Night Tide
film screening and conversation with the artist
The work Night Tide was realised as part of the first Malta Biennale in 2024 and intertwines two fictitious Mediterranean women's stories. The work was created as a response to the research of the Maltese history of piracy in the Mediterranean, in which Dijana Protić imagines an active female role. The first narrative line of the film was therefore recorded in Maltese and follows the captain of a pirate ship who rescues the captain of a Dubrovnik ship after a shipwreck. This narrative comments on the history of relations between the Republic of Dubrovnik and Malta, and the historical fact that the Dubrovnik consul was present in Valletta since 1744. The second narrative line of the film is set in the present and was recorded in the Korčula dialect. Its protagonist is captain Mirta Milat, who sails on a research ship and maps the extent of the ecological disaster. The testimonies of captain Katarina and researcher Mirta comes to life through Maltese port cities, coastal natural landscapes and tides.
The work was filmed on the island of Gozo and Malta in January 2024. It was shown at the Malta Biennale as a three-channel video installation, while on Korčula is presented as a single-channel film.
Cinematographer: Bojan Mrđenović
Editing: Miro Manojlović
Composition and sound design: Manja Ristić
Artistic advisor: Lea Vene
Sound recorder and male voice in Croatian: Hrvoje Pelicarić
Female voice in Croatian: Marija Borovičkić
Dolphin sound recording: Robertina Šebjanič
Maltese translator: Kevin Saliba
Female voice in Maltese: Chelsea Muscat
Curators for Maltabiennale.art: Sofia Baldi Pighi, Elisa Carollo, Emma Mattei, Nigel Baldacchino
Production: Maltabiennale.art, 2024.
About author
Dijana Protić (b.1985, Zagreb, Croatia) has a Master of Fine Art (MFA) degree in dramaturgy from The Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She is a collaborator in the Center for Innovative Media, Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka. She is the director of several short and documentary films, and the leader of film workshops, author of VR project The Shipbuilders of the Mistral. In March 2024 she presented Croatia on 1. Malta Biennale of Contemporary Art with artwork Night Tide, three channel multimedia installation. Currently, she is finishing a dissertation entitled Multimedia and Digital Art in Croatia and Slovenia 1988-2008. Her scientific interest is linked to multimedia and digital art, while the focus of artistic research is on innovative artistic practice, the history of the Mediterranean, feminism, and strategies of resistance. So far, she has collaborated on artistic and research projects with numerous individuals and organizations from the independent art scene such as WHW, Gray Area, Format C and local institutions such as the Kortil Gallery (HKD Sušak), Rijeka's ArtKvart and Zagreb Film, as well presented on over ten international conferences connected with history of the media art.
Lea Vene (b. 1987) is an independent curator and cultural anthropologist. She obtained her MA in Art History, Cultural Anthropology and Fashion Theory from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. In 2019, she completed two postgraduate courses (Critical Images and R-Lab) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She worked as curator at the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery in Zagreb, and curates
the annual programme of the Močvara Gallery together with Lovro Japundžić. Since 2015, she has curated several different exhibition and conference programmes for the international photography festival Organ Vida. She is a lecturer in fashion museology and anthropology at the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb. She is a member of the grey) (area association and a co-leader of the project Industrial Heritage of the Island of Korčula, exploring gender aspects of the intangible.
