Do Plants Dream of the Future? – Igor Eškinja (HR)
The artist transformed the samples of plants from abandoned industrial spaces into design patterns to create a new space, telling a story about the plants that live in manmade spaces made possible for life by his absence.
The modern world lies on the categories which make it possible to classify the world we know into sorts, classes and groups. The two elementary categories are the category of the nature and the category of culture, separating the natural world from the world created by human intervention. Yet, the world around us often tends to escape our categories, organisms and phenomena sometimes show up somewhere in between, pertaining to some other other class. One such escape also occurs in the spaces created by the humans, which the natural world is simply reconquering. It does so, however, not by pretending that a human intervention never happened as the intervention itself actually provided the life of certain organisms.
The artist Igor Eškinja wondered what kind of vegetation inhabits the abandoned industrial spaces at Mlaka, Brajdica, Marganovo, and Delta. He transformed the samples of the plants living in these venues into design patterns to use for a new space. The new space tells us a story about the plants that continue to live in the spaces created by man and then his absence. The vegetation inhabiting these spaces differs from the one we encounter in the fields and groves in the surrounding areas, some species unknown to us we classify as weeds, as something we cannot make any use of. The metaphor of a weed can be extended equally to these spaces which, abandoned and out of function, escape classification and with which we cannot build any relationships as in reality we do not know them.