The Fruits of Our Land, wallpaper 1000 cm x 50 cm in roll
One of the key principles in Jasmina Cibic’s work is the delegated creation of individual elements of her installations; in this way she is able to enter systems that are not as a rule part of contemporary visual art. The different individual elements in the artist’s “choreography” act to complement each other and together form a multi-layered whole that requires multiple directions of reading. One of best examples of the nature of such collaboration is the element that served as a kind of a connector in Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture with which she represented the Republic of Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial, where she covered the entire interior of the pavilion in wallpaper with infinitely repeated images of the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri. The story behind the image begins with the discovery of the endemic Slovenian beetle, which was first observed by the cave explorer Vladimir Kodrič in Pekel Cave near Celje in 1933; four years later, the entomologist Oskar Scheibel confirmed the discovery of the new species and, as a Nazi supporter, named it Anophthalmus hitleri. On the conceptual level, Cibic associates the endemic species with national architecture and foregrounds the issue of constructing and establishing the mechanisms of national identity through a nation’s icons. On the formal level, however, we have an example of a delegated artwork, since each pattern repeat within the wallpaper design displays more than forty different “variations” of the Anophthalmus hitleri beetle, all made by international entomologists and scientific illustrators. In keeping with the artist’s instructions, the scientists’ representations of the beetle had to be based solely on their experience in the field of entomology and their interpretation of the insect’s Latin name: they were not allowed to look for existing visual or descriptive references. The wallpaper presents an almost encyclopaedic series of depictions of the endemic insect and provides a formal background to the visualization of the issue of ideological models. By reproducing and multiplying ad infinitum images of Anophthalmus hitleri, Cibic seeks to problematize the discourse through a critical treatment of ideologically conditioned themes and their removal or withdrawal upon contact with a new political regime, new structural order, or simply the conscripting of a new authority.