Second prize Gold Ibex

Tanja Radez from Slovenia for the artwork “Girls and Boys”, curated by Tomas Poblete.
The spatial organization entitled Girls and Boys is a visual reflection by Tanja Radez, tracking in a part of her creative activity the visual remains of the recent past of her non-existent country Yugoslavia. Girls and Boys is a project dealing with early childhood games that are based on an exploratory attitude to collecting something. In Yugoslavia, one after the other the girls were collecting napkins and boys were collecting album stickers. The paper napkins, thinner than the wind, have remained forever imprinted in the girls’ subconscious memory. They smelled of homeliness or an unknown modernity, of the distant and unreachable, sometimes of the luxurious or the extravagant. While girls poetically collected the napkins, with their drawings and little patterns, the boys mostly went for album stickers. The psychological role of the pictures or stickers that were found inside chewing gum or chocolate wrapping was of great importance. Basketball and football players, cars, motorcycles, Winnetou and Sandokan, famous actors, animals and plants, stuck in a specific order in the empty spaces of the album that were slowly filling up. It was all so exciting, up to the moment when there were only a few of the stickers missing, and often that was the way it stayed. The albums had an important educative role. The sign on the cover of the Oto-moto album says it’s a sticker album for general technical education. Cars, motorcycles and traffic education, or animals of the world – all of them were systematically educational, provided with detailed illustrations and exact information. Sports fans found a great value in the world championships’ albums, the collections of the players’ portraits stuck in time are an encyclopaedia of memories of their greatest achievements. Looking at different albums and napkin collections, I developed a theory about the difference between girls and boys based on these early childhood collections. The collecting starts at a very early age, it may even be an urge that we are born with. The girls collect in a dreamy, intuitive manner, collecting designs, and feelings, while the boys collect systematically, in their albums or other similar contemporary obsessions the collections are precisely defined, systematized, numbered, and full of knowledge and data. The girls trade their belongings, while the boys sell it. This way of functioning remains a lifetime process – women’s collections are emotional, but often the ladies are not conscious of the fact that their shoe cupboard filled with pairs for all types of occasions, is really a collection. On the other hand the men, husbands, and gentlemen often engage in a dangerous affair as collectors. They invest a lot of time, knowledge and money into their collections. They also tend to evaluate their collections, and often collect things that will theoretically rise in value. The men deal inside their collections, fight for them, study them in detail, hide them, or brag with them. The women prefer to live out their collections in a certain way, as well as use them.