In my master’s thesis, I examined my artistic practice through two solo exhibitions from 2024, in which I explored forgotten internet archives of the Africa discotheque in Trebnje, which operated from the late 1996 until 2009. My research and reinterpretative practice referring to this nightclub includes graphic works, paintings, sculptural elements, and an installation that connects the works into a coherent whole.
In my master’s thesis, I concentrated on the process of merging different works into a unified installation, where their interconnection creates a multi-layered concept. I researched the history of Slovenian nightclubs at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, examined the reasons for their decline, and analysed the early forms of communication on social media as methods of archiving these nightclubs as social phenomena. I was particularly interested in the relationship between a painted image created based on references found on social media and its digitalisation, as well as the dialogue between the image and the digital, numerical, and typographic elements appearing in paintings and graphic prints.
By analysing my works and comparing them with similar practices, the thesis gradually reveals how artistic reinterpretation preserves the memory of a specific era and how digital archives on social media influence our understanding of that era. In this way, the master’s thesis addresses wider questions of archiving memory and its transition between the virtual and physical worlds.
|
