Coaching

Branka provides freelance coaching for artists or artists-to-be. She successfully coached people towards their entry exams for art schools (e.g. Anita Lugomer, DOGtime, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) or towards their end exams (e.g. Yafit Taranto, MA of Film, Netherlands Film Academie). She also advices artists during their production process, towards creating a new work.

Branka’s expertise is to find durational treads in one's work, and to recognise or retrieve them in their today’s practice. This information helps her clients to create meaningful connections between their diverse practices, to reveal different layers of their current work and to find out how are those layers connected to them as subjects. In Branka’s opinion the subjective aspect of ones work is very often the source of its authenticity. 

Another aspect of Branka’s intervention is an ability to induce necessary breakthroughs when her clients feel “stuck”, “trapped”, or unable to get to the next level in their work. To achieve this she uses various methods for opening up the practice. Although Branka’s coaching tendency is to invent a custom method for each client, here are mentioned couple of examples from the past coaching sessions. One of often used methods is a performative method, where she might propose a performance (ritual) with an aim to transcend one’s stuckness by gaining wider perspective. For example, when Yafit Taranto was busy with subject of death in her MA research study, and she met a sort of “dead end” in her tread, Branka proposed her to instead of thinking and asking questions, she rather experientially “meet” with Death. This resulted in a staged funeral (with audience as participants) in which she “died” and was “reborn" again. Yafit gained important insights about her research during this performance and her practice got a new start from that moment on, which allowed her to graduate the same year instead of postponing and still tapping in the dark. Other methods for opening a practice used so far are: specific kinds of writing/reflection, “prescribed" daily practices, creation of specific conditions for a surprise, or repetitive practices which aim is an accumulation of knowledge. The accumulation ascends the capacity for “holding” and therefore a client finds herself “spilling out” what she needs to find. The mentioned methods are based on Branka’s study of Zen Koan, which gives them a power of solving a paradox. Branka’s approach to art making is tightly connected to one's self-development and not only helps her clients to advance as artists but also as human beings.