photography, costume, architectural scale model, video, text
The modernist Zora Hotel, complete with a futuristic swimming pool dome, designed by Lovro Perković, was built in Primošten in the 1960s. Considering the 1971 tourist advertisement that features Orson Welles and Oja Kodar in front of the Zora Hotel, its spaceship-like dome was inserted into the world of ‘60s sci-fi movies. The pool was converted into a spaceship, and the Yugoslav advertising slogan “Come and See the Truth” – used to invite foreign citizens to experience the “sunny side of socialism”
— became the slogan for the space-faring mission named Sunny Side. Oja Kodar contributed to this project with her poetic letter and the information that Welles, in his unfinished film Don Quixote, had planned to turn Primošten’s dome into a spaceship that would take Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to the Moon.
Associates:
Goran Radošević, Zoran Stojićević, Oja Kodar
A Letter from Oja Kodar (Olga Palinkaš);
July 27, 2018
Dear Lana, this is the right moment to write to you… There will be a lunar eclipse tonight! I’m sending you a small fragment of Orson’s manuscript in which he talks of his intention of making a movie about the trip to the Moon! The right time for that would be tonight, although, as the astronomers predict, we wouldn’t miss much. Supposedly, the same “miracle” shall happen again some 15 years from now. The immortal Don Quixote and Sancho Panza “still have time”! In any case, the dome of Primošten’s pool shall, I hope, wait for them in the same place. Contact me again if I can help you with anything… Even for a joint trip to the Moon…
