Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture - Kristina Pranjić

Water as Method – Eco-Transversal Mapping of Adriatic Avant-Gardes

Kristina Pranjić presents the project ADRIATIC AVANT-GARDE: Eco-Transversal Remapping of Northern Adriatic Avant-Gardes, which responds to the ecological crisis by rethinking cultural and art-historical narratives from the perspective of the sea. Focusing on under-researched avant-garde practices of the Northern Adriatic, the project challenges the field’s tendency to center major Western European urban hubs and brings into view innovations and translocal networks that have often remained marginal within established histories.

Rather than relying on national frameworks or linear genealogies, the project begins from the Adriatic’s material and infrastructural conditions. It proposes “water as method,” a way of tracing transversal relations between artistic practices, locations, and archives. Moving across three temporal layers – historical avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and contemporary intermedial practices – the lecture asks how ecological and material sensitivity takes shape as a situated practice: through sea imaginaries, more-than-human relations, and critiques of extractivist regimes.

During her Kamov Residency, hosted by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, in February 2026, Pranjić conducted preparatory research for an interactive map that will connect archival work with conversations with artists, curators, and cultural workers, alongside field-based encounters. The mapping aims to make local cultural ecologies more visible and to prompt reflection on how environmental and ecological “layers” register in artistic practices (historical and contemporary) and how new relations between them can be articulated.

Kristina Pranjić is a researcher working at the intersection of avant-garde history and theory, intermedial art, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities. She is Associate Professor at the University of Nova Gorica and a researcher at ZRC SAZU, where she is developing the ADRIATIC AVANT-GARDE project in collaboration with the University of Graz. Her research maps transnational avant-garde networks in East Central Europe and examines how artistic experiments in form, media, and collective practice engage social and political questions. She is the author of Jugoslovanska avantgarda in metropolitanska dada [Yugoslav Avant-Garde and Metropolitan Dada] (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2024).