MUSIC AND ECOLOGY FOR THE END OF THE KOTORART 2018

This year’s program of Don Branko’s Music Days and also the whole KotorArt, were completed on Monday, August 13th. With the program titled Our Daily Bay, one of the main themes of this year's festival – ecology, sustainable development and environmental protection – was completed. At the Kotor’s Cinema Square, there was performed a musical-visual-literary program, which had a common goal to awaken thinking about the pollution of the sea in the Bay. In this way, Don Branko's Music Days were rounded thematically, since, let us remember, at the opening of the festival on July 13th, there was performed a premiere of the composition Stella’s Passion by Rambo Amadeus, which through the dramatic text deals with the problem of flora and fauna in the Bay.

Percussionist Darko Karlečik took part in the musical part of the program, who for several days prepared children, volunteers of the Our Action NGO, as well as the Don Branko’s Music Days team members for performing on unconventional percussion instruments. Namely, they played on a huge construction made of waste collected from the sea. This installation represented a skeleton of a whale, almost in its natural size. Karlečik graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, under Professor Nebojša Jovan Živković, and obtained his master's degree from the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien. With his appearance at KotorArt, he showed not only his performing, but also extraordinary pedagogical skills, since he mostly worked with performers who did not have music education.
The action of cleaning of the Perast seabed, which was conducted on the August 4th by the professional divers in cooperation with Our Action and the festival team, was documented by a photo. In addition, the audience had the opportunity to view the photographs of Ivana Orlović Kranjc and Janez Kranjc, which were previously exposed in the aquarium of the Institute of Marine Biology, within the first underwater exhibition in Montenegro. When it comes to art, besides the installation of a skeleton of a whale, there was exhibited a Captured Fish sculpture, made by the Kotor high school students out of the waste from the sea, that is, from glass and plastic bottles. 

At the final evening of KotorArt, there as well performed artist Ana Nives Radović who carried out a short performance – transformation of the mosaic composed of small painted plates which in their original form gave the word waste, while at the end of the performance, after their rearrangement, they gave the word clean. Being primarily management economist and lawyer in the field of European Union law, and since 2017 the Director of the Tourist Organization of the Kotor Municipality, Ana has been engaged in painting since 2004, with all of the profit realized from sales of her paintings having been given to charity.

This year's KotorArt lasted from June 28th, and through four segments – Perast Klapa Festival, Kotor Festival of Theatre for Children, Don Branko’s Music Days and Philosophers’ Square, more than 250 programs were realized with the participation of more than a thousand artists.

Boris Marković