2020
Found objects, intervention, photographs, flags
Driven by the need to stay related to the world outside of my flat, I have been taking numerous post-lockdown walks through urban public space, where I have been collecting objects from the street that brought me in touch with unknown strangers that used them – other residents of the city. I gathered mundane objects such as work gloves, pigeon’s feathers, or children’s socks and documented them together with my body parts and the museum furniture, the plinth. The objects from the ground are then shown in the sky: on the flags installed in the public squares.
Series of photographs installed as flags portrays our common habitat – the city. The compound of the motives and the title tackles the art genre “landscape”, which is commonly used to name a space that is different or even opposite to man-made space, that is “natural”. For more than a hundred years, by shaping and building the environment, the natural habitat of the majority of humans has been a city. But over time, standards of consumption are growing, and living in the city took on a restless flavor which contributed to the idea of escaping back to “nature”, to “landscape”. The ever-rising standards of consumption are vibrating, advocating, and calling for its fulfillment through numerous visuals throughout the (common!) public space. The landscape questions these visuals of power and progress commonly represented in public spaces. By taking the unneeded, abandoned quotidian objects and relocating them on a plinth, and eventually, on the flags, The Landscape redirects the view to what is disregarded and disrespected. The flags turn leftovers into a gesture of resistance that seeks a different basis for building a community.
The work was realized as a part of the Q21 residency in Museumsquartier invited by tranzit.org/ERSTE Stiftung and Noć perforacija by This is Domino project.
Photo credits: Silvija Dogan, Sonja Hornung and Petra Mrša.
