Zoran Todorović (RS)

Integration, 2017
illegal people project 

In a refugee center in Belgrade, where refugees from the Near and Middle East and Africa pass through on their way to Western European countries, the artist collected urine from refugees and made craft beer from a popular Belgian recipe. The beer was intended for export to the first-world countries and for consumption by the audience and the author as part of a performance lecture, which was with the presentation of video documentation of the entire production process, from the refugee toilet to the final packing of the finished product, presented at LADA – Live Art Development Agency in London. The consumption of beer produced in this way has opened up the problem of the status of refugees and the human body, which, under certain processing conditions, becomes mobile and acceptable also in those countries of the capitalist center where the borders for refugees are firmly closed. The art project "Integration: Illegal People" premiered at LADA in November 2017. Todorović, in the format of this work, presented open political issues that confront the hidden social symptoms that are revealed to us here – about objective, about the status of a physiological procedure and power of fictional in art, actively reflecting the position of the second world countries in global political circumstances.

“At the end of my project, some people who stayed longer knew that I was making beer, so they were willing to help, which is to pee in the urinal for my project. In the end, it only took four days to collect urine. On the one hand, I had to call it the end because there was a very open war with Doctor Without Borders.” (...) “I collected only 10 litres of urine, though it is not a little amount, at the first moment I expected much more, if I could stay in the centre a bit longer.” (...) “Those problems are the symptoms of something I can hardly articulate, something that relates to the secret of our state. What is the problem if refugees choose to pee here or there?” (...) “Who can tell where the right place is for peeing? What does ‘peeing' mean in that context?”

Excerpt from: The Transgression of Bodily fluids Crossing Boundaries: An Interview with Zoran Todorović on the ‘Integration: Illegal People’ Project

Zoran Todorović (b. 1965, Serbia) graduated painting in 1992 at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in the class of professor Milice Stevanović, under the mentorship of whom he also obtained his Master's degree in 1995. Since 1998 he has been working as an assistant and since 2006 as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Zoran Todorović established a complex and controversial art practice of exploring, deriving and carrying out critical (liminal, transformational, provocative) relations of art, science and micropolitics regarding the human body, that is, the human body in the contemporary culture of arbitrariness, alienation and absorption.

https://www.zorantodorovic.com/work/