Garaža Kamba

During the artist residence in the Kamba Garage in August and September of 2024, artist Rebecca Merlić explored the urban and social landscape of Zagreb’s historic coffeehouses, their appearance broken through fragmented archival material, personal memories of people who regularly visited them, as well as the physical state of Zagreb’s coffeehouses today. The resulting multimedia work „Kavana Corso” combines the experience of the coffeehouse (Kavana) with the idea of trip or travel (Corso). It suggests exploring the flavors, conversations and experiences that take place within the coffeehouses as a movement, environment, art research, coffee and interpersonal relations.
Exploring different meanings of Kavana took the artist to conversations with musician Drago Diklić, Austrian architect Hermann Czech and the person after whom Kamba was named – Zlatko (Kamba) Kamber, who shared their professional and personal experience of life, creativity and changes in Zagreb coffeehouses and its context in the everyday fabric of the city. Which coffeehouse gathered the wild ones, which one gather the more respectable (although answers may vary), what was worn and eaten, what kind of music echoed and what was the difference between coffeehouses, clubs and bars in the past, are the topics that encounter the reality in which the Zagreb coffeehouses as an idea prevail in public opinion, but no longer exist and has not existed for many years.
The question is, just how much of this now imagined landscape perseveres only in the annals of pink-colored nostalgia and how much of its setting applies to today’s social context. Perhaps by arranging elements of the past and the potential of the present, it can contribute to the transformation of fast-moving trends that no longer leave space for slow afternoons turning into nights filled with music.

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