In her works, which are based on long-term participatory research processes, the artist and filmmaker Katarina Jazbec creates new forms of narrative in which she explores vital questions of ethics, identity, freedom, justice, and economic inequality. In her most recent experimental documentary, the award-winning You Can’t Automate Me, for example, she hauntingly portrays the dangerous working life of Rotterdam dockworkers, who every day risk their lives securing shipping containers and, unlike many other port workers, cannot be replaced by machines.
For Ruhr Ding: Schlaf, Katarina Jazbec transfers her interest in rituals of dream-sharing, expressing and communicating dreams, to the Ruhr region. In her new film project, she examines how the processes of change in this former mining region affect the nightly dreams of its residents. How is their relationship with nature reflected in those dreams, and what stories are hidden in them? What significance does the end of the fossil-fuel age carry for the region’s possible future? Katarina Jazbec’s research and the protagonists of her short film took her to a quarry in Hagen and to the ThyssenKrupp Steel plant at Duisburg-Bruckhausen.
Katarina Jazbec studied in the Faculty for Economics at the University of Ljubljana and completed her master’s degree in photography at the St. Joost School of Art & Design in Breda.
Katarina Jazbec (*1991 in Slovenia) lives in Rotterdam.
