The Club of Innocent Readers
2021
The Club of Innocent Readers is a site-specific lecture performance (60’) designed for the readers and regular users of the City Library S.S. Kranjčević in Zagreb, Croatia.
The artist/lecturer brings to life five imaginary members of the library by retelling their stories, reading passages from their favourite books, and presenting personal objects belonging to them. The characters are Goga, Una, Milica, Šimun, and Branko.
Goga is a saleswoman at the nearby newsstand. Her story is told through Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Una, a seamstress from the nearby Zapoljska Street, selected Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life by Dubravka Ugrešić as her favourite book. Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library was picked by Milica, a passionate crime reader and cleaner at the Library S.S. Kranjčević. Šimun, who is a physics teacher at the nearby high school Fran Krsto Frankopan, revealed his obsession with time through One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Finally, Branko, a retired janitor of the nearby fire station, discussed Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.
By retelling these five personal stories, the artist/lecturer highlights five important elements of literature: the act of reading, character development, plot, time within the story, and the phenomenon of cognition. By corroborating the stories with documents—notebooks, drawings, jottings, newspaper clippings— and objects— a watch, a handkerchief, a sewing pattern—performance threads a fine line between what is fiction and what reality, offering a play of imagination and everyday life.
Commissioned by and performed at Gallery Prozori, part of the City Library S.S. Kranjčević, Zagreb.
