Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. With rituals, based on the use of her own body, she reconnoitres in her work the boundaries of her own physical and psychological stamina.The film is not a mechanical reproduction of Abramovic’s performances, but creates a new reality: the performances are translated into cinematographic images and embedded in the fictional context of the film. Abramovic plays her own role, appears in different multiple forms that repeatedly distort and blur her identity. Memories are mixed with fantasies, daydreams and with both artistic and everyday rituals. It is as if Abramovic is looking two ways at once, like a two-faced head: one face looking at the past, the other at the future. It is an attempt to rediscover herself in the past and at the same time to give shape to a creative process.îThe film is just as whimsical, fragmented and discontinuous as memory itself. The chronological narrative line breaks free of the autonomous layer of picture and sound. The film throws a different light on the work of Abromovic, extends it to other dimensions and evokes new sensations for the viewer.
