Contrada - A place of childhood memories

BATANA ecomuseum is an ecomuseum in Rovinj dedicated to a traditional wooden vessel called “batana”, as well as to the citizens of Rovinj who have picked it as their symbol. In 2015 Ecomuseum organized an exhibition called “Contrada – the place of childhood memories”, where the street of the same name was turned into an exhibition area where different workshops were held and traditional games from the city’s history were demonstrated. Our task was to design the catalogue by Tamara Nikolić Đerić with illustrations and descriptions of the games.

The streets of Rovinj used to be a place where most of the everyday life went on – from socializing and playing to doing business. One of such streets was Cuntràda San suàne. “Contrada” catalog was created as a result of the need to present traditional games to the modern world and to try to prevent them from being forgotten in digital reality, and for the street games to continue even after the end of the exhibition. Besides descriptions of the games and their instructions, it also contains a seemingly unusual toy – a stone, which used to be the most common thing for playing street games. Treating a “regular” stone as a valuable present is a result of critical contemplation about changes in our society and the context of children playing then and now.