SHRUBS (2020)

Upon reviewing the images on old reversal films, I realized the plants on those photographs lack something – they lacked the “plantness”. With the photographic process I have robbed the nature of its natural, it contained nothing organic, it became sterile and not wild anymore. I needed to return what I have taken – I started adding the natural to the photographic medium. Series Žbunje / Shrubs consists of altering printed images by colorizing them with plant-based natural pigments; of stitching films with yucca-harvested threads; of films, which have disintegrated in the soil I have buried them in; and of adding different parts of plants to the images. I have always found the word žbunje, serbocroatian for bushes, quite funny. But at the same time, in its essence, the word contains a quality of wildness, harshness, which reminds me of nature itself. With my interventions I aimed to return some of this organic wildness to photographs of my, appropriated nature.