make it happen, we rallied our co-creators via Instagram. We then teamed up with two local graffiti artists to produce a live painting event on the opening night.

Film and graffiti.

Analogue photography and graffiti share elements of uncertainty which aren’t common in the somewhat logical and relatively easy to control digital art. With film, the results are unknown until it’s developed. Graffiti involves work with unusual textures, environments, and oversized objects which can often subvert expectations.

The beginnings of graffiti date back thousands of years. Its modern origins start with the invention of the aerosol spray can in 1949. In the 1960s it gained wide exposure in Berlin, on the West side of the wall and on the other side of the globe, New York. The ‘70s has seen the first art gallery exhibition featuring graffiti.

The art form has since exploded, much like photography, as more people around the world dedicated themselves to creative expression. As we examine our history, both film and spray paint give us a glimpse into the creator’s world.

In the 2000s, the internet has provided a new platform for both art mediums. On forums and social media, photographers have organized and promoted the troubled film industry, eventually contributing to its recent renaissance. Meanwhile, graffiti has benefited from legitimization, increasingly positive image, and renewed public interest.

On March 6th we brought these two mediums closer with the help of two street artists, Alex Riser from Berlin and Leaf from Belgrade. Their vision has been sprayed on a six square meter panel of printed analogue exposures.

Organizing the cross-media group exhibition.

For our event, Instagram has been the primary medium for driving participation and attendance. There we connected with photographers from Ecuador, South Africa, Canada, USA, and all over Europe.

Our hashtag served as a platform to curate the submissions and connect with talented photographers, willing to have their work subjected to graffiti and exhibition. Our personal network of creative friends eventually became a part of the event as well. In the end, we got to meet and introduce a lot of new people, online and in person.

Our new creative relationships demanded regular communication and contingency planning. Not everyone turned out to be as responsive as we have expected; we had to make sure that we would be able to produce an event in case of an unsuccessful call for submissions. Fortunately, we’ve had a great number of quality contributions.

Although we were lucky to work with an active community of photographers willing to participate — graffiti artists were tougher to come by. As we searched for the talent, we got stonewalled by managers and their fees. Because the event was not aimed for profit, getting through to artists willing to contribute skill and time turned out to be a challenging and delicate task.

Finding talent is just the beginning, of course. Some funds still had to be generated to manage unavoidable expenses, such as printing. In our case, online fundraising campaigns did not work out. A lesson for the next year, perhaps.

With the finer details sorted, manual labour ended up being the easy part. Printing, framing, transporting, and setup.

The opening night was a mixture of dashing between tasks and pre-show anxiety. Thankfully, we were too busy to freak out! Once the event began we were finally able to relax and enjoy ourselves along with our friends and supporters.

We were very proud to see this happening; we dreamed about doing this for a long time.

On city streets, people transit daily from place to place, not paying much attention to their surroundings. For photographers and graffiti artists, the streets are a source of inspiration and a canvas for the exhibition.

During the exhibition, we invited the visitors to pause and experience the act of street art being made in front of them. For some, seeing it happen has been a demystifying experience; with the graffiti artists typically keeping their activities out of sight and film photographers quietly clicking away from the sidewalks.

We saw the event as a unifying experience, between multiple art disciplines, artists with various home countries and backgrounds, and the onlookers often excluded from the process.

Our plan is to continue exhibiting annually in various cities and collaborating with new artists each year. We are always looking to meet new artists, discuss our initiatives, and hear your opinions. Should you be interested, please find us on Instagram or on the web.