Maja Smrekar

Maja Smrekar was born 1978 in Slovenia, 2005 graduated at the Sculpture Department of Fine Art Academy in Ljubljana, Slovenia; currently finishing MA at the New Media Department. Her main interests are based at the phenomenology of perception and the concept of life. Among others, she has been collaborating with Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana for the last eight years and with Aksioma Institute for the last five years. Under their production she has been executing projects, connecting the intersections of humanistic and natural sciences into the inetrdisciplinary art works. In 2010 she organised International Festival HAIP10/New Nature which has been focussed to interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration ethics between scientists and artists. The festival took place at Multimedia Centre Cyberpipe in Ljubljana where she has been active as an artistic director for two years. She has been awarded at the Cynetart festival 2012 by the European Centre for Arts Hellerau (Dresden/Germany) with the 1st prize, Honorary mention at the Ars Electronica festival 2013 (Linz / Austria) and The Golden Bird Award 2013 – the national award for special achivements at the field of visual art (Ljubljana/Slovenia). Maja Smrekar lives and works between Ljubljana / Slovenia and Berlin / Germany.

This artist has been selected by the guest curator Ewen Chardronnet as part of his ArtJaws collection entitled “COSMOS OF MUTUAL EXCHANGES”.

Survival Kit for the Anthropocene – TRAILER photo session has been conceived as an eco-performance displaying the use of a set of equipment for survival in an apocalyptic situation, while at the same time addressing the process of disappearance of local cultures and economies in the grip of global neoliberal economics. The latter is often presented as a neutral, almost natural occurrence that shares one feature in particular with nature – a mechanism for the brutal survival of the fittest. Mobile kit for survival which connects contemporary technology with folklore is a hybrid between a beehive and the Slovenian peasant chest.

The small figures drawn at the exterior reminiscent of folk ornamentation, featuring species that are becoming increasingly widespread and invasive in the local territory: Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed, zebra mussels, and harlequin ladybugs. The egg-like form is basically a water reservoir with impregnated pig bladders, into which water flows, through water filters, along a bamboo tube. It ́s materials connect an indigenous flax rope and pig bladders with the invasive acacia and bamboo. Drawers contain the basic tactical tools, combined by the attached wooden two-pronged pitchfork with detachable mesh that can be used according to the situation and therefore serve as an umbrella, fish trap, pitchfork or a crossbow.

The project is a paraphrase to the vanishing cultures and local economies that are dissolving in the pool of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, and a critique of mainstream ecology that is “solving” climatic change within the global neoliberal framework, therefore within the existing capitalist paradigms, in which corporations are only being strengthened through tax havens with each passing day.