Urban legends. Gossip in the streets. Hearsay and rumour. Fanfiction. Ghost stories. Fairy tales. Myths. Folklore. Oral traditions. Personal anecdotes. Self-introductions. Shiny posts on social media… I’m drawn to all kinds of stories - or rather to what shape them: the narrative structures themselves. As a habit, I enjoy teasing out the variables hidden within them - treating them like factors, or hashtags - and factorizing them, to reveal the narrative archetypes that lie beneath. Because ultimately, all of these stories converge into our collective memory. Just like when you read a myth about the Nile inscribed on ancient Egyptian papyrus, you recall a ghost story from the Amazon - or a moral tale from Japan. When we come up with a story, what’s really happening is that a record already stored in the collective memory - a cloud storage beyond space and time - is being temporarily summoned down into the here and now. The variations of stories are finite. We are all equally forced to access this cloud constantly, and we are merely its mediators - through whom these records are reproduced. And there’s no hierarchy involved here. (Though some events are more banal than others.) What is happening to me now has already happened - or will happen - to someone else, somewhere, sometime. And what is not happening to me now has also already happened - or will happen - to someone else, somewhere, sometime. If that’s the case, then the concepts of truth or falsehood fall away, leaving only a linguistic game - a matter of swapping out subjects, proper nouns, and the like. Armed with such grandiose-delusional logic, I carry out various experiments - centered on sharing memories, translating them into the body, and structurally reconstructing them - on a day-to-day basis so I don’t get bored of the world. I’ve decided, for now, to call these experiments ‘artworks’. May 15, 2025. From the window of my accommodation in Ljubljana, watching the castle on the hill and listening to the church bells. Version 2024-09-13 Version 2020-08-03 |