Toni Meštrović, born 1973 in Split, Croatia, is a multimedia artist working predominantly in form of video and sound installations. He graduated with a Graphic Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1999, studied Video/Digital Imaging with Valie Export at the International Summer Academy for Contemporary Art in Salzburg in 1997, and completed a postgraduate diploma in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne in 2004. Video, sound and audio-visual installations produced during Meštrović’s postgraduate studies explore his personal perception of the sea, and the island where he grew up. Ongoing thematic preoccupations are the assimilation of the linear and cyclical time and the exhaustion of habitual quotidian linear narrative as well as change, either as a record of evaporation of water like in a closed circuit video installation, or as a commentary of social change. Mestrović lives in Rijeka and Kaštela, and is Professor at the Arts Academy University of Split, Department of Film and Video.
Toni Meštrović, “Continuum continuous”, 2004, single-channel video 6’07” loop. Photo: Matko Biljak, courtesy the Artist
Nick Tobier: I am interested in the relationships between specific places and specific projects–both spatially and culturally as well as in duration and physical presence. In the single channel videos, Vertigo, you seem to throw the camera in the air and let it capture something on its own. What were you thinking?
Toni Meštrović: In Vertigo, the camera is tied to a rope about 1.5 meters long and spun around. That work originated from another video, Veli Drvenik (2000) shot with a Hi8 video camera, years before sports cameras, which I simply spun around while holding it by the strap. Although I like to control the frame, it was during that period that I started taking photographs without looking through the viewfinder, allowing for surprises and chance. Mistakes and randomness are an important part of my process.
Toni Meštrović, “Eavesdropping”, 2022, closed circuit video/sound installation. Ph courtesy the Artist
You often describe the camera as eavesdropping- a listener rather than a seer. I was hoping you could talk more about this idea of putting a tool into an unfamiliar role?
Eavesdropping (2022), is part of a series using CCTV cameras and directional microphones, and in some cases, ultrasound speakers. It all started with Hack the System (2018) when I “hacked” the video surveillance of the Gallery of Fine Arts in Split. I used a primitive system with video projectors right under CCTV cameras and then split their signal into the projector. What you saw was a video projection of what the camera saw, creating an old-style video feedback loop.
Toni Meštrović, “Resonance of Sound”, 2021, spatial sound installation 30’59”. Ph courtesy the Artist
In a documentary of Resonance of Sound, 2021 (installation Tunnel Grič, Zagreb), you are playing the installation wire–with a bow, with a mallet.
I do not consider myself a creator of instruments but rather a creator of possibilities for experience. I think that was my first experience playing an instrument. Until then, I had always only recorded or documented situations that produced vibrations on their own. I do not have a musical education, although musicologist Davorka Begović once told me that I am a composer, but that perhaps speaks more about her broad understanding of music than about me.
Reflecting on this project, was the tunnel a specific opportunity to respond to an eccentric space?
Resonance of Sound is firmly tied to that specific space. Spaces with unique characteristics have always attracted me. Site-specific work is very uneconomical, investing a lot of energy and resources into something that only fully functions for a relatively short time in one place. But the charm of these works lies in this temporality.
Toni Meštrović, “Resonance of Sound”, 2021, spatial sound installation. Photo: Toni Meštrović, courtesy the Artist
Many of these spaces are emptied of other cues–such as images. How has your thinking about sound, space and the relationship between sound and space and image evolved as a video/filmmaker?
I grew up on an island by the Adriatic Sea, where from an early age, I dove into nature, catching fish. Diving into the sea is an immersive experience, and an irresistible urge for me, reminiscent of returning to the womb. I started combining installation and video, creating spaces for immersion. I later began to recognize the video’s sound as its own invisible medium that surrounds and is within your body simultaneously, a medium that, when devoid of visual anchors, becomes very abstract yet direct. I started modestly, using stereo signals, and then, opening up channels in surround sound environments, all the way to the ambisonic experience in Evacuation Plan (2016).
Toni Meštrović, “Vertigo #18”, 2022, (Dubrovnik), single-channel video 0’20” loop. Ph courtesy the Artist
Tell me more about these places and their inherent rhythms –especially in the series Continuum, where building a stone wall poses questions about duration and physicality.
Continuum (2004) was the first piece I created upon returning home to Croatia after postgraduate studies in Germany. My father was renovating his ancestral home a modest structure made of stone from the surrounding area on the island of Veli Drvenik. Stone is abundant on this island where people have survived for centuries with little soil or fertile land. This work led to a series titled Continuum continuus, through which elements of endurance, persistence, and resilience are emphasized. Although Continuum documents a specific place, it is a portrait of fragile places that are disappearing – the place of my identity and my heritage. The Adriatic and Mediterranean regions are under immense pressure from an economy geared towards mass tourism where profit and the lack of intelligent planning carry destructive consequences for the ecology and the identity of the area. I wonder, what legacy we are leaving our children?
Toni Meštrović, “Continuum Continuus” 2012, video/sound installation. Photo: Toni Meštrović, courtesy the Artist
How do you think about the evanescent quality of video as the medium for this tactile and sensory presence?
Video is an unstable medium compared to the solidity of stone. Although these concepts are very relative, the temporality of the medium gives it a certain value. I believe that just as durable materials have their value, so do unstable materials have a different value. Perhaps the value of unstable materials is even greater because there is a risk that they will disappear quickly. This uncertainty or inevitable disappearance somehow adds to their value. After all, our lives are also unstable, which makes them very valuable.
Nick Tobier
Split, Croatia, August 2024
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