Reflections on Cultural Programming: ALMARE meets MoTa

© Marcel Obal

It's a gray October Monday afternoon in Ljubljana. We are in the Slovenian capital for Suzanne Ciani’s concert, part of the off-programme of the Sonica festival. Truth be told, we came here driven by our interest to peep into the festival’s inner workings and, most importantly, get to know the people animating Sonica, their desires and fears, as well as shed some light on the enigmatic non-profit association behind it all: MoTA - Museum of Transitory Art.

We meet MoTA's founder Martin Bricelj Baraga at Kino Šiška, one of Slovenia's first modernist buildings, an elegant Soviet movie theatre converted into a full-fledged cultural centre in 1994. While we settle on the foyer sofas, it doesn't take Martin long to fill the room with his resounding laughter. Right from the start, Martin gives us the impression of a warm-hearted guy, who takes his job very seriously. We started by talking about Sonica, which reached its seventeenth edition in April.

ALMARE: Can you tell us about the beginnings of Sonica?

Martin Bricelj Baraga: It all goes back to the late nineties, to the first steps I took to turn my many passions into reality. I'm a visual artist—that's the field I come from. I had just founded a studio called CodeSign, where we worked in art and design, but we were also very passionate about electronic music. At that time, several electronic music festivals had just been born, Sónar being one example. But around here, in Ljubljana, there were mostly just house and techno parties. There was drum and bass too, of course, but we didn't like that much. We felt that if we didn't organize a festival ourselves, there wouldn’t be anything that would be interesting for us. So we started organising events. But they weren't just parties—they were real events, each with its own curatorial concept. Those parties were the first seeds that would later grow into Festival pomladi and then Sonica.

© Igor Bijuklić

ALMARE: The integration of the two languages of visual arts and music — now taken for granted and showcased in hundreds of festivals worldwide — was a hallmark of that era... How did the parties evolve into a festival, and how did the festival preserve its multimedia lineage?

MBB: It all happened very fast. Our previous festival was Festival Pomladi (Spring Festival), an open-air event that started in Tivoli City Park and ran for eight or nine years, occupying several public spaces around the city—we even made it onto the main road in the centre of Ljubljana. Eventually we were reaching 5,000 admissions, yet we had no interest in selling beer or taking a commercial approach. During the Festival Pomladi years we hosted interesting AV artists like DJ Yoda and Plaid from Warp Records—there was strong interest at the time in breakbeat and other less represented genres.

The festival's artistic direction was still fairly "popular," attracting wide audiences, but I was drawn to more experimental forms, so we gradually began adding art forms that moved in that direction. SONICA was born out of this need. Even though it was originally conceived as an exhibition, we called it a "festival" because that was the only way to receive support—in reality it was closer to an exhibition, a laboratory. In the space we had at the time, we hosted ten media art installations, some of which we commissioned ourselves (Felix's Machines). We opened the first SONICA with artists like Tim Hecker and Byetone, alongside all the installations inhabiting the same space.

Back in 2008 or 2009, that kind of research was a novelty—it felt abstract, almost unthinkable. That was when our organisation underwent a total transformation: new name (MoTA), new programme, new team. We also launched our first residency programme. In short, we kept adding elements, always asking ourselves: "What's missing?"

ALMARE: Speaking of things that are missing: let's talk about the fundamental question—funding. What was the economy of the early editions of the festival?

MBB: The first edition of Sonica ran on a budget of only €1,500! And in the beginning of Festival Pomladi we relied on many friends who played for free; other bands also came for very little... I remember a friend lent us a huge sound system for only 250€. A few years later we installed a much bigger system, and the festival started to gain attraction—but at its peak, we actually lost the support of the City. And we were organising a free festival for the city! It was only a few years later, once we started bringing in artists with bigger fees, like Clark and Nôze—a now-forgotten French duo—that we had to introduce an entrance ticket.

© Katja Goljat

ALMARE: Soon before Sonica was born, Festival Pomladi was the first free festival in Ljubljana to offer a high-level open air experience in the city park, but the City discontinued its support. Why wasn’t the City interested in what you were doing? 

MBB: The fact that the City of Ljubljana wasn't interested struck me. You know how it works, right? You do it because you want to, not for the money. You do it for yourself and for the community—for the city too. That's when we started trying to expand our boundaries, to focus on internationalisation of our activities and projects.

ALMARE: So is it from this need that T.R.I.B.E. was born? Can you tell us about T.R.I.B.E. and your other networks?

MBB: As I said, I'm an artist, art is an international language, and Ljubljana is a small city. I've always traveled abroad for my work, and T.R.I.B.E. was born from that same need. It was a platform created to connect media labs and artist residency spaces across Eastern Europe and the Balkans—a network that encourages exchange between artists and countries that used to be connected but aren’t so much anymore—T.R.I.B.E. stands for Transitory research initiative for Balkan and East. Nonument, another project in MoTA's orbit, also started as a network of creative individuals, artists, architects, art historians and cultural activists. It's a special project dedicated to “ruined, forgotten, destroyed, or abandoned building heritage.” The awareness and desire to grow something bigger has always defined our projects.

© Katja Goljat