by Susie S. Lee
Jasmina Cibic is part of a new generation of Slovenian artists. Originally from Ljubljana, educated in Italy and the UK, and now working in London, she expresses a particular sensitivity to the complexities of cultural identity and the politics of display. She talked to Susie S. Lee about concepts of identity and representation.
You directly address many issues of cultural identity in your work. With Slovenia’s complex political history, how important a role do you feel cultural identity has in Slovenia today?
Slovenia is a very young country, one that is still trying to understand its history, re-discover and re- or de-brand its myths, select a code of behaviour… basically to design the nation’s dress code so to speak. As such it is incredibly interesting from the point of view of identity politics. The cultural identity of a nation is a complex presence, which is always present, but many times – as a construct – it may be placed into the servitude of the state and soft power and, quite frankly, misrepresented.
Your work addresses a number of symbols of cultural iconography. What is the specific Slovenian issue that you discuss in your work?
All my work is context and site specific, so really Slovenia (as the focus of my investigations) has been specifically featured only within my project that represented the country at the 2013 Venice Biennial that explored the choices behind particular state/national representation. For our Economy and Culture was composed of a variety of elements, which examined modes of exchange, reception and constructions of identity and literally dramatised not only the power paradigms inherent in systems of authority, but also the explicit contradictions present in the transmutation of a national identity from past to present, place to place.
Your Venice installation revolved around the unfortunately-named “Hitler Beetle”. What sparked your interest in this animal?
The project begins with the story of the discovery of one of Slovenia’s endemic species, Anophthalmus hitleri, a cave beetle, which has recently joined the endangered species list solely because of its name. Discovered in 1933 and named by an admirer of Hitler in 1937, this blind beetle marks an un-erasable ideological moment since, according to the rules of Linnaean taxonomy, animal and plant names cannot be changed.
In 2006, National Geographic Magazine published an article on the insect (in its specific overtly-dramatised tone) and soon after collectors of Nazi memorabilia began to hunt the hitleri down, resulting in this small blind creature coming close to extinction. I worked with over forty international entomologists and scientific illustrators, including associates of The Natural Museum in London, the US Department of Agriculture, the Zoological Museum at Tel Aviv University to produce illustrations of the hitleri beetle.
You called this beetle a “failed national icon”. Do you feel such symbols have had a genuine impact on Slovenian identity or are they not simply constructs?
I speak of the hitleri beetle being a “failed” national icon as its name prohibits (for obvious reasons) it being ever placed on the pedestal of national representation. Cave animals are one of the specifics of Slovenia (the first ever cave beetle was discovered in the country in the late 1800s) and as it is usual with national branding – representatives of endemic and indigenous flora and fauna are the ones that feature on items such as coins, banknotes, stamps, passports etc. As such, of course these symbols are all constructs, but it is precisely the question of when these constructs have a genuine effect on national identity, and if so, is it a positive or a negative one. Within the current state of affairs with upheavals of nationalism I believe it is a crucial question also.
In your work you have built many architectural spaces, some of which only appear in photographs, and you have also referred to the “re-appropriation of modernist architecture”. What is your relationship to architecture and what is the significance of appropriating it in your work?
Within the last decade we have seen a vast resurgence of interest in modernist architecture by fine artists and the former East’s socialist modernism seems to be at the forefront. What is interesting is that we are speaking of a period in architecture’s history that has not been properly presented to the public by the architectural historians (we now finally have the fabulous book Unfinished Modernisations that plots the story of post Second World War Yugoslavia’s architectural plight) – but was initially presented through the fine artists working with it.
Jasmina Cibic was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1979, and is currently based in London. She graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy in 2003 and completed her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London in 2006. In 2013, she represented the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with her exhibition, “For our Economy and Culture”. Her work, although acutely conscious of a specific national political, cultural and artistic lineage creates a very distinctive language of its own. Her work is generally site and context specific, performative in nature employing a range of activities, media and theatrical tactics to redefine or reconsider an existent environment or space.
In a way this was a kind of kidnapping of the model and it is quite unprecedented and extremely interesting. My work plays with this double game – when meaning of a real-life model is attributed via fiction first.
What impact do you feel has Slovenia‘s political history as a former socialist state had on state vs. commercial spaces, and art and architecture practices in Slovenia in general?
The specificity of Slovenian art history is that it is unsure about how to tackle contemporary art practice. High modernism thrived in Slovenia much longer than it did in Western Europe and consequently the rupture of contemporaneity took much longer to absorb. I am not exactly sure that contemporary art practices are really even included in the existing art lineage. It almost seems as if there were two parallel art canons in Slovenia: the official one, which ends with the dusk of modernism, and the contemporary one that strives to reconstruct its own specific history. The two have not merged yet. Needless to say, the gap between these two lines of historicisation is often blatantly political. I am therefore ambivalent about how my work fits the Slovene art canon, since it is itself unsure about its criteria and parameters. But I am interested in exploring its paradoxes, which provide a privileged insight into the political mechanisms it operates under. p
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