BOOKS, PHOTOS, FILM & PHOTOSYNTHESIS: AT SHIP THIS YEAR, EVEN MOSS MAKES MUSIC

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This September, music is turning up in all sorts of places in Šibenik. Between the covers of books, on cinema screens, across gallery walls — and, thanks to one particularly productive patch of moss, it’s even being grown.

There’s more happening in Šibenik than you might have on your radar. And some of it starts before SHIP officially does.

On September 9, SHIP’s Day Zero, Zagreb’s cult student club KSET is bringing part of its 50-year history to Šibenik. At Azimut, KSET’s Photo Section will open KSET50, a retrospective built from five decades of photographs of Croatian and international artists who have passed through the legendary KSET boiler room. KSET’s Disco Section will provide the soundtrack.

Books get their turn too. Croatian researcher and author Boris Jokić arrives with 60 otkucaja: Glazbena lektira (60 Beats: Music as Required Reading), a book built around 60 songs and the personal stories attached to them. Erik Satie, Patti Smith, Josipa Lisac and Arsen Dedić are among the starting points for stories about growing up, society and those moments we somehow end up remembering through the music that was playing. Jokić will share some of them with the SHIP audience alongside Krešimir Blažević of Rockmark.

Another musical universe ufolds across almost 500 pages of Mance: Tajna starog hrasta (Mance: The Secret of the Old Oak). Kornel Šeper’s LP-sized monograph, designed by Tomislav Vranić Vrana, brings together music, photographs, drawings, manuscripts and poetry by Milan Manojlović Mance, one of the most singular figures of the Croatian underground. Mance was never particularly easy to put in a box. Which makes SHIP a pretty good place for him.

And then there’s moss.

French artist Hugo Baranger’s Where 2+2=5 brings together moss, analogue synthesisers and chess at Galerija Matija. Electricity generated through photosynthesis powers the synths, while games by legendary chess player Mikhail Tal become scores for a sound composition that keeps changing as it unfolds.

The following day, September 10, SHIP officially begins with a film almost a century old — and a band that has no intention of letting it stay silent. At 5 PM at House of Art Arsen, Croatian instrumental surf rock band LHD will perform their original score live to Birtija, Joza Ivakić’s 1929 Croatian silent film, digitally restored from nitrate-film originals. The audiovisual pairing was created as part of KIN-O-ZVUK, a project bringing Croatian film heritage and contemporary music together.

Books, photographs, silent film, chess, moss — turns out there are quite a few ways to make your way onto the SHIP program.