Story of Damage and Restoration

Interactive projection, 2025

Projection video presentation: https://youtu.be/oFfky03Oqp4

Projection installation presentation: https://youtu.be/iSXS3NzMVsw

Projection presents the concept of damage and restoration in a form of a myth-like story The Tale of Damage and Restoration, a fictional story that describes the birth and mutual pursuit of damage and restoration as bringers of functional and dysfunctional states. This process also represents the relationship between nature, technology, and art, highlighting the perspective in which art finds itself in the current Slovenian political discourse, which conceives of it as a dysfunctional state of humanity and a intentional damage to established ethics. The world, recognized as an intertwining of damage and restoration, has built a reality where art is recognized as damage. To become art in this perspective means to become dysfunctional.

Story goes like this:

When the damage occurred, it looked as if a huge bundle had exploded and scattered. The restoration team wanted to immediately suppress the bundle and put it back into the hole from which it had emerged. To escape the pressure of the restoration, the damage split and tried to escape through other parts of the restoration, but the restoration quickly caught up with it and began to push it back into the original bundle. The damage was far from giving up and split again, and every time the restoration caught up with it, the damage split again. Thus, both split into thousands of pieces, and here and there, some managed to become more standardized than others. This mutual pursuit and struggle resulted in mixtures of damage and repair that still sometimes change and also combine with each other into larger masses and cells. The masses are sometimes predominantly composed of damage, sometimes of repair, and form a kind of sediment between the mixtures of one and the other.

This gave rise to the concept of damage and restoration, processes that form and connect the functional and non-functional states of things, organisms, and the environment. By studying functional and non-functional states, we can recognize the whole world as an intertwining of damage and restoration, and what is functional for one is non-functional for another, or the damage of one can mean the restoration of another. Even today, damage and restoration chase and divide each other in the human world and shape human activities, like art and economy.

In modern times, people (at least in southeastern Europe) have created a system in which technological development has been standardized as a functional state of a "vital" human society, while the development of art has slowed down considerably and is often perceived as a non-functional state of human society. Technology could be described as a standardized renewal that constantly renews the development of humanity, while art seems to be a hindrance to human progress, especially art that is more difficult to understand.