Flesh into Blossom
Site-specific installation with a mural made with dry pigment, and a woollen-cotton garment.

21.09.2024-31.10.2024
Commissioned for Sonja S. Memorial, 32. Memorial Nadežda Petrović, founder and patron: City of Čačak, organiser: Art Gallery “Nadežda Petrović”, Čačak, curated by Zdenka Badovinac. Photo: Milenko Savović.

"Flash into Blossom" is constructed around the reading of Donna Haraway’s essay A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and her book Staying with the Trouble (2016), as well as my ongoing interest in the fairy (known in Southeastern Europe as samovila, vila, juda, majka)—an anthropomorphic mythical creature, but also a prototype of free will and the free-spirited woman.

I wonder how we might look at the fairy from today’s perspective, beyond fairy-tale heritage, and see her more as a kind of cyborg of the future—keeping in mind Haraway’s observation that “the cyborg appears in myth when the line between human and animal is crossed.”

If the fairy belongs to the “lost golden times” of the Neolithic and Bronze Age of “Old Europe,” when humans lived as one with animals and nature—but was later overpowered by violent, warrior-androcentric civilizations—then the cyborg, as a 20th-century construct, represents not only the symbiosis between human and machine but, more importantly, the urgency of creating interspecies relationships based on companionship and care, so crucial for our survival.

“Our survival is at stake,” says Haraway, but “there is a myth system waiting to become a political language […] in order to act potently.”

The whole installation pulses in shades of delicate pink, violet, and yellow as a response to our alienation. The landscape on the wall, painted with dry pigment, continues onto the woollen base of the larger-than-life garment that serves as an homage to women who knew the language of the spiritual and the sacral, and the magic of healing.

The word cyborg, written in my non-binary typography Archetype Open Form—which renders reading an almost impossible act—becomes a base for the magic of embroidery to unfold. The beauty and exceptionality of our planet—zoomorphic, floral, and human shapes—are rendered across the surface of the garment, which stands as a tribute to those women who held ancestral knowledge, spiritual connection, and healing power.

The title is inspired by Audre Lorde’s poem Recreation.