»Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines - all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines.”
He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.«
With this quote from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, called Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, began the unravelling of my inner struggles, which emerged during the time of my undergraduate studies at the Academy of Visual Art and Design in Ljubljana. By the end of my studies as a painter, there hovered an all-present, unexplainable anxiety. It was when I began to feel like I was just a machine in the endless production line of machines driving this society, and catharsis appeared intangible and impossible to reach.
I became aware that as an artist, producing in this endless machine that is capitalism, I’m actively contributing to the mass claustrophobia, caused by the endless production of material objects that feed consumerism. I felt guilty for being a part of a system, which is to blame for the global climate crisis we are experiencing at this moment.
Thus said, I resented any need for producing new objects, them being paintings, prints or any other kind of materials. But I still felt a strong fascination for all visual stimulation, including the art world in which I was exploring and evolving. In this thesis, I’m trying to find a solution to balance both extremes of my experience.
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