Summer Mysteries

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project © Dušanka Seratlić - I want to live every life.My eyes are broken, I see rainbows.The question of a secret yet to be revealed.Question your body. © Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project View all images ↓
View all images ↓
Report issue

Summer Mysteries is what happens when you stay in one place long enough for it to start talking back.

Summer Mysteries is a photographic and textual work exploring a single city across a single season. Produced during a summer spent in Budva, Montenegro, the project pairs photographs with fragments of writing to create an intimate, layered portrait of a place most people experience only as surface.

The photographs are what you see: Budva in summer, the postcard, the shimmer, the rituals of the season. The texts are what unfolds beneath the surface: excerpts from notebooks kept throughout the summer, a stream of consciousness in which sensory experience constantly collides with questions of technology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence. Together, the photographs and texts form two registers of the same place: the image captures what is present, felt, and impermanent, the text attempts to make sense of the constant background noise our minds produce.

This double structure reflects a central tension in my practice, which is the gap between subjective experience and the attempt to communicate it. What emerges here is not a documentary portrait of Budva but a personal mythology of one season, an attempt to translate a deeply embodied experience into something that can communicate and connect.

The work was originally presented as a solo exhibition at the Open Air Art Gallery in Budva in 2015. Alongside photographs and accompanying texts, the exhibition included a participatory element: the photographs were printed as postcards with texts on the reverse side, tucked into some twenty Agatha Christie novels and left throughout Budva's Old Town to be found and carried away as talismans of a summer. The gesture of releasing the work into the city rather than containing it in a gallery extended the project beyond the exhibition and into the life of the place itself, where each found postcard became a private encounter between the work and a stranger. Most of the exhibited photographs were stolen from the open-air gallery during the course of the exhibition, an unintended but fitting conclusion to a project designed to be carried away.

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project
i

What has happened? What will happen? At this moment, I can’t know this.We were here, once before, underwater. This sweater smells nice. AgathaChristie’s books relax me in many ways. First of all, reading is such anincredible escape. It happens solely within you, and even the author iscompletely irrelevant. It’s also a very good hiding place. Over this summer,I had read almost all of Agatha Ch

© Dušanka Seratlić - I want to live every life.My eyes are broken, I see rainbows.The question of a secret yet to be revealed.Question your body.
i

I want to live every life.My eyes are broken, I see rainbows.The question of a secret yet to be revealed.Question your body.

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project
i

The story begins with a book called “How to Create a Mind” by Ray Kurzweil.It is an interesting look at the software and hardware needed to createartificial intelligence. Using sentences that I found interesting whilereading, I created this short text of what I took away from this book.“All philosophy is critique of language. Sun rises and sets. Or it setsand rises. Consciousness is a fundame

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project
i

One minute after. The photographs are questions. Where is this space? Is itreal, is it public, is it personal, is it imaginary? When is this? Is ita memory, a prediction? Just a moment whenever? Was it ever now? Everydaydelusions. Living in a screensaver. Question time. You dont have to beanyhting, you dont have to be anywhere. But what to do with this sadnesscreated by the disconnection betw

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project
i

A question. What happens with things that are lost? In what way is a filmthat has been used to photograph points in time and space lost if thosephotographs were recorded on the film, but later got burned, or the filmnever got developed, or it was destroyed by a wave?The fact remains - I photographed things I found beautiful or interestingin order to remember them and show them to people as th

© Dušanka Seratlić - I fear I have more bad days than good days.Question your undying love.
i

I fear I have more bad days than good days.Question your undying love.

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project
i

I want to live every life. It’s august. The colonial forces were movingsouth. It was going to rain. But to his eyes, the storm seemed more ominous.It seemed to be carrying with it a time best spent on the land. The cloudsso hot and heavy she was feeling their touch on her shoulders were unbearableon the sea. The warmth was primordial, felt in every bone. Sun shines throughthis thick water lev

© Dušanka Seratlić - Image from the Summer Mysteries photography project
i

Question the power of your desire.“Predicting the future is actually the primary reason that we have a brain.The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.Inventions or discoveries or just stumbles upon.We are apparently very eager to explain and rationalize our actions, evenwhen we actually didn’t make the decisions that led to them. It shouldn’tsurprise us that the me