Meta Grgurevič
Collaborations
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V zavetrju časa
Category: Expositions
Collaborators: Meta Grgurevič, Urša Vidic, Zoran Srdić Janežič
V zavetrju časa was a multi-media spatial installation by Meta Grgurevič and Urša Vidic, loosely based on the novel To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It was on display on June 2016 in Ljubljana Puppet Theatre and included lights, sound, music, video, performance and kinetic objects. If you have already read other articles about my projects with Meta and Urša, you probably guessed that my role in this project was the automatisation of the kinetic objects.
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I have been thinking about the meaning of everything. It seems to me that the important things are 1) to climb the highest mountain, 2) to penetrate a wild uncharted jungle to rescue a gentleman in distress, and 3) to stand under the midnight sun on the south pole.
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This automatic magician is an amalgam of engineering, physics and the occult. The premise is from ceremonial magick, which holds that the course of events can be affected by drawing appropriate symbols. Invocation of Asta repeatedly lifts and casts little golden sticks. The hope is that eventually a magickally significant shape will come up, and a magickal phenomenon is observed.
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Another project together with Meta and a group of other people. As always with her, the aim was to find something very simple and basic about the laws of nature, and twist it into something impossible. This time, we chose time. As suggested to me by an unnamed person (or maybe I know him? I just completely forgot who told me this), to invert time you just have to get the sand in a hourglass run upwards. I happened to mention this idea to Meta when she was despairing over what to make for the 31st Ljubljana graphic biennale. She liked the idea, and now such an hourglass exists.
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Here is yet another project that I made as part of a team assembled by Meta and that went to a show by Jaša. This time it was the Venice Biennale, where Jaša had his show Utter in the Slovenian pavilion. In addition to this circle drawing robot, I also made a custom sound to lights interface for controlling the lighting fixture of the pavilion. Hopefully it has its own page here soon.
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This project was hugely influential in my life. In the summer of 2013, I was feeling not so happy with my life in Helsinki and, for some undiscernible twist of psychology, I decided to reset everything. I quit my software engineering position at Documill, gave up my apartment, threw away everything I could not not fit into a backpack, and bought a one-way ticket to Berlin. By incredible stroke of luck (not the only one I got during that very chaotic and magical period of my life), Meta contacted me again. It had already been some years since we built the first levitation machine. Now she was about to work on that topic again. As I happened to be about as free as a human being can, I immediately agreed to come to Ljubljana and make another, bigger and better levitation machine with her.
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In spring 2012, when I was still living in Helsinki, Koelse, got an email from an artist in residency in Helsinki international artist programme. She asked for technical assistance for a project involving building a Tesla coil. After discussing this invitation for collaboration, we reached the understanding that a) we have no idea how to build a Tesla coil and b) the whole idea sounds quite unsafe. Because of these conclusions, we turned down the offer. The reply we got was an intriguing one: If Tesla coils are out of question, how about a levitation machine? This artist certainly seemed to have curious interests. Since I thought she has to be an interesting person, so I signed up for levitation machine collaboration. It turned out to be only a first in long series of works we have made together with Meta.