
Renata Poljak
In the late nineteenth century, the discovery of gold in Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago extending from the tip of South America, curiously spurred a mass emigration from the Dalmatian island of Brač, more than 8,000 miles away. Many of these sailors would settle in the town of Porvenir—the Spanish word for “future”—effectively creating a Croatian ethnic colony at the very edge of the inhabited world.
The Split-born artist and filmmaker Renata Poljak’s great-great-grandfather was one of those sailors. For her twelve-minute video Porvenir (all works 2020), Poljak retraces her ancestor’s journey