14th festival of non-aligned comics NOVO DOBA

The alternative, auteur or non-aligned comic book festival Novo Doba (New Era) provides its guests and participants with an intense program filled with various events, exhibitions, workshops, concerts and presentations. It also gives the opportunity to engage in printed editions exchange between selected authors, publishers and productions from the international alternative arts circle, which gives them insight into vivid and lively local scenes.

Novo Doba is fast becoming a year-long festival, with its activities within the newly-established supracultural epicenter Matrijarsija, where its coordination team operates from, and where they organize workshops of absolutely all imaginable skills, at all times, even odd times. Matrijarsija has been established in 2014 with the aim of becoming a place for artists from various fields of audio-visual arts to congregate and it already has at its disposal suitable capacities for housing and working.

These kinds of artist residences have already been practiced in 2014 at the initiatives of individual artists and collectives. Such programs allow various artists, theoreticians, curators and other creatives to immerse themselves in a space and context that may seem outside their regular surroundings and activities. It provides them ample time to reflect, explore, produce and present, as well as face them with presenting their practices to other/different communities, by meeting new people, using new materials, and experiencing life in a different location. The emphasis is on a multi-layered cultural exchange and the experience of other/different. The Novo Doba Festival is part of a network of similar festivals across Europe and it had participated, presented itself and left its mark in France, Italy, Sweden, Croatia, Romania, Germany, Slovenia, Hungary and Macedonia.

Visitors from the region and a wider European context mingle with the authors, authors mingle with the organizers, guests with hosts, cats with dogs. It is impossible to present all guests, comic book authors, musicians, experimentators, graphic artists, distributors, discographers, bookshop owners, comic book collectors, welders, pushers, shovers, dancers, theoreticians and essayists, activists and agitators, volunteers, directors, circus performers, media archeologists, silkscreen printers, imrovisers, children from our house, children from other houses, projectionists, overseers, cameramen and photographers, professionals and amateurs, chefs and gourmets, actors and on-lookers, ecologists, street artists, mural painters, gusle players, DJs, VJs, CJs, MCs, cassette tapes collectors, tailors, writers and screenwriters, cyclists, cavemen, people from the future, the new era. The Newerists.