Forma Viva Collection

Forma Viva stands for both an international sculptors meeting that first took place in 1961 and for the resultant collections of monumental sculptures, presented in either specially designated parks or spread across urban regions. It is an unique enterprise dedicated to outdoor creation and to a profoundly public dimension of art. Supposedly it is also the oldest still active sculptors symposium in the world.

The Forma Viva collections mirror the four locations where the meetings have been sometimes simultaneously and sometimes alternatively taking place – in Maribor (the main city in the Eastern part of Slovenia), in Seča (a peninsula near the coastal town of Portorož), in Kostanjevica na Krki (a small island town located on the river Krka) and in Ravne na Koroškem (the central town of the Koroška region).

Flower (125 x 175 x 175 cm), reinforced concrete by Mojca Smerdu from 1983, located in front of the Faculty of Economics and Business, part of the Forma Viva Open Air Sculpture Collection, Maribor

Background

In a defunct Roman quarry at Sankt Margarethen a meeting called Bildhauersymposion St. Margarethen (founded by Karl Prantl and lasting till 1977) was held for the first time in 1959. It was attended by Janez Lenassi and a year later also by Jakob Savinšek, both of them sculptors who got greatly inspired by its conception of an open-air artistic gathering and workshop.

They've developed an idea for a similar project to be established in Slovenia, of an annual international symposium where not only would monumental works be created in situ but where also a distinctively international and heterogeneous congregation of ideas could be held. The name that they've coined is Latin for living form, seeing the meeting as a means of exploring sculpture in ever changing directions.

Concept

Since its inception Forma Viva has been a geographically diverse entity, with two gatherings held at two different locations 200 kilometres apart and soon yet another pair of Forma Viva manifestations established. The basic premises of Forma Viva are that the organisers takes care of the materials, tools and provide for the artists during their work (usually lasting between 4 to 8 weeks) while in exchange they donate their works to the collections.

The materials for sculptures have been chosen in accordance with the natural resources or social contexts of individual sites. As such the symposium in Kostanjevica na Krki uses oak wood (until recently obtained in nearby woods) and in Seča the hard and bright Istrian limestone (among other things it is used for the fountains in Venice) is being sculpted. With the steel industry playing a very prominent role in the region at the time, the works produced at the third site, Ravne na Koroškem, are made of metal. Similarly the burgeoning urban development of Maribor commanded the use of reinforced concrete for the endeavours taking place there. Other locations proposed were Jesenice (iron), Ptuj (aluminium or plastic) and Radenci (clay).

A brief history

The first two symposium sites were Seča and Kostanjevica na Krki (set up by Lenassi and Savinšek), but soon they were joined by Ravne na Koroškem (1964) and Maribor (1967). The steel making plant in Ravne was instrumental for the one held there, as it arose of a chance meeting the factory CEO Franc Fale had with the Forma Viva organisers. Similarly as his plant backed this project, so was the one in Maribor supported by the local construction companies (first Stavbar but later also Gradis and Konstruktor).

At first, annual symposia were held in both Seča and Kostanjevica but, for economic reasons, this had to be curtailed after a few years. As of 1967 they were held alternately, each every two years. In the initial years it was customary for mutual visits between the two sites to be organised, thus fostering a truly colourful artistic meeting (with roughly a dozen invited artists per site).

The Maribor symposium happened six times between 1967 and 1986 (after which it hasn't been yet resurrected), and the one in Ravne seven times between 1964 and 1989 (yet resurrected in 2008 and 2014). The Seča symposium remains the only one with a continuous run, as Kostanjevica also went thorough a ten year hiatus (1988–1998). Nowadays the later two symposiums invite about three artists every two years.

Initially Forma Viva was an unitary brand with a unitary organisational body. While the institute still remains, the individual collections and symposia are now managed by Božidar Jakac Gallery, Kostanjevica na Krki, Obalne galerije - Coastal Galleries, Maribor Art Gallery and Koroška Regional Museum respectively.

Other Forma Vivas

With time the name came to denote any outdoor collection of sculpture and a few other independent Forma Viva's were also established, most notably in zrece and Makole.

The Zrece one began to take shape in mid-1970s and and the collection was growing until 1989. It is a result of cooperation between the artist Vasilij Cetkovic and Marjan Osole, the managing director of the tools company Unior at that time. Built on the the blacksmith tradition of the area, they created eight pieces made from iron, steel and artificial grindstones.

The youngest of all, Forma Viva Makole is an international sculptors symposium and painters gathering that was founded in 2003 by the photographer and designer Ivan Dvoršak. Different materials are used for the pieces which are stationed around the village of Makole and some of its outlying villages in the hilly, wine-growing region of Haloze.

The collections

In Kostanjevica na Krki the better part of the works are on display in the park adjacent to the former Kostanjevica Monastery, where the Božidar Jakac Gallery, Kostanjevica na Krki is stationed. There are approximately 130 works, of which a small part can be found at the surrounding meadows, towns, villages and road junctures (like the constructivist sculpture by Vjenceslav Richter (HR)). Most of the pieces are made of wood (and thus quite a challenge to mmaintain), yet one can also come across occasional mixed techniques.

In Seča more than a hundred works that can be contemplated in the park overlooking the sea. Additionally, a large number of them is distributed around several parks on the Slovenian coast, as originally planned over fifty years ago.

The Maribor collection (19 pieces all in all) is scattered across the whole of the city, from courtyards of residential complexes (and in one case even one of the apartment block outer walls) to public squares.

In Ravne na Koroškem the enterprise was conceptualised as distinctively regional and the thirty odd steel sculptures grace a number of towns as well as parks in the area. The assemblage was began to be extensively renovated in 2005.

Exterior of Božidar Jakac Art Museum in the former Kostanjevica Monastery, Kostanjevica na Krki. In front: a sculpture from the Forma Viva Open Air Wood Sculpture Collection

Artists

Forma Viva has hosted hundreds of artists coming from all the continents except Australia. The manner of choosing the artists is different from year to year. Nowadays a public call is the main method, but in previous decades the better part of the artists was actually chosen by a special committee that invited them individual.

It is worth mentioning that Japanese artists represented the biggest percentage of the artists invited. Supposedly the only political dimension of the geographical representation was diversity, and Russian artists worked side-by-side with American ones. The symposium used to be criticised for not giving any preferential treatment to the Non-Aligned Movement countries.

Impact

Besides serving as notable landmarks, Forma Viva has also been an important for the penetration of the heterogeneous current of contemporary art into the local artistic communities. Bringing the many contemporary modelling principles, Forma Vuva used to act as one of the most institutions for the development of Slovene visual arts (alongside events such as the Biennial of Graphic Arts and Biennial of Design (BIO)).

Furthermore, the event was very important for the local community as well. Artworks were often created with the cooperation of local craftsman and – as in the case of Ravne – the workers in the local steel plant. The working sites were also freely accessible and often, especially in the early decades, they presented a rare opportunity for people living in remote villages to meet foreigners. A telling anecdote is how in 1961 the sculptor Bernard Roussil was a huge attraction for presenting a chainsaw to the awe-struck locals.