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Microcosm more photos
Realizations: 2006, City Gallery of Villach, Austria 2002; City Gallery of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. The Microcosm installation with a bathroom is a kind of an incubator, a giant petri-dish, which enables ideal conditions for cultivation of various micro organisms, originating from human body. Constituent elements of the installation with their perceptual and conceptual multi-extension are directing the observer to his or her own body. Contemporary visual displaying of the body is becoming a field of dangerous relations (between natural and artificial, organic and non-organic), a potentiality, denoted with uncanniness and attractiveness of bodily openness. A human being lives in an environment and is a part of it; he/she does not gaze at the world as at a display or something that is distant from him. He touches things and regards them. In such a manner he is seizing them, they are becoming a part of him. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is pointing out that space in post-Euclidian world is not a grid of relations between objects, is not a scene which is looked at as by a geometer from afar, but, instead, space starts from me as the zero point of spatiality. A world does not exist in front of me, but is all around me and I live in it and am thus its part. I live it from the inside and am immersed in it. I am a part of the flesh of the world in which everything is interwoven. The world is made from the same substance as a body. Human body does not end with a rind of human organism, with skin, for example. It is expanding into space. On human body micro organisms are dependent on the bodily chemical or nutritious conditions. In the project Microcosm the micro organisms are transferred into an external environment in which ideal conditions for their living are assured. In this manner they multiply in such enormous quantities, that they can be seen with the naked eye as colonies of different forms and colors. In the new environment micro organisms that originate from the body begin to live autonomous lives. Thus an invisible inside becomes visibly revealed. It also becomes a part of the external world, with which our body is coming in contact. A part of a body has actually seceded and become an other and foreign to the body. Huge quantities of micro organisms become a threat. A dangerous environment has arisen, from which our body often cannot protect itself. --- Special thanks to prof. Miomir Kneževic, PhD and Metka Krašna, PhD, Blood Transfusion Centre of Slovenia – Tissue Typing Center ; to Mojca Puncer; to Gary Cass, Symbiotica and University of Western Australia – Faculty of Natural & Agricultural Sciences; to Zoran Gorišek; to Renate Obud and City Gallery of Villach; to City Gallery of Nova Gorica. --- |