Yangtze Project, 2009

Urban performance / video - Data recovery

Sava Yangtze Project is a transmedia performance which brings to reality original, not less performative event from 1966. On July 16, of that year Mao Zedong swum across (allegedly) Yangtze river. The day after, pictures of this undertaking took over the world.
"People say Yangtze is a big river. It is big but not terrible. Is not imperialist America big? We challenged it and what happened? Nothing! There are things in the world which are big but not terrible.“ (Mao Zedong)
Data recovery is a process of partial salvaging of lost data from the memory without a context which originally gave them positive informational, social or other sense. Similarly to the data loss in computer this procedure is an attempt to salvage fragments of an action, event or situation which disappeared social memory loss. The most important thing is that the event does not become contextualized through the interpretation, historicizing and manipulation of the lost meaning. History is a long line of confabulations, a spontaneous production of false memories.
In the sunset of May 14, 2009 Dalibor Martinis, with two waterproof cameras on his body and a waterproof MP3 player on his head, swum across river Sava and thus made that under the Sava's bridge the Yangtze flows. While Mao Zedong symbolically used the nature in order to forever change the society, Martinis symbolically used the society to change the nature for a moment.