Beacons

The photographic series continues Cibic’s ongoing exploration of film portraiture, establishing the female protagonists that inhabit her cinematic works.

Within her film Beacons, Cibic constructs an octet of personifications—The Listener, The Coder, The Interpreter, The Semaphore, The Messenger, The Translator, and The Voice. Positioned within landscapes and architectures once selected by former Yugoslavia as stages for the inauguration of a new model of global governance—the Non-Aligned Movement—these figures operate as both witnesses and transmitters. Suspended between character and allegory, they break their long established historical stasis as they uncover and carry forward the legacies of resistance.

Cibic’s protagonists are created specifically to enact a lost archive: distilling the speeches of cultural workers from Non-Aligned countries into a collective sonic score, translating language into sound, music, and choreography. Through this process, they recast the unrealised promises of cultural independence, spiritual decolonisation, and alternative world-building into a rehearsal for the present.

As photographic subjects, they become emissaries of that archive - no longer static allegories, they emerge as sirens: carrying forward submerged histories and rearticulating them as forms through which we might once again imagine—and claim—the dreams we call our own.