Study Circle Zagreb

We gather around the topic Socially Engaged Approach to Heritage. We, members, work across visual art, curation, performing arts, literature and art history.

Our work starts from the notion of ties ties with others, with people who speak other languages, carry different histories and come from different places. This research belongs to Trešnjevka, a neighbourhood shaped by migration, labour, everyday life and many forms of coexistence. It also belongs to the wider community gathered around On Mobilisation. Towards Multivocal Collaborative Futures.

Heritage is made and remade through everyday life. In Trešnjevka, histories are not kept only in archives or official accounts, but in objects, streets, buildings, memories, habits and relations between neighbours. The Study Circle starts from the working-class memory of the neighbourhood, its social fabric and the voices that are often left outside dominant narratives. Local heritage becomes something people gather around, argue with, inherit, question and reshape together.

This Study Circle looks at alternative futures of belonging through intercultural understanding, socially engaged artistic practices and neighbourhood mobilisation. Heritage becomes a gathering point: a way to ask who belongs, who is remembered, who is missing and what kinds of collective life can still be imagined.

Through artistic and civic practice, we treat local heritage as a material for relation, conflict, care and collective imagination.

STUDY CIRCLE #2 / May 2026, Voltino library, Zagreb

This session, which goes under the common term veza ( eng. tr. tie, bond, connection) was dedicated to further research of the possibilities of connecting geographically dispersed strategies of resistance through art, which we have already begun exploring in our previous session. We turned for inspiration to a selection of Palestinian poetry published in the trilingual zine “We have been here forever” (published in the framework of “Cultura para paz” organised by Teja, Paisanaje, Museo Reina Sofia, L’Internationale) with the introduction by Rana Issa. She writes about Arab poetry as “a mnemonic device that penetrates people’s consciousness, registers and shapes their affective state”, and states that Palestinian poetry is both “a diwan (a historical record) and a protest against oppression”, used as “a means of cultivating political imagination and preserving collective spirit.” For our small collective, (and each of us bearing experiences of being part of other collectives), such potential contained in one single poem by a single author was very inspiring.

We called three more people to join our session: Renata Filčić, Marko Rajković and Diana Meheik, and as a location for our workshop, we have chosen the library branch in the part of Trešnejvka called Voltino (micro-neighborhood planned around the Končar factory, one of the most important Trešnjevka’s factories, still active today), where we were welcomed by the librarian Jasminka Kurt with cardamom spiced coffee and Mahmod Darwish’s poetry books. 

We chose to translate the poem “Pull yourself together” by the poet Hiba Abu Nada, killed by an Israeli airstrike of her home in the Gaza strip in 2023 at the age of 32. Verse by verse, using multiple languages, we have discussed the position of Palestine in the Arab world, the figure of Mahmod Darwish for the people of Palestine, different fractions within the Palestinian political landscape, and the nuances of different expressions in different languages. The basic knowledge of the Arab language and, moreover, the experience of life in Lebanon and the role of poetry as spoken word in everyday life, given by one of the participants, was precious. In the second part of the workshops we rested from speaking and together we created the blue-sky poster with selected translated verses and will be displayed in BLOK’s gallery Nova BAZA, Voltino library, MSU and several other spots in the city.