Nina Dragičević
Nina Dragičević (b. 1984) started her musical career as a classical violinist. Since 2008 she has been active as a drum’n’bass DJ and a member of the first female DJ collective in Slovenia, Female’s’cream . Since 2013 she has been focusing on creating her own music which she presents exclusively at alternative culture venues, such as Ljubljana’s Škuc Gallery , Kapelica Gallery , Pritličje , Autonomous cultural centre Metelkova , Social centre Rog etc.
In her compositions, Overheard fragments of sound (December 2013), HRTBRKS (January 2014), An Ode to My Butcher (May 2014), Composition for an orchestra or a specific individual (June 2014) and Parallellax (April 2015), she mixes electronic sounds with organic and concrete ones, records soundscapes and herself, and combines as well as conceptualizes these elements in a specific, recognizable sound poetry. Because of her intellectual usage of sounds and composing music, excellent performance and humanistic intonation she can be regarded as a part of the great tradition outlined by female pioneers of electronic music, sound sculptors , synthesizers of sounds , such as Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and Eliane Radigue. In 2016 her album Parallellax was released on Kamizdat Records . In the same year she exhibited an 8-channel sound installation Vox Populi(st) in Sonoretum (Kapelica Gallery).
Nina Dragičević has also been engaged in other areas of cultural expression and civil-society activism. Since 2012 she has been editor of Lezbnik magazine. In 2013 she was coordinator of the Lesbian Quarter festival, and in 2016 program director of Ljubljana’s Pride Parade . She participates in a feminist initiative for women in music Glasne . She works as a designer: she created several book-covers for Škuc publishing house; she created the visual image for the Lesbian quarter festival in 2013, the poster for the first concert of Glasne in 2015 and the visual image for the Pride Parade in 2016. In 2014 her prose debut Kdo ima druge skrbi (Eng. Who has other worries ) was published, and in 2016 she published a monograph Slavne neznane: zvočne umetnice v konstrukciji družbe (Eng. Famous Unknowns: female sound artists in the construction of society ).
She is a journalist for Ljubljana’s Radio Student , where she runs a show Slavne neznane (Eng. Famous Unknowns) on gender and sexual difference in music. Her essays on music and other articles were published in the magazine Odzven , Časopis za kritiko znanosti ( Journal for the Critique of Science) , the daily Delo etc. In Autonomous Cultural Centre Metelkova she organizes Slišane v salonu (Eng. Heard in the Salon ), a cycle of sociologically conceived discussions on music, tinged with a feminist perspective. Her comprehensive authorial contribution ranks her among those intellectual personas which because of the forgotten, but essential bond between artistic expression, social engagement and critical thinking have the power to think and reflect on the present time.