BLOG 11/07/2019
The Jan Diaries — The Blues After Belgrade’s Dev9t Festival
The July 2019 entry of The Jan Diaries was written in the state Jan Kinčl calls festival blues, after three days at Dev9t in Belgrade. It opens, unexpectedly, with a defence of a festival he was not at.
What the piece covers
The claim that Exit is not what it used to be gets a careful answer. Kinčl agrees that a festival in its formative years produces the unpolished-diamond moments that end up defining the experience, but points out that an event drawing 350,000 people to the Petrovaradin Fortress, as Exit did in 2017, simply cannot run on the informality of its early editions; control and safety are the price of becoming an internationally recognised festival with professional infrastructure. What he misses is available elsewhere, which is where Dev9t comes in — twenty kilometres south of Belgrade at Stara Ciglana, the old brickyard, and in 2019 only in its fifth edition, still in the phase where organisational chaos reads as charm rather than as failure.
Formally, Dev9t is a multidisciplinary art festival running nine days across nine disciplines: music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, photography, film and comics. The site is divided into nine sectors known as favele, with a central kafana that serves as the festival office until five in the afternoon and as a stage afterwards; at that one stage Kinčl caught dub, Indian fusion jazz and a local Roma ensemble reworking well-known compositions. Marina Abramović contributed an installation titled Čistač, alongside work by Serbian visual artists and filmmakers including Mrđan Bajić, Marko Lađušić and Svetomir Arsić Basara. The music programme paired international names — LP Duo, Bob Moses, Monolink, Behrouz, Red Axes, Graham Candy — with a deep local DJ line-up drawn from more than a decade of his own working relationships.
The part that stayed
Kinčl’s own dates were Saturday 15 June, booked as a DJ set that turned into a back-to-back with Marko Milosavljević, and Monday 17 June, a live show with Regis that rain interrupted and that resumed immediately afterwards to a full floor. He left on the Tuesday for Novi Sad and went on to Zadar on the Wednesday. The measure of the place, in his reading, is that the schedule stops mattering: “performeri se sudaraju, pridružuju jedni drugima u neočekivanim kombinacijama i rade zbrku koja ima beskrajno puno šarma” — performers collide, join each other in unexpected combinations and make a mess with endless charm. Missing what you came to see, and finding something you had never heard of, is the sign that the programming worked.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Six minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Blues nakon beogradskog Dev9t festivala → redbull.com